Carey Roberts’ latest piece highlights how the International Violence Against Women Act, VAWA, appears to violate the US constitution. Sooner or later, keen rights advocates are likely to challenge this sexist and divisive legislation and, like many other temporary US laws, it will be shafted.

New Zealand on the other hand has no constitution. There is little protection here for any basic rights or freedoms. We have a Bill of Rights, but just this week the Key government showed how weak and irrelevant the Bill of Rights is. The fact that Key’s law changes regarding benefits was found to contravene the Bill of Rights on various grounds was simply disregarded, treated with utter contempt by that government, without consequence. Hence we put up with all manner of male denigration and anti-male sexism in law, jurisprudence, state services, advertising and business practice even though discrimination on the grounds of gender is supposedly banned under the Bill of Rights.

There is little in NZ to protect us from injustice and foolishness. We have obligations under UN conventions but much of what the UN does is ideologically captured by false feminist propaganda. The Clark government avoided signing into any conventions that might protect men or families. Even if UN conventions were sensible and just, there is only limited machinery that can oblige a government to keep to them.

New Zealand needs a constitution, some fundamental rights and freedoms on which successful states are built. If we had one, many of the profound injustices reported by men and fathers on MENZ could have been avoided. Yes, it is true that the US constitution has not protected men there from state excesses involving male-bashing and female privilege (or for that matter other assaults on individual liberties through the war on terrorism and the ridiculous war on drugs), but remember that their constitution is hundreds of years old and may not be well equipped to handle some modern trends. Also, in due course their constitution may well be invoked to quash much of the feminist male-bashing injustice that has been tolerated to date.

Incidentally, Carey Roberts points to the fact that VAWA and “the gaggle of federal and state domestic violence laws” are largely based on the theoretical “power and control” concept. This concept in relation to personal relationships arose from feminist creative thinking but has little scientific support or intellectual integrity. Roberts refers to it as a “bogeyman”, and we are reminded that its uncritical acceptance is leading to ever more ridiculous levels of injustice and illegalization of normal human behaviour. The concepts of “emotional abuse” and “coercion” are dangerously vague ideas that have been creeping into law in feminist-polluted countries. Behaviour now labelled as abuse and coercion often amounts to no more than an expression of frustration or dissatisfaction at a partner’s behaviour or lack of it, and it can be as little as expressing an opinion or making a request of a partner. Of course, exactly the same behaviour when done by a male will be much more likely to be seen as abusive or coercive than when done by a female.

Where is the fundamental morality and related code of conduct against which NZ laws and state behaviour must be measured? Is there any way other than through a constitution for NZ to protect its citizens better from the wild sea of ideological dishonesty and stupidity?