Yesterday New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled that gay civil unions (the actual term 'marriage' has not been ruled on) will grant all the rights and benefits of heterosexual civil unions to "committed same-sex couples". See the New York Times for the complete story.
What is particularly amazing about this ruling is that both Democrat and Republican justices voted in favour of granting equal rights to gay couples, and in a nuanced decision demonstrated that sober and just lawmaking has not totally vanished from the legalistic wasteland of the US court system.
Our own legislators on Parliament Hill would do well to study this ruling if only to see what is possible when an honest appraisal is made on a "rights question" and conclusions are drawn in the best possible spirit of the law.
The sad truth, as I think most of us have come to realize, is that detractors of same-sex unions (or "marriage" if the more loaded term is to be dropped into the mix), aren't really exclusively concerned with saving marriage. In fact, between 2002 and 2003 there was a marked reduction in the total number of marriages in Canada and this was before any same-sex couples had rights to the altar ceremony. Only after same-sex marriages started to become legalized in certain provinces did the total number of marriages start to climb again, seeing a 6000 marriage increase between 2003 and 2005. Of course about half of those were same-sex couples, but as in so many other areas (think interior decorating, personal grooming, and luxury coffee sipping), the gays led the way back to the good life and did their part to ensure marriage didn't die off in Canada. We just don't get the credit we deserve sometimes...
No, it's become pretty clear that the ultimate goal of the more radical members of the anti-gay-marriage camp is to eliminate all elements of homosexuality in their narrowly conceived 'ideal' society. The recently leaked "Defense of Religions Act," albeit in partial draft form, attests to this in its alleged defense of individuals who advocate the death of homosexuals on religious grounds. And honestly...that's just not nice.
It's a truism that gay marriage has become the most potent 'wedge issue' to be deployed by what is typically referred to as the 'far right' since abortion became a high-profile question of social morality. I'm not so naive as to believe that all the courts in the world could end the brimstone and hellfire braying of the ideologically blinded elements in our increasingly impoverished political discourse. No, with the old script in hand I can already turn the page and read the next few lines: "the activist judges are at it again, sticking their nose in something that doesn't concern them one bit; the liberal media conspires once again with the fringe left; a perverse and corrupting force will poison the minds of our children; the end of society is upon us; etc."
I wonder who these people, those who fight tooth-and-nail to keep homosexuals and many other minorities outside of their cherished institutions, hope to save and to what end? If children are better raised by parents who participate in the major institutions of society, and individuals only find greater meaning for their lives through a genuine civic franchise as full and unqualified members of society, and if violent acts are most often committed by groups that have been systematically disenfranchised, then why in whatever God's name you believe in would you actively seek to segregate social institutions, create different and unequal categories of citizenship, and violently disenfranchise whole segments of society in the supposed service of the greater good? Whose greater good, if not society's?
We've become very complacent about our own political and social state of affairs after years of mindlessly bashing the big bad Americans and clucking our tongues in the self-congratulatory chorus of "I am Canadian". Well, guess what, next to New Jersey we're starting to look pretty backwater.
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I hardly think we've been "mindlessly" bashing the Americans all these years, and "backwater" is a touch extreme if you're describing all of Canada, but I'd say that we have become dangerously careless about the low level of thought and of discourse that we tolerate in those who operate in "Rinky-dink-on-the-Rideau". Maybe the gays, who have so ably raised the bar in the areas of interior decoration, personal grooming and latte-sipping, could also lead us to new heights of "nuanced" and "sober" political discussion....
Yes, I was getting a tad extreme by the end of this entry, and I admit without hesitation that not all Canadians have been mindlessly American bashing, but the trend has been to do so as a knee-jerk reaction without necessarily taking a look at how we measure up on similar issues. The Liberals under Paul Martin became champions of this type of "it's not us it's them" attitude and made it an overt part of the official federal position on the US in that regime's dying days. Just thinking of his 'tsk, tsk' speech on the environment (essentially a dressing down of the Americans) at the environment summit in Montreal during the last election campaign makes me shudder, especially when Canada's environmental record is, quite remarkably, worse than America's.
And yes, "backwater" is more than "a touch extreme" but it was fun to write.
It's the extremist minority that upsets me, not the majority of decent and fair-minded Canadians. I shouldn't have painted the entire country with any one brush, a very anti-Canadian approach and essentially the very position I mean to counter. Mea culpa! :)
Yup, we are sometimes ignorant, or dishonest, or self-righteous in comparing ourselves to the Americans. We should get over that. As for "the extremist minority", the members of that club will always be with us and, in one sense, that's a good thing. They push us to clarify our thinking, to find the right words to express our thoughts, and to fight passionately for justice.
Well put!
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