Dialogue: Nation's hypocrisy hits new heights

By GARTH GEORGE

The outpouring of hypocrisy, and not only from politicians from whom we expect it, over the Dover Samuels affair is none the less odious for being unsurprising. In these days when double standards are the norm, it was to be expected.

So Mr Samuels had sex with a teenage girl some 15 years ago. If she was over the age of consent (which some politicians in recent years, incidentally, have suggested lowering), so what?

It is happening today, probably hundreds of times a night, here in Auckland and throughout the nation. The country's brothels are stacked with teenagers, some of them still at school; and reports lately tell us that girls as young as 12 are selling their bodies on the streets of South Auckland.

Mr Samuels' young lover became pregnant. So what? It happens to thousands of teenagers every year. Some are impregnated by their fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles or family friends, others by youngsters who are also in their teens.

And off they trot to get state-funded abortions, on the grounds that they are mentally incapable of being mothers. Ever given any thought to how many mentally incompetent women go through abortion clinics each year?

In my book, Mr Samuels' complicity in the girl's abortion is a far more disgraceful matter than his having had intercourse with her, particularly in view of his pro-life stance in the past.

The wilful killing of an unborn child is in a different category altogether from fornication.

Yet both have for decades now been perfectly acceptable to a society which considers itself to have outgrown the morality upon which it was founded.

That aside, where is the public outcry about all the young girls today who are being exploited by older men?

What are the authorities doing to protect these teenagers?

Why aren't the police or state social workers picking up the children off the street at Hunters Corner?

Why aren't the often middle-aged men who use these children arrested and prosecuted?

And what makes anyone think that these kids - having been brought up in an age of rampant immorality and having absorbed the sex "education" imposed on them by education authorities and outfits such as the Family Planning Association - don't know what they're doing?

We prate on about the "rights" of children, yet when a young girl exercises her "right" to have intercourse with whomsoever she pleases, we throw up our hands in horror.

Why is it naughty for a man in his 40s to have sex with a teenage girl, even if she might have been, in a sense, under his protection, when hardly an eyebrow was raised when we learned that a mature female schoolteacher lay down for a teenage schoolboy?

Since the 1960s and the arrival of oral contraception, we as a society have chosen to set aside traditional sexual morality - to do away with the concepts contained in words such as "adultery" and "fornication" - in favour of the New Age philosophies that if it feels good, it's okay to do it and that sexual intercourse is simply another bodily function like eating or defecating.

We have degraded sex to the point where taking a member of the opposite sex (or the same, for that matter) to bed is seen as no different from taking him or her to dinner or to the movies. The spiritual dimensions of the sex act and procreation - and take my word for it, they are powerful ones - are blithely ignored.

The other thing that sticks in my craw about the Samuels affair is that it has taken nearly 15 years for someone to bring this matter to light. Why is it that they waited until he was in a position of national prominence before opening their mouths?

Don't try to tell me that the motives of the accusers - and that includes Richard Prebble - are anything else but vengeful, spiteful or political and designed to destroy Mr Samuels' future as a Maori leader of mana.

It didn't matter whether Mr Samuels was sacked, made to resign, or even had managed to retain his job as Minister of Maori Affairs, in the face of the machinations of Helen Clark and her piously politically correct, New Age inner circle he was in a no-win situation. Even Jesus Christ couldn't beat the hypocrites.

And as for older men tumbling randy teenage girls, and the dreadful social depredations of sexual immorality in general, the Bible puts it very succinctly: "As you sow, so shall you reap." And: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

garthgeorge@herald.co.nz