NYT to Hawaiians: We Tell You What Your Culture is

NYT Nov 9, 2013: To allow a full airing of views, the Legislature said any citizen could comment. In what some called a “public filibuster,” religious opponents mobilized, accounting for most of the more than 1,000 people who testified for two minutes each, during 55 hours of hearings over five days this week.

Both sides claimed to represent the true “aloha spirit.” Some ethnic Hawaiians tearfully said the bill would destroy their culture, and the opponents’ television and radio ads described as endangered the Hawaiian heritage of “ohana,” or family, of “mothers and fathers caring for each other and their keiki,” or children.

But ethnic historians noted that the pre-European island culture did not have marriage in the modern sense and accepted homosexuality.  (And even though we at the NYT have never heard of Queen Kaahumanu, we are here to tell you that all of your history from Kaahumanu on doesn't count.)

read ... Obey us

NYT: The Aloha Spirit for Everyone (who agrees with us)

NYT Nov 3, 2013, Newtown, Connecticut: -- The Hawaii Legislature met in special session last week to consider a bill that would allow same-sex marriages to begin Nov. 18. Passage would bring things full circle from the 1990s.

But you could draw a circle much bigger than that. Start in the 1820s, when the first New England missionaries arrived on the islands, burning with a zeal to save heathen souls. Hawaii is one of our oldest live-and-let-live battlegrounds, where Western views of propriety and sexual morality grappled with a contrary point of view. Hawaii was a peaceable kingdom then,  (That statement alone proves these morons know nothing about Hawaii.) with relaxed attitudes toward sin and clothing.  (Aha!  NYT: Peaceable = Naked.) Missionaries saw drinking, dancing, tattoos, gambling and debauchery, and countered with hymns, bolts of crisp cotton and muslin (Yup.  It’s the clothing.  LOL!  They want us all to get naked!) — and monogamy. (Which means we won’t be ‘available’ to visiting NYT editors.  How frustrating for them!)

They worked fast. A missionary wife, Laura Fish Judd, wrote this in 1828: “Mr. Richards, at Lahaina, says he has united six hundred couples in a few months. It is certainly a vast improvement upon the old system of living together like brutes.” Perhaps if Mrs. Judd had spoken with the brutes, she might have understood them better. Scholars have noted a deep Hawaiian tradition of tolerance and fluid sexual identity, of acceptance, toward gay people especially…. (But no gay marriage anywhere on Earth prior to 1993.)

A local news outfit, Honolulu Civil Beat, said the issue is splitting the state evenly, at 44 percent on each side. The debate has an upside-down feel to it. The people wearing the rainbow leis and invoking Hawaii’s heritage and the “aloha spirit” are saying: Let’s please get married, in the Western tradition. The conservatives’ reply: No rites for you. Go have your wedding in California. There’s fluid, and then there’s topsy-turvy. It’s why a few years ago, when some native Hawaiians on Maui tried to close a nude beach — telling white folks, please put your clothes on — some people said: Huh?  (There they go with the nudity again.)

(Apparently the NYTs smug, conscious, enlightened, and progressive idiot-editors have never heard of Queen Kaahumanu.  Double irony—before the Hawaiian Kingdom, there was nobody in these islands who called himself a “Hawaiian”.  Hawaiian culture and identity is 100% tied to the creation of the Hawaiian Kingdom.  Therefore the NYT is demanding that Hawaiians dissolve all of their history and follow the neo-pagan culture of the NYT editors.  Apparently the NYT believes that if they write this with a byline from Connecticut that Hawaiians will follow their new NYT religion.  Or maybe its just too cold to get naked in Connecticut....)

read … We tell you what your culture is.  You obey us.

ILind Nov 4, 2013: No reason to defer to Hawaiian “right” to oppose marriage equality

(Why?  Because they’re Christians and that makes them invalid representatives of Hawaiian culture, etcetcetc.  Ian Lind makes all the same errors that the NYT does.  Maybe he was brainwashed at the same reeducation camp.)

BEST COMMENTS:

Bart Dame: in “the real world” of the church pews and the Capitol auditorium, native Hawaiians are turning out en masse and repeating that framework: “Gay equality is a Western, European idea and the gay advocates are haole outsiders, who come here acting like ‘know-it-alls’ with NO sensitivity to local people and our culture. This is a Second overthrow of Hawaiian culture by arrogant outsiders.” That is a composite of the argument. But it has great force on the imagination of many, many people of Hawaiian ancestry. I know I will anger some of my allies, but too many gay rights advocates feed into that stereotype.

Maunalani: As a Native Hawaiian Christian, allow me a response. There were big reasons why the Hawaiians embraced Christianity and rejected “their traditional religions.” The “traditional religions” were kept alive by human sacrifice. You could be prayed to death if someone had a problem with you. A chief, as a descendant of the gods, could order you killed instantly if you stepped on his shadow or didn’t prostrate yourself. Similarly if you broke a hundred different kapus, such as being the wrong gender and eating bananas. Hawaiians spent much of their time killing each other in wars and disputes.

Hawaiians practiced infanticide. They didn’t value their children, and had sexual relationships indiscriminately with multiple partners. Nothing in the “traditional religions” kept Hawaiian women from being prostituted to foreign sailors, or helped prevent the resulting spread of venereal diseases which killed off so many and in a short time helped reduce the numbers of Hawaiians to a small percentage of what they once were.

Christianity changed all that. The missionaries replaced the savagery in the Hawaiian culture with the “Aloha Spirit” (the Love of God), which is now seen as an integral part of the Hawaiian culture.

A lot of us Hawaiians don’t want to go back to a pagan world without Ke Akua. And if we want to follow Ke Akua, we have to obey His commandments, which are clear in this regard.

I always find it interesting that the dying liberal mainline churches are now embracing the same bad un-Christian practices which they converted us from, and now claim that we are are backwards for still following the values they once embraced.

John: The agonizing dilemma of having to choose between pandering to Hawaiians and pandering to gays – and a timely solution that allows us to feel really good about ourselves and secure in our moral superiority. Thanks, Ian!

One more thing: Since the people in Connecticut have apparently reverted to paganism, it must be Hawaii's job to convert them to Christianity(!)