| The Ontario Court of Appeal landed in the world’s newspapers last week for taking gay marriage one step closer to its inevitable place in Canadian society. Shame on any Canadian who thinks there were more important recent events. A government giving legal status to gay marriage is an earth-shattering matter that will cause moral decay and expose the contradictions of how conservatives discriminate between our economic and social freedoms.
Decriminalized pot, cheap wood and now gay marriages – if it was not for Cuba’s communist tendencies, the U.S. would have more in common with that country than Canada. Not only will every Canadian turn into a potential drug smuggler, but the Bush administration’s moral clarity will be muddied by hundreds of gay couples returning from Ontario as legally married partners. On the lighter side, a gay marriage industry could relieve some of Ontario’s SARS-related economic hurt.
Economic potential aside, if Canada amends its marriage laws, it would be in the unusual situation of taking the lead in recognizing social change. We would be one of three countries where gay marriages are recognized – Belgium and the Netherlands are the other two.
The social change comes from how Canadians’ views on gay relationships are changing in the same way our views on working mothers changed in the ’70s. The public acceptance of gay relationships will increase the federal government’s resolve to fiddle with the institution of marriage. Canada’s conservative leaders will mourn the destruction of the venerable institution and point to the moral ruin that comes about when people are given too much freedom. Yet the liberal economics supported by many conservatives place more strain on Canada’s social fabric than even high-profile changes to our marriage laws.
Christians of various sects will lead the charge against gay marriage because Christianity remains the dominant religion in Canada. Yet the church’s role in marriage is barely 500 years old. Marriage, and the homophobia that drives conservatives to resist gay marriage, predates religious control over the ritual by thousands of years.
Since the 12th century, when the Catholic Church realized the revenue and social control potential of dictating the rules of marriage, marriage and Christianity have been linked. In 1563, the Catholic Church’s law-setting Council of Trent wrote the link into canon law and established the now traditional form of marriage – in a church, presided over by a priest and in front of two witnesses.
Today, the legal concept of marriage lies in the hands of a secular government, and marriage in 21st century Canada, for better or for worse, will return to being a simple legal contract meant to create certainty in a relationship. The contract will continue to be celebrated with a ceremony that reflects the importance of marriage to social stability and helps the people who must uphold the marriage relationship.
The concept of marriage placed before the Ontario courts was, as it was in ancient Rome, a legal concept designed to protect the interest of the two parties to the contract. The courts, and the Canadian government, are secular institutions and must treat marriage in this dry, legal sense. Religions and their adherents in Canada are free to establish all the rites and rules of marriage they want – hopefully without interference from government.
The conservative reaction is predictable – a henny-penny, sky-is-falling cry rising from the conservative faithful. Like the decriminalization of pot, gay marriage exposes the conservatives’ desire for social control through government regulation and how that desire conflicts with their liberal economic views and hands-off approach to economic policy.
To avoid the most obvious contradictions between economic freedom and social control, conservatives divide each person into an economic actor and a social actor. Economically, we need to be as free as possible from government regulations to pursue economic opportunity. In conservative minds, not only would a free economic actor use resources more efficiently, but the freedom would also create jobs, provide for everyone’s needs and foster some kind of undefined greater good.
While conservatives can somehow trust our economic side to act in the best interests of the economy and society, they cannot trust our social side with similar freedoms. Social control in certain areas is a conservative imperative because we all know that certain personal freedoms only lead to chaos.
This convenient division of the imaginary person certainly helps conservatives ignore the contradictions in their policies. For example, decriminalizing pot is bad, but so is trying to regulate the tobacco and alcohol industries to death. In the hodge-podge of conservative ideology, however, the contradictions are everywhere. Violence against property of any kind, even graffiti, must be punished – this is law and order. Certain violence against people, such as spanking children, must be permitted – this is liberty.
Liberty does not extend to homosexual couples. Logic and order go out the window when entrenched fears are threatened. Unfortunately for conservatives, in the minds of many Canadians the conservative claim to be the political voice of reason goes out the window with it. |
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