Traditional values

Your correspondents I Tomson and KH Salt (Bay Times, 18 August 2006) are two of a kind. Both complain that traditional values have been replaced by “today’s condom culture” or “atheistic humanist laws”. Neither considers that the problem may lie with traditional values and those who cling to them. Maybe humanistic values and solutions are simply filling the vacuum left by the failure of traditional values. If a new generation have rejected traditional values and this has resulted in rising rates of venereal disease, Tomson and Salt are free to carry on flogging a dead horse, but why do they criticise those who try to reduce the damage? Salt in particular even goes so far as to bear false witness by attributing to the Humanist Manifesto a quote about “the rotting corpse of Christianity”. I have checked the text of Humanist Manifestos I, II and III. None of them contain this phrase. In fact I cannot find any reference to Christianity at all. The three manifestos were written by some eminent thinkers of the twentieth century. Salt should have the courtesy to read what they actually wrote before attempting to quote them.