Letter: Decriminalising homosexuality

Dear Editor, Saturday’s headline, “We have made history” records two historical events in the Cook Islands.

First, our Rainbow Community, with the unceasing support of leaders such as Karla Eggelton, Val Wichman and Lady Tuaine Marsters, achieved the rights and recognition so long and so wrongly withheld from these members of our collective family who have been a part of Cook Islands culture long before “the gospel” arrived to declare parts of our culture outside of God’s creation.

Second “made history” is our lawmakers; making us world-famous for being one of the last Christian-based jurisdictions to join the rest of the Christian world to finally put law to what we were all taught in Sunday School; God is Love.

Now, lawmakers, how long will it be until we join most of the rest of the world and decriminalise God’s miracle plant, cannabis? And, will you have the moral strength to legislate full pardons for the young Aitutaki entrepreneur-farmers whose lives you allowed to be ruined with laws as archaic as the ones you’ve just had the courage to place on the scrap heap of past ignorance?