This strange column by Margaret Somerville, a law professor at McGill, appeared in the National Post a couple of months back (the link here is to a reprint, obviously). Somerville is an odd duck — I've seen her on a few television appearances and for a lawyer she is surprisingly prone to enormous leaps of logic. Clearly she occupies a position firmly on the right of the sexual/reproductive issues spectrum, but the way she makes these political statements under the guise of "ethics" irks me.

Specifically: to worry about the effect of same-sex marriage on a child's "prima facie right to know and be raised within their own biological family" one first has to accept that such a right exists. This is one of the leaps I was talking about. The 2001 Census identified more than a million single-parent families in Canada. Add to that some 540,000 common-law families with children, some of which will be "biological families" and some of which won't be.

So are nearly 35% of Canadian families denying their component children the right to grow up with their happily married mother and father, or is this terminology simply inappropriate? Marriage is not a biological phenomenon; Ms Somerville should not be defining the "biological family" in terms of marriage. What she's really talking about is the "traditional family," but this is an institution informed by religion and inertia, not science, and for credibility's sake she wishes to steer clear of the term altogether.

It is also informed by emotion, of course, which is the only reason gay marriage is an issue at all. Even those adamantly opposed to it must admit that, in light of the hundreds of thousands of single parent and heterosexual "non-traditional" families in Canada, two-parent single-sex families are statistically insignificant. Symbolically, however, endorsing same-sex marriage is a powerful blow against the millions of Canadians who simply feel that homosexuality is wrong.

Ms Somerville's only remaining argument is that allowing gay marriage will open the door to single-sex couples exploiting new reproductive technologies and creating their "own" child. Whatever one thinks of this prospect it is difficult to see what on earth it has to do with marriage. Just as no one can stop unmarried men and women from having children, no one will be able to stop unmarried single-sex couples from taking advantage of whatever chance for "procreation" the future affords them.