Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Out of the caves and into the light

By G.D. Maxwell I give up. Uncle! I just can’t solve the puzzle.

By G.D. Maxwell

I give up. Uncle! I just can’t solve the puzzle. It’s a riddle that’s left my rain-soaked, powder-deprived psyche even more battered and beaten and feeling like I’m living in a bad dream loop, still waiting for a Godot-like winter that never comes, washed away in an endless autumn. But like a stubborn crossword clue, I’m simply going to have to let it go without ever unraveling its mysteries.

The it is exactly how, through what invidious mechanism, recognizing and enshrining in law the inherent right of homosexuals to marry each other is going to threaten the institution of heterosexual marriage. Call me stupid, lord knows it’s been done often enough before. Call me a queer lover; at least that would be a new epithet.

But can someone, anyone – half a brain or better to open – ante up a good explanation for how Parliament is going to diminish the institution of marriage by recognizing something that is already law in virtually all provinces other than Little Texas and is obviously four-square with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?

And please don’t fall back on any specious arguments invoking the will-o-God. If God were so against same-sex marriage, there’d be eleven commandments, not some casual reference to queer bashing in Leviticus. Given God’s specific warning about adultery, just to take one of the more popularly breached commandments, I don’t know how most conservative religious leaders can even make the biblical argument against homosexuals marrying without cringing at the fear a thunderbolt is about to strike them and the better part of their congregations dead.

Let’s face it, heterosexual marriage has done a pretty good job, all by itself, of bringing the institution of marriage into disrepute. I’m not certain how letting loving, committed people into the club is going to undermine it further. They can’t do any worse than heteros have already done at the marriage game and chances are, having struggled to overcome the social barriers hurled at them since they peeped out of their closets, their participation will surely raise the success percentage of a dog-eared institution.

People who have never tried to hit a major league curveball make fun of "sluggers" in baseball because the best of them only manage to hit the ball successfully about one-third of the time. But here you have your bedrock social institution, your basis for civilization limping along with a success rate just barely over half in the USofA and not quite two-thirds in Canada. And they’re afraid letting homosexuals join in the game is going to destroy it?

Why? Where is the threat?

I suspect the discomfort many hetero people feel about this issue has its roots in the whole messy business of who puts what where when homosexual people have sex, that and the hand-in-hand fear that if we finally break down the last social barrier to full and equal rights, straights’ll be getting hit on by queers every time they bend over for a can of beans at the supermarket. Get over it people. For starters, you’re just not attractive enough to get hit on that often.

There isn’t a single argument against allowing same-sex marriage that doesn’t fall apart – logically, legally and even morally – long before it’s played out to its conclusion. As long as the government is in the marriage business, as long as we are notionally a society where every person is afforded equal protection of the law, and as long as we retain the Charter, there is no dodging the ultimate outcome of this bun fight.

The whole question of marriage is just the endgame in a dizzying dance that’s seen homosexuality go from being illegal, aberrant – abhorrent – behaviour just a couple of decades ago to… to what exactly? An alternate lifestyle? Another way of being human?

The fact is, a very large portion of the Canadian populace still see it as aberrant and some slightly smaller proportion still see it as abhorrent. Many of them are not knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, although the march toward equal rights is most definitely a march out of the caves and into the light. Many of them actually believe in equal rights for homosexuals. Many of them would overcome their own fears and prejudices and learn to love their own children and their children’s life partners if they turned out to be homosexual.

But they draw the line at marriage. You can, apparently, go all the way to the alter but just not take that final step, a step too far.

Stephen Hapless draws the line there. Of course, his world is full of imaginary lines that would see the government get out of the box the Supreme Court has put it in without invoking the Notwithstanding clause. He’s the only one who has had this epiphany and he is neither sharing the mechanics of it nor convincing many people he has a clue what he’s talking about. I think it’s a matter of faith; just can’t be sure.

The Archbishop of Toronto, Aloysius Ambrozic – and how can you take anything someone named Aloysius says seriously – at least has the intellectual courtesy to call on the government to invoke the clause and engage the country in yet another endless debate on the subject. I suspect the Archbishop has taken a good look at the demographic numbers on this subject and concluded buying time just might get him to retirement before the wave of echo boomers comes along, assumes the mantle of power, shrugs their collective shoulders and says, "What’s the big deal about gays getting married?" right after they say, "What’s the Catholic church?"

And Ralph Klein, governor of Little Texas, draws the line there. Ralph just might make history and use the Notwithstanding clause on this one, sparing the delicate souls in the oil patch the ignominy of affording human rights to people they know in their heart of hearts don’t deserve them and rocketing the country into a minor constitutional crisis. It would be so, well, so Ralph. Way more raucous than ducking out homeless guys.

It’s ironic that a single issue so neatly encapsulates the whole What It Means To Be Canadian argument while, at the same time, threatening to brush aside one of its basic underpinnings. Canadians have long taken undeserved pride for defining themselves more tolerant, more accepting, more humanistic than their neighbours to the south. And let’s face it, Americans certainly paraded their ugly underbelly in the last election when 11 out of 11 states slammed the door shut on the closet after stuffing homosexuals back inside and some states even went so far as to say heterosexual marriage was the only game in town, denying even unmarried heteros spousal equivalent status.

And true, the same-sex marriage bill will pass in a seriously divided Parliament. But even in open-minded, enlightened, liberal, multicultural Canada, it’s still a very, very close call and a divisive cultural issue.

Makes ya wonder, doesn’t it, just how far we’ve really progressed along this path of enlightenment and whether we’ll ever really leave the cave very far behind?