Letters

Gay and lesbian clergy
Reading through the Factfile on Religion (NI 331) I was disturbed to read what was written about sexual minorities. Unfortunately it is true that a majority of Christians do not have a policy of accepting gay people. However, all Christians are NOT from the right wing. Some of us seek actively to overturn 2,000 years of injustice and to embrace justice and acceptance for all.

The church which I belong to, the United Church of Canada, is one of Canada’s largest Christian bodies and has an explicit policy of not only accepting but also ordaining gay and lesbian clergy. I hope that the many other churches in Canada and around the world can follow this example of inclusivity and cease to equate Christianity with homophobic righteousness.

Jennifer Wushke 
Project Peacemakers,
Winnipeg, Canada

Moving hearts
I have subscribed to your magazine for the past year. I have been impressed with the magazine’s coverage of social justice topics and I share your views on many of these.

I subscribed, in part, because you included comments from religious leaders like Archbishop Tutu in your promotional material. So it is with some dismay that I read the subtle and not-so-subtle digs at religion in Factfile (NI 331) and Worldbeaters (NI 327). There is no question that there are terrible things done in the name of religion, but that is only one side of the story. How about devoting an article or two to the positive contribution that religion has made in moving people’s hearts to fight for social justice?

Marc van Beusekom
Toronto, Canada

(Un)clean machines
You apparently subscribe to the belief that electric-driven trams and trolley buses are a ‘clean’ form of transport (NI 331). This is only true where the electricity that drives them is generated by hydro-electricity or other renewable sources of energy. Where the electricity is generated by oil or coal-fired power stations, pollution is only transferred from one place to another.

JP Lethbridge
Birmingham, England

Marlboro Manoeuvres
Albena Amaudova (Peddling Dangerous Dreams NI 331) reveals the disturbing creativity with which the tobacco giant Philip Morris addicts a new generation of young people in Eastern Europe. Here’s some more sobering information: while it manoeuvres to push its tobacco agenda throughout the world – an effort spearheaded by the Marlboro Man, arguably the world’s largest source of youth tobacco addiction – Philip Morris spent a staggering $142 million on ‘feel-good’ corporate image advertising in the US to convince consumers and policy-makers that it is a good corporate citizen.

Despite the slick PR, growing numbers of consumers are joining Infact’s boycott of Kraft Foods, which is owned by Philip Morris. The Network for the Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals (NATT), a network of over 50 NGOs in more than 30 countries, is mobilizing to ensure the ratification of a binding treaty – the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control – currently being drafted at the World Health Organization (WHO).

For more information on the Kraft Boycott or the Convention write to the address below or e-mail: infact@igc.org
Sangita Nayak
Infact International Organizer,
46 Plympton Street, Boston,
Massachusetts 02118, US

Latest, greatest measure
David Werner’s article Elusive Promise (NI 331) makes much sense. It is true that Health for All has been horribly diluted and that the World Bank’s involvement in health planning has polluted public health – the fox guarding the henhouse.

However, I wonder at his criticism of the use of DALYs (‘disability adjusted life years’). Certainly the World Bank has been a sponsor of much of the research into this area but to claim that it ‘invented’ DALYs to measure economic productivity demeans a useful health tool.

Since the 1960s work has been done to attempt to find indicators of non-fatal health outcomes – to broaden our indicators beyond simple under-five mortality and life expectancy. DALYs are the latest and greatest of these indicators. Far from merely considering economic productivity, DALYs take into account the effect disability has on several areas: procreation, occupation, education and recreation. This is part of an ongoing search by WHO and the Harvard School of Public Health to improve our measurement of the suffering incurred by living with sickness.

John Kennedy
Tamworth, Australia

Fiddling while Rome burns
Present-day governments appear more and more like contemporary Neros. One of the most glaring examples is the recent failure of The Hague talks intended to consolidate the Kyoto agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions. It was hoped that the world would see a move towards curbing emissions and a consequent reduction of global warming. Instead, citizens were treated to a display of squabbling and discord.

As long as governments are tied to the apron strings of finance and business their efforts will always be constrained by consideration of profits. Our Neros do not want an intelligent and active citizenry who will challenge them to change and act. Their capacity to carry on as they do depends on citizens’ passivity and quiescence – hence the repression at Seattle and subsequent protests. Governments and leaders of industry and finance rely on turning citizens into little Neros with the help of a banal and sterile media which tells little and stimulates less. If, as anticipated by the Gorbachev Foundation, we move to the 20:80 society the 80 per cent will be kept complacent and pliable by what Zbigniew Brzezinski termed ‘tittytainment’.

Graham Roylance
Bridgewater, Australia

Sorry (for the small things)
Your Culture of Apology essay (NI 329) provokes the question: if Japanese are so quick to apologize humbly to other Japanese for the smallest of daily oversights and altercations why hasn’t Japan, as a country, been able wholeheartedly to embrace the idea of a genuine apology for cruelly invading and subduing so many foreign countries and causing so much unnecessary pain to those POWs from China, Malaya, Australia, the US etc?

Saying sumi ma sen to POWs may mean phenomenal payouts from a country where business is boss. While apologies are good for human relations, reparations are a bad form of business.

Rob Buchanan
Keri Keri, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Ritalin repression
Stalin or Hitler could learn much from the modern totalitarian education/state, which prescribes ritalin to a whole generation of children as if it’s a crime to have abundant energy. Not one voice of opposition! The crime is with the adults who have failed to lead that abundant energy towards fruitfulness, preferring to stifle it for a façade of educational order.

What will remain in 33 years when the natural attrition of vitality that comes with age is compounded with this stifling and addiction?

Mark McDougall
Elermore Vale, Australia

Irradiation fear
I am concerned about food irradiation. Apparently some of these foods are on our shelves already, cloaked by clever wordsmiths in such small-print phrases as: ‘This product has been electronically pasteurized’; ‘Treated by cold pasteurization’; ‘This food has been sterilized with E-Beam technology’ (all from The Times).

In institutions food is bought in bulk: as mass-cooked food products become more centralized there will be little control over the use of irradiated foods. China already uses irradiation in a significant way: when will the first signs of vitamin deficiency be observed, who will recognize the symptoms?

As GM foods have been imposed on many helpless countries so will irradiation. You have a lot of work to do to ensure that nutrition in the form we know and understand is not swept away and destroyed.

John Stanley Coduri
Pontypridd, Wales