DIVORCING MARRIAGE: UNVEILING THE DANGERS IN CANADA’S NEW SOCIAL EXPERIMENT
DANIEL CERE AND DOUGLAS FARROW, ED.
MONTREAL, QC & KINGSTON, ON: MCGILL-QUEENS’S UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004
193 PAGES, PAPERBACK, CDN $24.95
ISBN: 0773528954
REVIEWED BY HAROLD JANTZ
Does it matter that the Supreme Court is being asked to normalize same-sex unions by calling them “marriages”? That is what the Canadian government asked the country’s highest court to do. That came in the wake of a ruling by an Ontario Court of Appeal in 2002—since then followed by rulings in a number of other provinces—that limiting marriage to heterosexual couples violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Many Canadians appear not to be concerned. Indeed the Law Commission of Canada in its Beyond Conjugality report stated that “governments need to pursue a more comprehensive and principled approach to the legal recognition and support of the full range of close personal relationships among adults…Marriage [as traditionally defined] is no longer a sufficient model.”
It was that point of view, arguing from the basis of “close personal relationships,” or, as the Halpern decision in Ontario had it, simply “the union of two persons,” that opened the door to persons of the same sex to be married in this country.
Why be concerned? The momentum toward embracing—indeed celebrating—gay and lesbian partnerships as “marriages” has prompted a dozen academics, journalists and lawmakers to write a troubling and helpful work entitled Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada’s New Social Experiment, edited by two McGill University professors, Daniel Cere and Douglas Farrow.
The editors have brought together an exceptionally strong cast of writers who’ve made it their task to explain clearly and persuasively why—in public policy terms—the drive to treat homosexual partnerships as equal to heterosexual marriages is wrongheaded and damaging to society. Their arguments deserve close attention.
They address a range of issues. How marriage is understood, for example. Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson identify universal, nearly universal and variable features of marriage. The “universal” features are these: cultures and societies lend support to marriages, marriages “recognize the interdependence of men and women,” they define the “public dimensions of the partnership,” they “define eligible partners,” they encourage “procreation under specific conditions” and they provide mutual support between men and women and between parents and children.
In short, marriage everywhere underscores the importance of bonding between persons of the opposite sex, is supported by society around them, involves a commitment to permanence and implies a willingness to have children and to nurture them to maturity. While a marriage may not have children, it inherently symbolizes and institutionalizes that potential. By abandoning such features, courts have embarked on a huge and dangerous social engineering project whose outcome we can only dimly foresee at this moment.
To support its decision, writes Douglas Farrow, the Ontario Court of Appeal in Halpern vs. Canada employed an “incurably subjective” argument based on loss of self-esteem and dignity for same-sex partners. Such an argument makes the one claiming the loss both its subject and measure, something, claims Farrow, that cannot be the “basis for law, but a recipe for social turmoil.”
That’s what we are already seeing, since those—other than the courts—who are supposed to grant such esteem, can’t be compelled to give it.
In a carefully worded way, Divorcing Marriage looks at cultural questions such as how the changing identity of men and women is influencing marriage and what is happening to men’s relationship to both their spouses and children. It asks what a “marriage culture” might be? What does it mean when a society elevates relationships that specifically exclude someone of an opposite sex?
Margaret Somerville, director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and the Law, wonders if we have really understood the adult-driven nature of the equal rights claims of same-sex partners. Does a child have a right, for example, to know its biological parents and be raised by them? Are non-traditional families the norm or the exception?
If marriage no longer symbolizes and institutionalizes the inherently procreative relationship between a man and a woman, are we replacing it with something better? “Law is never neutral,” writes Somerville, “it upholds or challenges our most important societal values.”
In similar ways, issues around the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, social engineering, the reductionism involved in stripping away from marriage long held understandings, various elements of the equal rights debate, ideas about political morality and how belief and public policy interact, are addressed by the book.
The themes might sound intimidating; in fact, the authors of Divorcing Marriage have written a very accessible, temperate, yet greatly troubling book. While the book is not explicitly Christian, a number of the writers are clearly Christian and argue in ways that support Christian understandings.
Anyone concerned about cultural and policy questions that touch deeply on our lives in 21st century Canada ought to read this book. It will help them understand far better what is going on in this great Canadian debate.
Harold Jantz is the founder and former editor of ChristianWeek.
