Sat Dec 11/04
The marrying men

I view the prospect of gay marriage much as I do the decriminalization of marijuana: simplistically speaking, both are very good things. Unfortunately, I very much doubt that the government is going to go about implementing them properly. In the case of marijuana, decriminalization appears to be a half step towards legalization, but it's also fraught with paradox (how do you downgrade the significance of owning a drug while upgrading the penalties for producing it) and questionable motives (enforcement of possession will go up, not down, once police officers know they're just handing out yellow tickets instead of criminal records). Likewise, simply amending the Marriage Act to include same-sex marriages would create an altogether ridiculous situation in which a piece of legislation that is (inappropriately, I think) based on the idea of a state-church partnership would include provisions for unions that the churches virulently oppose.

On Thursday, CalgaryGrit issued an open call for intelligent arguments against gay marriage. As of my last check of the comments section, none had arrived — none that he hadn't already nicely destroyed in his piece, anyway — and certainly none has ever been made in the mainstream press. (Most arguments that get made are either proudly based in religious teachings (and are thus utterly foreign to me, and to governments), or pretend at being ethically-based while betraying obvious cultural and/or religious biases.) Just for shits and giggles, though, I gave some thought to it and came up with something that I think is actually rather convincing (to me, anyway). The following two paragraphs are the argument I made to CalgaryGrit, and I stand by it:

The current "definition" of marriage can arguably be seen as a sort of seal of approval bestowed by Canadian society. Standards have obviously evolved, but still, while 100 percent of Canadians "approve" of heterosexual marriage, a very significant number disapprove of homosexual marriage. By sole virtue of that fact, inasmuch as "marriage" is this amorphous blob of societal acceptance, gay marriages cannot be equal to straight ones. It doesn't matter if that lack of acceptance stems from bigotry; it doesn't matter that it's ridiculous for people to object to gay marriage en masse while ignoring all the horrible things that go on in some straight marriages. I think the lack of acceptance itself is a valid argument against simply amending the current Marriage Act to include same-sex couples.

But really, that just shows how stupid the Marriage Act is to begin with. Though equal treatment under the law is a no-brainer for a majority of Canadians right now, equal respect for same- and opposite-sex couples is perhaps centuries off. Thus, the former is the only "seal of approval" the government currently has the moral authority to offer, and it also happens to have an urgent moral responsibility to do so — right freaking now. So the only intellectually honest course of action I see is to scrap the current Marriage Act altogether and confine government's role in marriage to matters of cold, hard, quantifiable fact. (In other words, the "publication of banns" has no place in Canadian law.) People are free to judge these marriages as they see fit — they will anyway. That's none of the government's concern.

-contact-