Bruce Logan

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Bruce Logan (born 1938) is a New Zealand conservative Christian who has been involved in opposition to liberal social policies within his country for over two decades.

Logan was originally Head of English at Orewa College in Auckland, until he moved southwards to Christchurch in the mid-nineties. He became curriculum director at Middleton Grange School, New Zealand's largest evangelical/fundamentalist Christian (private) school, at the same time. While employed there, Logan also acted as Director for the New Zealand Education Development Foundation, which attempted to interest centre-right political parties in education concerns, like school choice, school bulk funding, the abolition of outcome-based education strategies and a deregulated post-compulsory tertiary education sector.

In Cutting Edge, Logan often reprinted articles from the Institute for Economic Affairs (United Kingdom), British journalist Melanie Phillips, First Things (United States, edited by Richard John Neuhaus and other Anglo-American and Australian social conservative publications.

In addition, he wrote several books for NZEDF, including A Questionable Conception (1998), which opposed comprehrensive sex education; A Level Playing Field? (1996), which advocated school 'choice'. He also wrote Marriage: Do We Need It? (1998) which explored the critical role marriage plays in civil society.

In 2000, the New Zealand Education Development Foundation metamorphosed into the Maxim Institute. Logan served as its first director and also operated out of Christchurch-based offices, as the Institute had offices in Christchurch and Auckland. Middleton Grange provided premises for their Christchurch offices. Logan also published Evidence, the Institute's 'policy journal,' which ran for fifteen issues (2001-2005).

After the formation of the Institute, Logan wrote Same Sex Marriage? (2000) for Affirm, a Tauranga-based New Zealand Presbyterian organisation opposed to civil unions, and lesbian and gay ordination within their own denomination. As well as this, he authored Waking Up to Marriage (2004), which repeated and supplemented earlier conservative social scientific research which encouraged promotion of heterosexual marriage over heterosexual cohabitation, and legal recognition of lesbian/gay civil unions, for the Maxim Institute.

During his time at the Institute, Logan campaigned against New Zealand's prostitution law reform, euthanasia, lesbian and gay civil unions in New Zealand and other issues related to feminism, family policy and bioethics.

1 Plagiarism scandal
2 Bibliography
3 Post-"Logangate" Articles
4 External links
5 Criticism

[edit] Plagiarism scandal

On October 17, 2005, Paul Litterick of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists used Copyscape [1], a web-based plagiarism detection service, to analyse Logan's published newspaper work. He uncovered evidence of significant plagiarism in Logan's work, and published the results in the Fundy Post (Issues 18 and 19), an online chronicle of the alleged excesses of New Zealand conservative Christians and other faith-based elements. Litterick found that some of Logan's work was taken (in most cases with permission) from Anglo-American sources, which include the Heritage Foundation, Institute for American Values and National Fatherhood Institute, Maggie Gallagher (a US social conservative journalist), Melanie Phillips,(UK), Conservative Christian Fellowship (UK) and Digby Anderson, Social Affairs Unit(UK).

Supporters of Logan say that his mistake was simply sloppiness or poor citation technique, rather than malicious theft of intellectual property; in at least one instance, Logan had permission to quote another author but had apparently neglected to properly demarcate her work and explicitly give her credit ^{[citation needed]}. By contrast, his opponents say that the systematic nature of the plagiarism -- involving large blocks of text being cut-and-pasted into his articles over a period of several years -- is evidence that Logan cannot be trusted as a contributor of original ideas ^{[citation needed]}.

In November 2005, Logan retired from the Maxim Institute. In the year following the scandal, he only published a handful of articles: one article for New Zealand's fundamentalist newspaper Challenge Weekly, and four others for the Otago Daily Times. It seems increasingly unlikely that he will regain his previous stature as a mainstream social commentator.

However, on October 26 2006, Logan was a workshop presenter at the conservative Christian organisation Family First's presentation of "Principles of Marriage and the Family" during a symposium entitled the New Zealand Forum on the Family at Butterfly Creek, Auckland. He was not a keynote presenter at the symposium in question, nor was his presence advertised. Gay community opponents of the New Zealand Christian Right have questioned whether that movement understands the implications of copyright and intellectual property infringement due to this apparent rehabilitation [2].

[edit] Bibliography

Bruce Logan: A Level Playing Field? Christchurch: New Zealand Education Development Foundation: 1994: ISBN 0-473-03168-X
Bruce Logan: Marriage: Do We Need It? Christchurch: NZEDF: 1998: ISBN 0-473-05628-3
Bruce Logan: A Questionable Conception: Christchurch: NZEDF: 1996: ISBN 0-473-03261-9
Bruce Logan: Same Sex Marriage? Tauranga: AFFIRM Publications: 2000: ISBN 0-9582113-2-9
Bruce Logan: Waking Up to Marriage: Auckland: Maxim Institute: 2004: ISBN 0-473-09787-7

[edit] Post-"Logangate" Articles

Bruce Logan: "How a Government Taxes is the Best Indicator of its Character" Otago Daily Times: 4 July 2006.
Bruce Logan: "Real Men Should Be Strong and Good:" Otago Daily Times:25 August 2006.
Bruce Logan: "Individuals Rights Lost in Rush to 'Freedom'" Otago Daily Times: 15 September 2006.
Bruce Logan: "Denial of Evil Utopian Delusion" Otago Daily Times: 10 October 2006.