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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 12, 2004
Fight
We now have the Canadian Supreme Court's diktats on "same-sex marriage". In political football we've watched the completion of a double-handoff: the Liberals handing to the Court to make a decision that could be politically suicidal then the Court handing back by ruling the Liberals had already made the decision by failing to appeal judgements in the lower courts. (Let us pause to admire the fine footwork!) Meanwhile that minority Liberal government with the predictable support of the socialist NDP and separatist Bloc is revving legislation to clinch the fait accompli. Parliament could still stop this nonsense with a backbench revolt. But the enemy has now seized all the high ground. I tilted against the "same-sex" windmill last year and the columns are still on my website if anyone needs the review. Nothing now remains but to act. If Canadians have any spunk they will flood the inboxes of their Members of Parliament with what they really think about redefining marriage. I pray but am not confident. For like the justices on our highest bench our ensconced "liberal" ruling class is entirely committed to the destruction of the traditional institution of marriage and I do not think they will brook mere public opinion. What they can't achieve openly in Parliament they will then engineer by legal deceits. Nevertheless with the core institution of our society on the block and no upside foreseeable in the decapitation it is time for every decent Canadian to man the keyboards. For "same-sex marriage" will hardly sate the appetite of activists for more and faster change. There is no upside even for the homosexuals to whom the State has promised what Nature will never provide. My closest living homosexual friend (he despises the word "gay") put it most succinctly on behalf of the many who never signed on to the activists' agenda: "I long to lead the charge back into the closet." But he's an American; and even better from a nice Red State in the Deep South. He and the man he lives with have enjoyed through their adult life a level of tolerance and accommodation that was unthinkable elsewhere in time and place. He has as he therefore explains no desire to tamper with the society that has made his life so easy. And he is not the sort of fool who imagines that changing the definition of marriage can fail to undermine what remains of family life. Now here is a fine irony for the people who wrote the numerous items of hate-mail on this issue for my inbox last year. Much of my own thinking on the issue has been formed or developed in conversations with this remarkable (and by his choice anonymous) homosexual. For I don't know of another person who has read so broadly in social history. And the more he reads the more amazed he is by the "Middle American" society around him -- the achievement of that very stable tolerant and free social order that activists of every stripe seek to pull down. They want Utopia. We realize that there will be no heaven on earth and that every attempt to push the human condition beyond what is compatible with an unchanging nature must end in Dystopia instead. And yet the desire to "push it" is also in our nature -- and in the nature of our radical flaw. "Gay marriage" is itself only the latest branch of a utopian outreach that is in theory infinitely extendable. In pure theory we could continue along it to polygamy; and then stretch it to include tame animals and whatever else took someone's fancy. Each would be an act of "progress" towards that indefinitely receding goal of perfect equality and inclusiveness. In practice the catastrophe arrives first. We are thus in the moment dealing with only one limb of the great revolutionary hanging-tree; and it would be positively unfair -- indeed uninclusive -- to give the often beleaguered homosexuals credit for planting the thing. For Canada (as other decadent Western countries) has been on a mission of moral self-destruction for a long time. The changes to our laws on divorce and abortion are now more than a third of a century behind us. That is where the "redefinition of marriage" began. Therefore fight! -- but don't pick on gays. They have only lined up at the same "rights" trough that almost everyone else had found before them. They only want their own small share of the serpent's big apple. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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