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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 13, 2003
Men & women
For the last three Sundays I've been writing in the shadow of the Ontario Appeals Court decision that in combination with our government's cowardly refusal to challenge it made "same-sex marriage" a fait accompli in Canada. I cannot apologize for dwelling on this instead of turning to lighter subjects as the summer glides along. Nor am I unaware that I speak for a minority of readers and Canadians nor that glibber views prevail among the majority who think the matter is settled and are glad to put it away. For they have no idea what the consequences will be of inserting this latest dagger into the body of our society. For our country and our culture is already changed since my own childhood more fundamentally than through all the centuries since European civilization was first brought to these shores. We have appeared to progress only in the sense that a superficial prosperity -- itself the product of mere technological developments -- has not halted and does not threaten to halt. There are ever new forms of bread and circuses to entertain our masses. But from the things that bring true joy to human souls from the things that give meaning to our lives and can adorn our world with beauty and ennoble it we have progressed into a hole. Our very idea of freedom is now reduced to the opposite idea of equality as the distinctions upon which our civilization was founded have been hacked away. Consider for instance only the immediate consequences of the ruling that destroyed the institution of marriage. Think for a moment on all the meaning that was contained in the words "husband" and "wife"; in the words "father" and "mother"; even in the words "son" and "daughter". Think if you can how deeply these stations and the duties and loyalties associated with each were rooted in our experience as civilized men and women. These are relations that can no longer exist in law and which are already being stripped from public usage. The marriage of men to men and of women to women makes it impossible to maintain any distinctions of the kind. Sex -- what is male and what female -- was written into each of them; and in extracting it all intra-familial relations were thus abrogated. There can only be "partners" henceforth; and as the whole notion of "parentage" was founded in the "heterosexual monopoly" on childbirth children themselves can only have "guardians". The common paternity and maternity of brothers and sisters may continue to exist as fact (progressively undermined by new technology). But by degrees such facts must cease to be publicly acknowledged. This is not alarmist. No other possible course is available in the logical wake of the "same-sex marriage" ruling. It leaves no way back. In Canada the Charter of Rights has empowered our courts to strike down successively every attempt to maintain such distinctions. The family itself has thus been driven underground. It can now exist only by the private consent of its members on extra-legal terms. It most certainly no longer exists as a model or example binding one generation to another. My more libertarian friends seem convinced after very little reflection that the effect of "same-sex marriage" must be to make the "gays buy into bourgeois family values". This is why they support it or at least don't object. Their fallacy is to assume that marriage and family continue to be the same for the majority who are not "gay". But this assumption cannot hold when the very distinctions upon which "straight" marriage and family are built must be stripped away to accommodate "gay" partners. What we are much more likely to see is a movement of the "straights" towards the values pioneered among the "gays". For what we now have if you think it through logically is not "straight" marriage extended to admit "gays" but rather marriage itself entirely redefined. From now on everyone is in a "gay marriage" -- all married are "partners" neither husbands nor wives. The components have become interchangeable and the effect is unambiguously to make "straights buy into gay values". This was anyway the direction in which our society was "evolving". The reduction of every issue to "equality rights" had already made men interchangeable with women for any social purpose. While they continue to be distinguished at the lowest animal level -- the level of outward differences in anatomy -- they may not be distinguished in anything deeper or higher. "Same-sex marriage" thus confirms this societal groping -- towards a monstrous lie. For there can be no such thing as a human who is neither male nor female. A "person" who is neither is not a human but something else: an imaginary creature struggling to be realized in human flesh. And our laws now serve exclusively that class of "persons" whose most essential human characteristics have been stripped away. They were the Jews in ancient times who fully realized the significance of this fact: that God "had made them male and female". Who realized in a theological development of the idea of marriage the deep truth of this anthropological fact. The deep truth that men and women are necessary to the completion of each other that "man" in the male aspect of Adam cannot be alone. That "man" in the sense of human was Adam completed by Eve. This is the "beast with two backs" of Shakespeare's droll image -- the one animal in nature who embraces face-to-face. And I know this last paragraph will be lost on many readers. For it says something that now requires serious and patient thought. Whereas until very recently in our culture it was an insight into reality itself that we carried in our hearts through Christian inheritance of ancient Hebrew revelation. We knew if only by the grace of this inheritance that there is more in the meeting of man and woman than the animal begetting of children; that in their coming together -- in their mutual completion -- was the foundation of civilization itself. This insight is replaced in our time by something intellectually trite: with an idea of equality which removes all the difficulties in its way by denying the most fundamental human distinction. What a paradox that a society so rife with pornography should have abolished sex! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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