Time to Speak Up?

There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. Norman Mailer.

Can you guess which country and what era the following statements describe?

The force of the state was used to implement a set of legal reforms aimed at changing the public meaning of marriage. Policies included the establishment of no-fault marriage, eliminating legal distinctions between cohabitation and marriage, reconstituting marriage as a civil union regime, universalizing abortion, establishing universal daycare.

All who guessed Canada starting in the last decade of the 20th century could be forgiven for their error. Anyone who guessed Russia in the 1920’s would be correct and collect the gold star for historical and cultural trivia knowledge. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I am feeling some of Mailer’s impotence.

Isn’t it remarkable that the objectives of Soviet feminist Aleksandra Kollantai which she implemented in the 1920’s as Commissar of Social Welfare would be replicated in Canada at the end of the 20th and into the 21st century, even embraced by a significant percentage of Canadians and by a large margin amongst the elites of Canadian society.

It is even more remarkable given the fact that by 1936 the USSR had recognized that these radical measures had destabilized family life in the USSR, divorce rates were rising, temporary cohabitation was more prevalent, birth rates were declining, and children were falling between the cracks of broken families. Even Stalinist Russia recognized it had to reverse some of its legal reforms.

Daniel Cere, director of the Institute for the Study of Marriage, Law & Culture in Montreal is the source of this fascinating historical footnote, in his essay War of the Ring.

The essay is one of several in an important book published late in 2004 entitled Divorcing Marriage. The editors Douglas Farrow and Daniel Cere hoped it might influence enough Canadians and MP’s to vote against the Liberal motion in March 2005 that put Canada on the brink of redefining marriage. It is a book that should be read by millions of Canadians if they wish to understand just how Canada got itself into its present predicament.

By predicament I mean the situation where despite the fact there has been no meaningful public debate over the issue of whether or not we should redefine marriage, and the issue has not been one put before the people in any election campaign (other than the Conservatives promising to permit a free vote in the House of Commons on the matter), Canada is now one of only 3 countries in the world that permits members of the same sex to marry. For this we call ourselves progressive.

The predicament is even graver when one considers that it appears highly likely that despite this lack of debate more Canadians favour retaining the traditional definition of marriage, than abolishing it. And still Globe & Mail columnist John Ibbitson paints those who argue for the preservation of the traditional definition as the wearers of black hats, while those who argue for the abandonment of tradition wear the white hats.

Otherwise right thinking folk accuse those of us who argue for a reasoned and measured debate in the public square in advance of any vote in parliament of being arrogant and prejudiced against homosexuals. And, for good measure those of us who confess to being Christians are labelled as extreme right fundamentalists.

Someone I thought to be a friend of over 20 years duration, excoriated me for my letter to the National Post editor – the one about the elephant in the room. We have had previous debates over the issue of same sex marriage and neither of us found the other’s arguments compelling, but from my perspective it had never gotten personal. Now it seems it has, and this friend accused me not only of being arrogant and prejudiced but of poisoning him/her against Conservatives and Anglicans (of both I stand guilty of being a member) though what that has to do with the argument that we should have an open, honest and informed debate on the subject still escapes me.

In January 2005 I wrote a humorous essay on this site. Its premise was a fictitious decision of the Supreme Court of Canada that ruled in favour of golfers who wanted the size of the hole changed to that of a manhole. What I didn’t say in the essay was that some of the dialogue in that essay was taken almost word for word from statements made by advocates of same sex marriage.

Just as the game of golf and the people who call themselves golfers would change if the hole became the size of a manhole, the institution of marriage will change if same-sex couples marry. Daniel Cere quotes Ladelle McWhorter, a gay and lesbian theorist as saying “ that if same-sex couples get legally married, the institution of marriage will change, and since marriage is one of the institutions that support heterosexuality and heterosexual identities, heterosexuality and heterosexuals will change as well.”

Despite what the liberal press and the opposition parties try to convince you, this issue crosses political party lines, and the next few months may be the last opportunity ordinary Canadians have to give this issue some serious thought and to make their views known.

D.J. Enright wrote,

“since by and large people in the West don’t face prison camps and are tolerably free to say or write what they like, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses in real content, evolving into a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything. The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street.”

There was no opportunity for Russians in the 1920’s and 30’s to openly dissent against the changes invoked by Commissar Kollantai, and still the state recognized it had erred. The advocates for destroying the definition of marriage have been shouting in the streets for decades now and polite Canadians have stood by and said nothing. Isn't it time to raise our voices and be heard?