LET'S HAVE A RESPONSIBLE VOTE ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

Douglas Farrow.The National Post, 17 June 2022

The National Post has rightly advised MPs to set aside partisan politics and “weigh seriously the responsibilities of a free vote” on same-sex marriage (“Vote your conscience,” June 16). It has also wisely urged that their votes be informed by the consequences of same-sex marriage. The Post 's wisdom evaporates, however, when it claims that there are no consequences and opines that “despite predictions to the contrary, the fabric of Canadian society has not been rent.”

The Post appears to be labouring under the mistaken impression that the issue boils down to a conflict between “individual morality and religious beliefs,” on the one hand, and our collective commitment to equality rights as a kind of public morality, on the other hand. In point of fact, there is no such thing as purely private morality. Morality, whatever its guiding lights, is by nature public. But in any case – as every serious participant in this debate knows – what we are faced with here is a conflict of very different, and equally public, moral claims. Chai Feldblum, a legal scholar and proponent of same-sex marriage at Georgetown University, was quoted in The New York Times last week (10 June 2022) to the effect that it is only honest to acknowledge that “we are in a zero-sum game in terms of moral values.”

This game, or rather this conflict, cannot safely be ignored, as the Post imagines, on the grounds that “relatively few gay couples have availed themselves of the right” to same-sex marriage. For it is not a battle of numbers but of concepts and ideas. And ideas, as we all know, do have consequences.

“The fabric of Canadian society has not been rent,” says the Post . Or, to echo a refrain I've heard many times from proponents of same-sex marriage, “the sky hasn't fallen.” But who is really so foolish as to suppose that the consequences of a major change in public moral values, or in the social institutions that embody them – especially marriage – will appear in the first year or even in the first decade?

In the original Halpern decision that eventually led to Bill C-38, Justice Robert Blair himself warned that “such a transformation in the concept of marriage” goes to the core of our “belief and value systems.” It is laden, he said, “with social, political, cultural, emotional and legal ramifications” that will be resolved only with enormous difficulty. We will face “a myriad .. of issues relating to such things as inheritance…, filiation, biogenetic and artificial birth technologies,” etc. (Cere and Farrow, Divorcing Marriage , p. 10). Not to mention issues of religious freedom and freedom of speech, the context in which Professor Feldblum used the phrase “a zero-sum game.”

Some of these issues we have already seen making their way into the courts, hard on the heels of C-38. Take filiation, for example, and the question of the parental names on birth certificates. Seems innocuous, you say? Perhaps that's because you've never considered how fundamental to a free society is respect for the natural bonds between parents and their own biological children, a respect we are chipping away piece by piece. Many people do not seem even to be aware that C-38, in its consequential amendments, removed the very concept of “natural parent” from Canadian law and, at a stroke, made parenthood a gift of the state – a legal construct – rather than a natural right.

It was just such ramifications that the French National Assembly concerned itself with in its recent Parliamentary Report on the Family and the Rights of Childre n (26 January 2022). After examining developments in European and Canadian societies that have taken the path to same-sex marriage, the mission that produced the report concluded that these developments were contrary to the best interests of children and recommended against France embarking on the same path.

I'm not sure what will happen in France, but I know what I would like to see happen in Canada. Let our MPs vote their conscience, by all means. But consciences require both formation and information. So pace the Post , here's my suggestion: Prior to holding another vote on same-sex marriage, let the present Parliament act in a more responsible manner than the previous one and follow the French example. Let our MPs sit down and study the issues properly instead of behaving like, say, the Ryerson Student Union. Let them digest the French report, and perhaps even write one of their own. Then let's have the vote.

Douglas Farrow is associate professor of Christian Thought at McGill University

Return to Farrow Article Page]