McGowan inconsistent
Cathy McGowan is using the Catholic Church and the General Secretary of the Papua New Guinea Catholic Bishops Conference, Father Giorgio Licini, when she challenges local Federal MPs (The Border Mail, December 21) on conditions for asylum seekers in Bomana detention centre.
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The teachings of the church are not a smorgasbord from which Catholics may pick and choose.
For the Catholic Church human rights begin in the womb, with the right to life, not later on with the right to remotes.
She would have more credibility arguing for remotes if she wasn't on record as supporting abortion and euthanasia.
The West Australian government has just shockingly legislated to fly whatever is required to provide "assisted suicide" to regional people, but has adamantly refused to fund palliative care for them.
IN OTHER NEWS:
Her silence on this is deafening.
We all know who will be the main "beneficiaries" of this "service" in outback communities.
Our indigenous brothers and sisters.
The Catholic Church has got it right when it teaches abortion and doctor-prescribed suicide are an affront to human rights, just as it teaches refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants have a right to humane and just treatment.
I suspect Father Licini understands this and would be confounded by Cathy McGowan's inconsistency.
Denise M Cameron, Albury
Evidence is clear
DA Corbett gives us a typical letter (The Border Mail, December 26) about climate change; full of assertions, but with no evidence.
He says that "virtually every prediction made by climate scientists has been proven wrong and uses a few to justify his argument.
Let's have a look at what he says are false claims.
MORE LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:
The ice on the Himalayas is melting never to return (wrong he says, but with no evidence).
here are plenty of sources to show that this claim is true so let's just use one from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Scientists there have looked at photographs from US spy satellites starting in the 1970s that show the rate of melting has doubled since the year 2000 over about 2000km of mountain range.
This will have dire consequences as over one billion people depend on Himalayan glacier melt for their water supply and there will be little ice to melt.
The arctic ice is disappearing. Evidence - that those who sailed there got frozen in.
That is possible if they went there in the winter months because we also know that it grows faster during winter than it once did but also melts more rapidly in summer.
The average rate of decline is about 12 per cent.
Every reputable scientific institute has reported an increase in average global temperature and the link between carbon dioxide levels, and global warming is well known having been first postulated by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in the late 19th century and verified many times since.
Can I suggest that we concentrate hard on reducing emissions and stop reading and listening to the assertions of people who deny that climate is a real and present danger.