From the website of the New Zealand Christian Right’s anti-families website Family First comes yet more tiresome fundamentalist role-playing nonsense.

At a time when New Zealand has had two consecutive female Prime Ministers, two female Governor Generals, a female Supreme Court chief justice and female former CEO of Telecom, the Christian Right bizarrely insists on its quaintly polarised gender role play, in which men dress in blue and go out to waged work, while women stay at home, preferably without access to higher education, and look after children full-time. This doesn’t reflect working class nuclear family models where both parents have to engage in waged work to support their children and current standard of living, like the one I grew up in. It’s a highly class-bound model, and has only ever reflected the reality of lower middle class small shopkeepers and farmers, yet the Christian Right wants us to believe that it’s actually ‘universal?’ Please.

I’m not really sure how they plan to convince us by using the documents below. In the case of Why Gender Matters, the list of contributors is starkly composed of male backlash fanatics and Australian Christian Right activists like Ros and David Phillips (Festival of Light, Adelaide), Babette Francis (Endeavour Forum, Melbourne), Bill Muehlenberg (Family Council of Victoria) and Richard Egan (FOL Western Australia), none of whom have any recognised qualifications in fields like pediatrics or developmental psychology.

Tellingly, Family First ‘boasts’ of Judith Reisman, despite the fact that in several High Court and Indecent Publications Tribunal cases in the late eighties, the quality and standards of her ’social scientific’ research was found severely wanting. Again, too, Reisman received her Regents University doctorate for media content analysis, and has no qualifications in pediatrics and developmental psychology. Incidentally, US televangelist Pat Robertson was founder of Regents University, for that matter

Finally, we come to Dale O’Leary, author of a conservative Catholic book about same-sex marriage, entitled One Man, One Woman (2008). Mrs O’Leary attacks family diversity on Mercator.Net, a Christian Right website, but provides no evidence-based proof from pediatrics and developmental psychology for her quaint nostrums about gender role polarity, the subordination of women in heterosexual relationships and same-sex parenting.

One wonders if Family First actually read the pablum that they recommend to the rest of us. Without anyone involved who has recognisable academic qualifications in the field of pediatrics and child development, why exactly shouldn’t mainstream observers treat this nonsense with the contempt that it deserves?

Not Recommended:

Family First: http://www.familyfirst.org.nz

Dale O’Leary “Family Diversity Unpacked” Mercator.net: 09.07.08: http://www.mercator.net

Why Gender Matters: http://www.gendermatters.org.au