Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Same-sex issue will rise again

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is glad that the debate over same-sex marriage is over. Canada's three opposition party leaders are glad too - they believe that there is a right to homosexual marriage, a right that politicians should not mess with.

This "right" was discovered, in their view, by the wise and perceptive Supreme Court of Canada, a body that in its keen understanding of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had managed to detect a human right hidden between the lines, a right that had hitherto gone undetected by dull humanity for millennia.

In fact, the opposition leaders have been mesmerized by an ideology that Pope John Paul II called "a thinly veiled totalitarianism" that will raise its ugly head again and again in the years to come. Harper, meanwhile, is playing both sides of the street - trying to appease the social conservatives whose support he needs and trying to convince all the others that he is not really a social conservative.

But now the divisive same-sex marriage has been finally dealt with and the country can return to somnolescent peace and content. Except . . .

Except that a basic tenet of the nature of human society has been breached and, through that breach, foul poison will spread through the country, perhaps slowly at first but eventually with serious consequences for the social and spiritual health of the nation.

What will come first? Will it be marriage commissioners fired for failing to do their "duty" to marry same-sex couples? Will it be a teacher hounded by his peers for refusing to teach a curriculum that propounds the new gospel of "equal marriage"? Or will it be a bishop dragged before a human rights tribunal for supposedly spreading hatred towards homosexuals?

Sometime - probably sooner rather than later - there will come the attempt to include polygamy under the rubric of equal marriage. Will the debate then be as truncated on the exploitation of women under polygamy as it has been on the marginal role of children in same-sex marriage?

Decades down the road, what will the effect be on society of children raised in families where the binding force is not the desire to create a lasting community but rather the fulfillment of the sexual desire of consenting adults? More broadly, what will be the effect on society of whole generations nurtured on the pap that there are no moral rules except the moral rule to be tolerant of every abomination?

There is hope, however. The hope is the same one that is still percolating on abortion. It is that decades after an abomination has been signed into law and the chattering classes have accepted it as a human right, there will still be people with the courage to say "no."

Despite all the propaganda, a minority will continue to speak out and to pray to Almighty God for a change in direction. They will speak out because the propaganda has not dulled their moral sense and they will endure whatever social stigma that comes their way in order to witness to the truth. It is such minorities that have always been the hope of humanity.

Alongside that minority will exist the quiet majority who tolerate the violation of human dignity, but have never made their peace with it. We see that phenomena in the October Environics poll that found two-thirds of Canadians still believe there should be legal protection for the unborn at some point before birth.

Eventually, some event or state of affairs will mobilize this 70 per cent to rise up against the travesty. The veil of silence will be drawn back and the long winter will begin to melt.

No, the issue of same-sex marriage has not been finally dispensed with by a tidy vote in the House of Commons. The issue will remain in the hearts of the people of Canada. And if they are tired of the debate today, the day will come when they see the damage that has been done and demand that justice and human dignity once again rule.

- Glen Argan

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