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Down in the Canyon

Writing in The Western Standard, Father Raymond DeSouza tries to find something positive in "the bottom of the canyon":
Recognizing homosexual unions as marriages means, in principle, that marriage has nothing to do with the natural order of sexual differentiation and the procreation of children. That’s not a slippery slope. That’s the bottom of the canyon. Here [however] is promising ground for family policy reform. Now that there are no “barriers” to marriage for anyone, why not advance an agenda that seeks to strengthen marriage across the board? The best place to start will be to remove the equivalent-to-marriage treatment given now to common-law couples, whether opposite-sex or same-sex. The rise of common-law unions as equivalent to marriage has greatly weakened the incentive to marry and make permanent commitments. Now that we are all agreed that marriage is a good thing--so good that even homosexuals must have it--why not move ahead to restrict the benefits of marriage to, say, married couples alone?
I am not so optimistic. I think that if you try and impose strict monogamy on gay couples, they will cry, again, 'discrimination.' They will claim that they are living a 'different but equal' sort of marriage and imposing hetero values on it is a form of bigotry. And we, in our pistol whipped fashion, will once again grab the horsehair shirt and ask them how long we must wear it for, never once cluing in that the word is out. To get anything at all in the new Canada, all one has to do is cry a lot and chant, discrimination, discrimination, discrimination... It is the equivalent of a nuclear strike in Canadian politics, the attack from which there is no comeback. And here is why- we no longer believe that politics is about making real decisions; weighing and balancing competing and conflicting claims of rightness and authority, making a thought out decision and standing by it. We are ruled by adolescent sycophants because we as voters can't rise beyond a child's notion of fairness. And why is that? Again I blame the electorate - we don't think things through and as a result our voting is all about appearances in the here and now. De Souza's canyon metaphor is apt - the lower you go the harder it is to see ahead, or behind.

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