SST’s opposition to gay marriage consistent with its values

Garth McVicar’s view that crime will rise if gay couples are allowed to marry, is absolutely consistent with the approach Sensible Sentencing Trust has taken over the years, to issues relating to family values, says Spokesperson for Rethinking Crime and Punishment, Kim Workman.

“Garth has never been that interested in reducing crime. He is instead driven by the need to preserve the family values he knew as a child, and to limit and contain social diversity. His real concern is about a lack of shared values, and loss of secure social ties within the community.”

“Common to his set of beliefs is ethnocentrism – a discomfort with outsiders and those with a different set of values. As society becomes more diverse, Garth and his followers feel more threatened – and want to contain society in a box of their making. They respond to people with different moral values by criminalising them. They tend to believe that such people cannot be rehabilitated, and the simplest alternative is to incarcerate them for the rest of their natural lives.”

They are also more likely to abandon protection for defendants, and more willing to abandon norms of political tolerance. That includes standing in judgement on judicial decisions, without full recourse to the facts.”

Dr Martin Luther King summed up SST’s position when he said. “People often hate each other because they fear each other, they fear each other because they don’t know each other, they don’t know each other because they cannot communicate, they cannot communicate because they are separated.”

Rethinking, on the other hand, believes that if we can understand the social dynamics between and within groups, it will assist us to understand the manner in which people frame group boundaries and evaluate both their own and other groups. That, in turn, may lead to a reshaping of social values toward the acceptance of groups that are different, and promote a more inclusive and tolerant society.”

Read more in, “The World is Not as it Should Be - Punitiveness as a Response to Societal Change.”
http://www.rethinking.org.nz/images/newsletter%20PDF/Issue%2068/02%20%20The%20World%20is%20Not%20as%20it%20Should%20Be.pdf

ENDS

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