Peck Mark: Civil Union Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Peck Mark: Civil Union Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17465] 
MARK PECK (Labour—Invercargill) 
: 
 I am delighted to follow the member who preceded me because I do understand the dilemma that he and other members of the Committee face. I arrived at my office last Monday to find nearly 500 emails telling me not to support this bill. Similarly over a period of time I received a whole bunch that said I should support the bill. But one thing is extraordinarily clear to me: we are sent here to make decisions. Some of the decisions we have to make are tough and we deserve to be judged for those decisions. I have had to make a number of them in this House. 
The honourable member who preceded me was here for the 1986 debate. I remind him of what one of his colleagues Norman Jones said during that period of time. He said that the legalisation of homosexuality would completely change society as we knew it. Well it did not. We all knew that it would not and we knew that Norman Jones was wrong on that. But the public of Invercargill loved him. Why did they love him? They saw that their member of Parliament was prepared to take a stand on a prejudice of theirs that they were unable to conceptualise. 
I will tell members a story about my father who is an Anglican priest. He has been an Anglican priest since 1959. He started off in the Episcopal Church in the United States and is still preaching today. He preached a sermon at St Barnabas Church—I think it is—in Bishopdale and my sister turned up to that church service. My father did not know my sister was there. My father talked about the liberal philosophy of theology which came about sometime after about the 1500s when it was defined as being rooted in scripture tradition and reason. He spoke about the responsibility of the Church to exercise reason on attitudes and morality when it came to people’s sexual orientation. What he did not know at that time and what my sister had not told him at that time was that she was gay. She has two children. She sat in that church and cried her eyes out because she knew that at least her father understood. Her father who had been a priest for 50 years understood what she was going through and exercised in his sermon to her an ability to cleanse the way she felt. She has two little children. They are the loveliest little children one could hope to meet. They are learning how to play the piano to play cricket to go swimming and to do all the other things that children do. I will not have members of this Committee say to me that my sister and my father are wrong. 
There are two streams of theology. The first comes from St Vincent and goes back to AD 434. That is the intolerant version of theology and it is now the master theology in the United States. That is what it is. I have had a gutful of those people who run around and say that they know best—that they know better than us how our families should live. That is just as bad as any other form of prejudice. The Puritanism that has overtaken the United States will cause people to suffer for a generation. It has seen George Bush be re-elected President of that country. It will see the conservatisation of the Supreme Court in the United States. It will see the abortion laws of the United States be overturned. Brian Tamaki and his thugs sat in the gallery the other day to point out those of us on this side of the Chamber who dared to stand up against them who dared to say that their prejudice needs to be put to rest. 
This is a debate that will evoke strong emotions but it is a simple matter. I have no right as a human being to tell others how to live and neither does anybody else in this Chamber. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: What about smoking? 
MARK PECK 
: I say to that member that taking it to a referendum will give Brian Tamaki exactly what he wants: an ability to demonise the homosexuals of this country and to do it in a highly publicised way. His people are like the blackshirts of Nazi Germany. Members should not misunderstand it: that is exactly the agenda. That is wrong and it is time that this Parliament grew up and faced the decisions it has to make.