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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 13, 2005
Breaking upon the law
I still don't apologize for the number of times I have taken up the issue of "same-sex marriage" -- though I know opposition to it among their own class drives media and academic people squirrelly. I even understand why it does: for in today's Canada these are people who overwhelmingly are as libertarian in the "social issues" as they are protectionist in the economic ones. In other words from my own point of view the great majority of our intellectual establishment or "clerisy" (as distinct from the people they believe they are serving) have everything important backwards. They are pluralist in the absolute realm of morals; but absolutist in the plural realm of economic life. Some however are libertarian across the board. I tend to be allied with such people in our detestation of government bureaucracy -- of the instinct to tax spend meddle bribe and tyrannize that emerges in any mainstream party that comes near power. Yet I am not a libertarian at all so far as I am able to search the contents of my intellectual pockets. My political views are those of an old-fashioned liberal informed by Tory and Catholic ideas about the basic human realities. "Libertarian" might be too strong a term for many of these some-time allies. We all shrink from laissez-faire when we see a disaster unfolding. And modern government with its wonderful ability to abet and enlarge the minor disasters of daily life is therefore a wonderful source of arguments against laissez-faire. There is always something almost everyone agrees the government must immediately do in order to fix the disaster from the last time we demanded government action. "Multicultural" is a good-enough term to describe the ideological voyage upon which Canada's self-styled great and good have long since embarked. The definition of it might be: "The use of government tyranny to enforce moral pluralism." The wind of change at any given moment -- feminism through previous decades homosexualism now perhaps Islamism in the near future -- deflect off the same turning sail. Soon I think such winds will prove powerful and various enough to rip the mast right off the deck. In my column last week I predicted two things: the series of disasters that will follow from trying to write equality between "gay" and "straight" marriages into all our country's statutes; and that I would be called "alarmist" for enumerating them. As my editor safely predicted I would prove right in this latter prediction. He strongly urged me to tone it down a bit lest even my dwindling band of supporters take flight. But you know me: Heart on sleeve colours on mast. It was the last of my practical predictions that went furthest over the top with my correspondents. I pointed to the imagined need to remove the distinction between "natural" and "legal" parenthood since this has already been identified as unfair to those who can't have "natural" children. I said this must also remove the legal grounds on which a young man may be sued for the support of the child with which he has got a young woman. It shouldn't have surprised anyone. A mind calm and crisply logical will quickly see how the one thing leads irresistibly to the other. The whole distinction between "natural" and "legal" was -- like the implicit distinction between "natural" and "legal" marriage itself -- absolutely necessary to the predictable functioning of all our laws. The distinction had already been seriously undermined by the legalization and then proliferation of contraception and abortions and "no-fault" divorce. What we 're getting now is not a fresh challenge to the concept that anything can be true in nature. It is instead the delivery of the coup de grace to that idea upon which our whole legal system was built. I don't want to leave the impression that "same-sex marriage" and the things that must be changed to accommodate it are the end of the world. It is not in man's power to end the world; that is only in God's power. The best we can do in that direction and on our own initiative is to make our lives ugly and miserable. We have forgotten that human law is a tissue when it is not founded in the moral law written into nature by nature's God. When the two laws come into conflict it is the former which disintegrates. In the wise old Scottish legal maxim People do not break the law. They break themselves upon the law. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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