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In a message apparently circulated to MPs and elected officials around the country within hours of Tuesday's disaster, and originally sent to all MPs after the September 'quake, the senior minister of Auckland's Victory Community Church is reiterating that legal recognition of same sex relationships is one of the factors leading to such tragedies.
"New Zealand cannot go on murdering unborn children, undermining the God-given authority of parents to discipline their children, legalising prostitution, homosexual unions (in kind to marriage)... " Max Legg says. In the original September message he thundered "stop doing these things or something worse will come upon you all."
And a mid-western USA-hosted website, christchurchquake.net, is connecting both earthquakes with a conflation of rants against "swamp lesbians," Gay Ski Week: "the Snow Gaymes... plane loads of perverts," "The Homosexual Religion - The Devil is A Lesbian" and all manner of perceived social ills.
The site harangues its readers about "New Zealand's lesbian leaders" and includes the Kiwi- or Australian-sounding message: "Copyright - Christchurch Earthquake - No More Poofter & Lesbian Festivals.
A Kiwi GayNZ.com reader in Canada says he Googled the Christchurch quake and up came Christchurchquake. "Thinking it was some kind council website or something I went to look at it," says Jonathan O'Brien. "The whole site is either some sick joke or a worrying sign of insane bigotry back home."
"This sort of homophobic attitude generally comes from religious people who are subscribing to a Mid-Western USA frame of thought which is fearful of the world," says Associate Professor of History at Massey University, Peter Lineham. "It has its roots in a fear of what they see as a series of evils which are destroying what seems to them to have once been a comfortable 19th century kind of world. They see gays and lesbians as a threat to family life and fear lesbians in particular, as for them all submissiveness to a male authority figure has gone."
Lineham, who has for years studied religious movements, says glbt peoples' visibility "is shocking for them, it makes them feel like the world is imploding and feeds into their religious predictions of the end of the world."
Rawa Karetai, one of the many readers who are emailing GayNZ.com Daily News on the subject, says, "I am all for free speech along with opinions, but this is just wrong," he says. "Righteous babble is not going to help those who are suffering right now."
Karetai is advising people disgusted at the site's content to email the host at abuse@bluehost.com "to express how disgusted you are as a New Zealander at the views that are expressed and to stand up for the people of Christchurch and more importantly New Zealand in our time of need."
