Rights of child in family must be studied

Parliamentary 'mission' needed before vote on same-sex marriage

A Shepherd Speaks

By BISHOP FRED HENRY
Calgary

Like it or not, the marriage issue simply won't go away.

Earlier this month it was announced that in Bhubaneswar, India, a woman who fell in love with a snake has married the reptile at a traditional Hindu wedding celebrated by 2,000 guests.

The bride, Bimbala Das, wore a silk saree for the ceremony. Priests chanted mantras to seal the union, but the cobra failed to come out of a nearby anthill where it lives. A brass replica snake stood in for the hesitant groom.

"Though snakes cannot speak nor understand, we communicate in a peculiar way," Das, 30, said, "Whenever I put milk near the anthill where the cobra lives, it always comes out to drink. . . . I always get to see it every time I go near the anthill. It has never harmed me."

Das has moved into a hut built close to the anthill since the wedding.

"I am happy," said her mother Dyuti Bhoi, who has two other daughters and two sons to marry off.

On a much happier note, a parliamentary report on the family and the rights of the child was tabled Jan. 26 in the National Assembly of France. It begins by asserting that the family is the first locus for the development of social relationships, rearing children and transmitting values.

The Information Mission, which produced the report, was created at the request of the president of the National Assembly, to propose any change to the law and to administrative practices that are necessary to better protect the rights of the child and to reflect changes in the French family.

All views heard

The mission made every effort to hear all views on this subject. It organized 14 round tables and heard 130 people, an expression of the diversity of French society. It travelled to Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada to assess the reforms that have been undertaken in other countries.

The mission began its work by examining the foundations of the family and considering how it has changed and where it now stands, because it wanted to see France as it is and not as it imagines it to be.

This enabled the mission to assess the extent to which families are child-centred at present: given the rising instability of couples' relationships, the child is increasingly seen as underlying the parents' identity and as the foundation of the family unit; children today are wanted, chosen; sometimes, children are even said to be a right.

Given these developments, the mission was persuaded of the need to make the best interests of the child the central factor in family law.

Rights and duties

The mission considered the call for marriage to be available to same-sex couples, and concluded that it is not possible to think about marriage separately from filiation: the two questions are closely connected in that marriage is organized around the child.

Marriage is not merely the contractual recognition of the love between a couple; it is a framework that imposes rights and duties, and that is designed to provide for the care and harmonious development of the child.

Making marriage available to same-sex couples therefore presupposes that they will also be given the right to adopt and receive medical assistance for procreation and even the right to use surrogate mothers, because such couples are not fertile.

Although the mission was divided on this subject. it considered the consequences for the child's development and the construction of his or her identity of creating a fictitious filiation by law - two fathers, or two mothers - which is biologically neither real nor plausible.

A majority of the mission refused to support recognizing a right to a child.

They also accepted the fundamental principles of the law of filiation, which are based on the tripartite unit of "a father, a mother, a child," citing the principle of caution. For that reason, the majority logically chose to deny access to marriage to same-sex couples.

A majority of the mission were also in favour of preserving the rules that apply to child adoption, which provide that this option is available solely to married couples and single individuals. The majority did not go down the road of making adoption available to unmarried couples, because of the lesser permanency of such couples and the fact that there is no judicial involvement in the event of separation.

Adopted children have already suffered the trauma of being abandoned, and, quite often, being uprooted. They must therefore be given the greatest possible protection from the risk that their parents will separate. Marriage therefore offers children better legal security.

Undue haste

In late June of last year, with undue haste and inordinate pressure put on members of Parliament by party leaders, the House of Commons passed Bill C-38, which changed the definition of civil marriage to "the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others," allowing same-sex couples to wed.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he is keeping his campaign promise to hold a free vote in the House of Commons on whether the issue should be revisited. Prior to doing so, to ensure an intelligent and responsible vote, he should create an "Information Mission" to produce a parliamentary report on the family and the rights of the child.

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