Same sex marriages? Why not?
By Herman Goodden -- London Free Press --Jan. 18, 2001
I've received a number of e-mails from readers hoping I will write about same-sex marriage in the wake of last Sunday's legally presumptuous, double wedding ceremony for a gay and lesbian couple at Toronto's Metropolitan Community Church.
Because of my support of London mayor-emeritus Dianne Haskett's refusal of a civic proclamation on behalf of the Homophile Association of London Ontario (HALO), these readers seem to anticipate I will denounce the whole idea of same-sex unions as well.
Well, you'd better sit down, folks.
The Haskett/HALO war was a matter of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. What got up my nose was the proposition that any politically ascendant interest group would try to legally compel any Canadian citizen to parrot a party line that clearly violated that citizen's religious convictions.
This is a different issue and, in principle, I have no problem with same-sex unions. I don't know if it should be called marriage. We'll have to come up terminology other than husbands and wives and those churches with religious objections to homosexuality must not be compelled to sponsor such unions (the Haskett/HALO mistake all over again).
But if two homosexuals wish to publicly pledge their love and commit to one another's life-long support, they deserve that option.
A re-examination of what marriage means in this society is long overdue. That re-examination could begin as early as next week when the province is expected to be legally challenged for refusing to register Sunday's unions as valid marriages.
As things stand our concept of marriage is riddled with inequities and absurdities that need to be straightened out. Once understood as a binding, irreversible covenant ordered to the raising of children a man and a woman solemnly entered into for life, marriage has become something more involuntary, amorphous and incoherent.
You might think we live more freely now that divorce has become routine, but the human wreckage and legal expense of all those shattered unions is appalling.
Every time a couple succumbs to divorce, the seismic rumblings are felt throughout their circle of friends.
Romantic expectations are set ever lower. Today you hear of young couples (and not just the children of divorce with family trees that look like they've been sent through the mill at the Eddy Match company) entering into first marriages in a spirit of: "Well, this is where we want to be right now, I guess, but if it doesn't work out then we might have to rethink the whole thing."
They don't stand a chance. One might as effectively prepare for the high jump by eating three boxes of doughnuts just before the big meet.
Paradoxically, amid all these domestic innovations that have made marriages so much easier to break, one more basic freedom all modern couples have lost, is the freedom to remain unmarried in the first place. This has worked negative wonders in taking what was the high honour and challenge of choosing to marry someone and transforming it into an unavoidable affliction that can't be dodged, like catching a cold that's making the rounds at work.
A couple years' cohabitation is all it takes for the state to declare common-law couples ipso facto married and when such unions start to come apart (even though portents of instability may have prevented the couple from taking the marital plunge in the first place), both participants are now entitled to engage in the same ugly battles of recrimination and gouging as any married couple.
While some can't help but get married (and are then free to marry as many others as they like), other folks can't get married at all.
For homosexuals, there is no provision to formally declare their commitment to one another. If gays actually tend toward commitment-phobic behaviour (as the stereotype asserts), perhaps our legislators should ponder if that might not be partially due to the absence of established conventions allowing them to pledge otherwise.
An across-the-board discussion of what marriage is and should be is long overdue. My thanks to the folks at Metropolitan Community Church for bringing it on. |
