Same-sex marriage debate isn't over yet

Toronto Sun ^ | 2005-07-23 | Salim Mansur

[Clive]

The whole range of consequences, especially the unintended ones, flowing from any legislation engaged in social engineering can never be predicted in its entirety.

If it could, then, perhaps, the Soviet Union would not have sunk like the Titanic in the slipstream of its much-vaunted efforts to engineer new socialist men and women who would bear any burden, pay any price, to advance the collectivist goals of their classless society.

Canadian legislation a generation ago, making divorces easy and painless to relieve couples from the agony of marriages gone sour, was considered humane and progressive.

A generation later, children of failed marriages, single parents, common-law arrangements and other experiments in co-habitation tell a story that could not have been fully imagined then.

It is undeniable that the passage of the same-sex marriage bill into law has left the country divided, and in time Canadians will learn the full extent of the harm done in wrecking the traditional institution of marriage on the gilded claims of tolerance and progress.

The arguments advanced by supporters of same-sex marriage were never convincing.

Theirs is at best a Pyrrhic victory, acquired by desecrating an institution through a charade that mocked the principles of democracy the prime minister once promised to defend.

Many, in opposing the legislation, as I did, were not defending the meaning of traditional marriage merely on sentimental grounds. It could not be demonstrated, nor was it, that marriage is a right in the same sense that freedom to think and speak, freedom to believe in a religion or not and freedom to own property are rights.

Marriage has always been a social convention sanctified by all traditional religions for being the seed of family. Hence, the relationship between marriage and family was viewed as the moral basis of society and an integral aspect of the natural order of things.

But the assault on family is as old as the history of family. Human beings, in the Aristotelian sense, are political creatures, and the assault on family has always been a political machination by those holding the natural affinity of family as suspect.

Family is key

From Plato to Stalin and Mao, the ideologues of the state-as-the guiding-hands-of-human-destiny approach understood the imperative to wreck the family as a natural institution, in order to build their own versions of centrally-directed society, where natural kinship nurtured in a family setting would be replaced by ones designed and approved by the state.

Liberal Canada is not quite there yet -- to that point where the erstwhile philosopher-kings will direct Canadians into the making of a godless utopia where the state demands of them loyalty and affection ahead of their families.

But the lib-left disposition in Canada increasingly leans toward state and away from family, and this tendency, continued in matters from of taxation to social policies, may eventually mean replacing what remains of a free society with a closed one of tolerance for politically correct thinking only.

The defence of the traditional meaning of marriage was in effect defending the traditional place of the family in society. It was not about greater or lesser tolerance, nor about opposing progress in human affairs. It was also about democracy, about being suspicious of elite considerations on matters where common sense is the more reliable guide in thinking and doing what is naturally and instinctively right and good.

Polls repeatedly showed a majority -- in English Canada an overwhelming one -- opposed any change in the definition of traditional marriage.

Declining membership

All mainline traditional religions remain in agreement on the meaning of traditional marriage being a union of one man and one woman. Those religious groups, such as the mainstream Protestant congregations, that have supported same-sex marriage, find their churches, ironically, declining in membership.

The issue of marriage may now be closed, at least for a while.

But it might be safe to predict, like the subject of abortion, that it will not be interred.

Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.

[Clive]

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[AngelesCrestHighway]

Progressive Canada....Maybe you should spend a little more time beefing up your own military instead of relying on America to defend your butts.....(no pun intended)

[JRios1968]

All mainline traditional religions remain in agreement on the meaning of traditional marriage being a union of one man and one woman. Those religious groups, such as the "mainstream" Protestant congregations, that have supported same-sex marriage, find their churches, ironically, declining in membership.

That passage (quotation marks added by me,) by itself, should serve as a warning to those in the church who, misguided by their desire to make Christianity in their own mold, have taken the road of appeasement to the liberal agenda.

[Unam Sanctam]

Thanks for posting.

[Gerfang]

If your civilization is so fragile that it will come crashing down because two gay guys tie the knot, maybe it wasn’t worth having in the first place.

[Old Professer]

The whole concept is too stupid to argue; either marriage is sanctioned or it is merely procedural is about the best that can be done without creating parallel ceremonies with a concomitant set of laws.

Why should mainstream society treat this any different than skirt lengths?