Dalziel Lianne: Civil Union Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Dalziel Lianne: Civil Union Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17467] 
LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I will start with a quote from a book written by Alan Brash. I went to the launch of this book and he was a tremendous person who made an enormous contribution to churches to enable them to deal with really tough issues. The book is called  
Facing our Differences: The Churches and their Gay and Lesbian Members 
. I would like members to think about the following words as they contemplate the bill. He said: “As we look back over long periods of cruelty towards homosexual people we may qualify our condemnations of such treatments in view of the degree of their ignorance. But those who continue to call for such harsh attitudes today given the greater understanding we have available are in urgent need of repentance and of the changes of attitude and behaviour which repentance involves.” 
I would like to dedicate that part of the book to Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church because I think they need to think about what they are doing in terms of the misrepresentation of this legislation that they are promoting amongst their members and their fear and loathing around a group of people who Alan Brash reminds us are people. It is important that we hold on to that as we enter into this debate. 
I was talking about this whole issue of legality recently with a gay friend of mine. He had been in the early years of a 20-year relationship with his partner at the time that homosexual law reform came in. He asked me how I would feel if police could walk into my bedroom—into the privacy of my home—and arrest me for a sexual relationship that was monogamous longstanding and absolutely private. He said I could not understand for a minute the relief that law reform brought to gay men until I imagined what that could be like. 
When the law passed people said that it was the State promoting homosexuality and that people would be doing it in the streets. It did not happen. The same thing was said when the Human Rights Act was extended to include sexual orientation. I sat on that select committee. I listened to hundreds of submissions. I was quite saddened by the fact that so little had changed since the 1990s in terms of those who came to the select committee to argue exactly the same points on the Civil Union Bill. But it did not happen then and it will not happen now. 
I went to a lunch yesterday and engaged in a conversation with a couple of older men about the civil union legislation. They declared their lack of comfort with it. They were quite uncomfortable with it. We talked about it and at the end of our conversation although they were not quite comfortable with things they were certainly much clearer about why the legislation was necessary. As I was on my way out another man came up to me and said that I would not be getting his vote for “siding with the queers”. He said he had been in the Navy—he had retired obviously—and that there had been a “queer” on board his ship but that a quick seeing-to by two other sailors with a broom made him “real nice” and he stayed away from everyone after that. I was absolutely shocked. It takes a lot to take my breath away but that statement made to me yesterday in a hotel bar in Christchurch just blew me away. How on earth could anyone say that that is a decent way to treat a human being? 
Then we have had the emails that tell us we will have polygamy paedophilia and inter-family unions and that all the people in these activities will be asking for the same rights as same-sex couples. I remind people that criminal behaviour is different from legal behaviour and that all of those are criminal behaviours. Removing the criminality of anal intercourse which is what homosexual law reform did back in the 1980s did not remove the criminality of anal sexual violation or under-age anal sex. Allowing two people who cannot marry to enter into a civil union does not logically lead to opening the law up to people having more than one partner or under-age sex or paedophilia. In fact it is as illogical and as offensive as taking a broom to a human being. If people do not think that that is still happening today they should open their eyes.