Seven years have now passed since the Ontario Court of Appeal struck down the common law definition of marriage (“one man and one woman”), and effectively institutionalized same-sex marriage in Canada, through a Charter of Rights challenge.
Five years have passed since the 38th Canadian Parliament passed the Civil Marriage Act, confirming what courts in eight provinces had by then legislated. Canada became the fourth country in which marriages between homosexuals could be “solemnized” and recognized as “equal” to those between “heterosexuals.”
Note that I am already flagging words with the tweezer quotes. For not only the common law was being overturned: words were enduring redefinition.
Technically, there never was an impediment to homosexuals being married—so long as each married a member of the opposite sex. (Alas, it happened often enough!) Technically, “marriage” had never been “equal” to anything other than itself, for it was sui generis. If the married state was not different from any other relation between two persons, it was nothing at all.
To my view, and that of Lorne Gunter who wrote a good column on the anniversary the other day, it had been well on the way to becoming nothing at all, long before the same-sex enactments. The institution in its old, conventional form had been falling without a parachute for decades, slowed only by the spread arms of “family values” sentimentality. (More tweezers; I’ll get back to that.)
With Royal Assent, on July 20, 2005, it finally hit ground, and the journalists who at the time giddily celebrated the renewal of the whole idea of marriage, were in fact describing what in the stock market is called the dead-cat bounce.
To persist with this hyperbolic metaphor, we stepped out of the airplane decisively with the Divorce Act in 1968, though even then, only after years of threatening to do so. Prior to that unnatural Act, one couldn’t actually get a divorce in Canada—except through a specific Act of Parliament, after a Senate Committee had reviewed one’s arguments. Those were the good old days. For under the old common law, marriages were not only between one man and one woman, but also till death did them part. Hence the frequent use of the word “solemnized.”
It was understood that certain movie stars and other high flyers could get divorces because they had the means and the connections. “Normal” people were stuck with each other, and might as well try to work out their differences. They could separate, but not re-marry. Once Parliamentary Divorces had become fairly common and rubber-stamp, however, something like the Divorce Act became inevitable.
We will never have space in this column to connect all the dots. Suffice to say, especially in retrospect, the Civil Marriage Act of 2005 was presented as another “inevitable.” The title gives the whole story away. The courts, and even the tax department, were already recognizing “civil unions” in which no formal marriage vows had been exchanged, as the equivalent of marriages.
The surprising thing is that they do not yet recognize polygamous arrangements. “Pourquoi pas?” as the feminists used to say. I’d guess the answer is, that the tax department doesn’t like the fiscal implications.
Meanwhile, I have attended more than one wedding in a Catholic church in which, even though the candidates were, outwardly, a man and a woman, the priest systematically replaced the words “man and woman” in the liturgy with the words “two persons.” Yes, we’re all gay today.
The late J.M. Cameron, a much-admired university professor and something of a mentor to me, went discreetly to war with his own (Catholic) Church in the 1970s, upon discovering the nonce-word “values” had crept into some proposed new, hip translation of liturgical texts. As he was at pains to explain, the use of that word implied the “value system” being invoked was one of many we could choose from. That, in turn, undermined every claim to moral authority.
Something similar happened in society once the word “heterosexual” escaped from medical texts and entered into common speech. From that obscure moment forward, the key relation between “one man and one woman”—that is at the root of child-conception, and thus the means by which a civilization stays in business—was made vague.
The term “homosexual” had previously indicated a deviation from the norm. With the admission of the term “heterosexual,” there was no longer a norm. Since then, it has been “all relative, man.”
I have read innumerable glib columns and editorials (perhaps they just seem innumerable) saying, “What was all the fuss about?” Five years later, there are no signs of the world ending.
But in the fuss that never happened—there was no serious debate in Canada of a provision rejected by voters in one U.S. state after another by very wide margins—none of the tiny number of public opponents of “same-sex marriage” actually predicted the end of our world. For that was already “yesterday’s news.”
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