BAD WEEK

BAD WEEK FOR THE CAUSE
Things just went 'wronger and wronger' for proponents of gay marriage
Ted Byfield
Calgary Sun
Sunday, January 23, 2005

The Liberal government's campaign to impose gay marriage on the country, a campaign whose success has been portrayed in the national (meaning Toronto) media as a foregone conclusion, appeared last week to be something less than foregone after all.

From the point of view of the imposers, things started to go wrong early in the week, and went, so to speak, wronger and wronger as the week went on.

First came the declaration of Calgary's irascible Catholic bishop, Fred Henry, who blatantly proposed in a letter to his flock that "the State must use its coercive power to proscribe or curtail" homosexuality, adultery, prostitution and pornography "in the interests of the common good.''

The bishop's letter did not sit well with the Globe and Mail, which went about organizing an appropriately horrified response by interviewing those who could be depended upon to be duly horrified. The results were disappointing. The Anglican bishop of Calgary would go no further than to question Henry's terminology, and spokespersons for the United Church could not be induced to say anything at all.

This confined the horror to Catholic liberals and to the Globe editorial writers.

A spokesman for Catholic gays gratifyingly expressed himself as "horrified" by the bishop's letter, but then so what?

The liberal element in the Catholic church lost all credibility five or so years ago when, to the fanfare of page 1 coverage in the Globe, it launched a Canada-wide petition to revise the church's teaching on such things as gay rights.

The response to the petition was so feeble, it was quietly abandoned, a fact the Globe neglected to report.

This left it up to the Globe editorial writer, who allowed that while the bishop's right to inform Catholics of his church's view on gay marriage was "one thing," his right to advocate changes in the law was "quite another."

The distinction escaped me, principally because the writer didn't explain it.

He couldn't.

The Globe favours what it calls "pluralism."

By this it means that any view rooted in religion should be allowed no right of expression whatever in the formation of public policy, a position that would effectively disenfranchise those 80% of Canadians whose moral views are religiously rooted.

Since the Globe could hardly say that, it had to confine itself to depicting Bishop Henry as a dinosaurian maverick with "odious" views, far from typical of most Catholics.

That line fell to pieces the next day when none other than Cardinal Archbishop Aloysius Ambrozic came forth with a public proposal that Prime Minister Paul Martin shelve the whole issue for five years by invoking the notwithstanding clause on gay marriage.

At the same time, Martin, schmoozing his way through India, found himself castigated by the Sikhs there for even considering gay marriage here.

All these developments were bad news.

Although metro Toronto is the Liberal heartland, it teems with Sikhs plus Filipino, Vietnamese, African and Latin American Catholics, most of them very devout Christians.

Was it possible an unexpected groundswell was developing against the government's whole plan, the same switch in ethnic voters so pivotal in the re-election of George W. Bush?

None of this will be lost on Liberal policy-makers.

Then came even worse news.

The government was disclosed to be discreetly examining the implications of gay-marriage to Canadian marital law in general.

The conclusion: Recognizing gay marriage would certainly open the door to polygamy. After all, if marriage is a matter of human rights, how can the law disqualify Muslims whose Koran authorizes a man to have four wives, or Mormons who at one time widely observed the multiple-wife tradition until the law prohibited it?

Now what would the Globe say about that? It found the usual solution, and (as this was written) refused to even report on the polygamy study.

What worried the gay-marriage devotees most, however, was this: Why were the Liberals conducting such a study?

Could it be they were preparing an escape clause, something they could point to as justification for withdrawing the bill?

Surely not. Whatever it meant, last week went very badly for the gay marriage cause.

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