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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 20, 2011
No joke
Our motto today will come from Groucho Marx: "I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury." Or let me translate this into Catholic terms, as I am ever more inclined to do. "I was married by a priest. I should have asked for the Inquisition."My reader will hold that thought, while we review a news item that caught my attention this last week. It was about a "bogus marriage swoop" by the United Kingdom Border Agency. "Immigration teams have arrested 10 people during early morning raids aimed at disrupting an alleged international sham marriage scam," according to the Manchester Evening News. My first thought was, Bravo! (For I am what they call a "social conservative.") British authorities have succeeded in defining a form of marriage that could be bogus or sham. In this respect they seem well ahead of the Canadian authorities. The traditional sort of bogus marriage immigration scam was, as I understand, that you marry someone abroad, who isn't going to get a visa any other way. He (or she) now dances past officials who would otherwise send him home, and instead collects permanent immigrant status. His extended family may now be eligible for visas, too; and of course, it would be brutishly uncompassionate and right wing to deny them welfare services. But at the least, we now have one new customer in the pipeline for citizenship and the vote. Meanwhile the marriage quietly dissolves. There are variations, such as those in which only one party to the marriage is shamming. I'm aware of a case, for instance, in which a young Canadian lady fell desperately in love with some charming young Lothario she met, during a summer in Europe. He strongly hinted what he wanted from the marriage, but she felt confident of winning his heart, then living happily ever after. One might call such a woman a stupid fool, but that would be judgemental. Imagine her surprise when, after putting him through a Canadian university, and enduring his unconcealed affairs, he suddenly rounded on her -- suing not only for divorce, but for spousal support, on the grounds his wife had been his sole source of income. Now, usually it is the man complaining, that because he supported an unpleasant woman for more years than she deserved, the courts have let her take him to the cleaners. We learn, thus, that such absurdities in contemporary family law can be played both ways; that they are not really sexist, as whining males have so often alleged, but merely biased toward the more ruthless and calculating party. Getting back to England, here is the new twist. Women from the continent, thanks to common citizenship in the European Union, come to England, advertise themselves, say, in the matrimonial columns of Pakistani newspapers, fly to Pakistan to get married, then back to England to fill out immigration papers on behalf of their latest husbands. (We assume there is some financial inducement.) Arrests from the operation, code-named "Razorback," included a Pakistani man and woman, a young Slovak male, and "seven Czech and Slovak women aged between 21 and 36," according to that news report. It strikes me that if the women, upon returning to Europe, then failed to submit the immigration forms, we'd have a very complex and interesting case in international family and criminal law. I am told, however, by a Canadian lawyer friend, with a very dark as well as droll sense of humour, that while such cases have actually arisen, "They tend to be settled out of court." I am using arbitrary, almost random, anecdotal "evidence" to depict only one aspect of the farce we have achieved, by detaching marriage in both law and custom from its central, traditional function. This was the legitimation of offspring, and the assignment of responsibility for their care. I could instead draw upon a vast field of alternative anecdotes, or upon the huge accumulation of empirical data, making the same point. For once it is redefined as simply a legal relation between two people (with tax and other material advantages to be derived from it), the institution of marriage can only be abused. Which returns us to Groucho Marx. For all that could be said in support of "traditional marriage" -- chiefly that the alternative is moral and demographic catastrophe -- there has always been something to say against it. People can be fools. They can make bad marriages, no matter what the institutional arrangements. This is why some sort of provisions, for separation and divorce or annulment, have always been necessary, for the more extreme cases. Justice demanded them. Yet sanity requires that (Groucho) Marxist, "If only!" His joke depended upon the fact that, when he told it, marriage was nearly impossible to get out of. His humour turned, in the paradoxical way that humour does, on the seriousness of that marital reality. Without that profoundly serious commitment -- that openness to children, and through them, to the future of the human race -- there is no joke. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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