Americans have historically been pleased to have Canada as our northern neighbor. The border between the United States and Canada is often described as the world's longest and most peaceful--and visiting Americans find most of Canada pretty much like home, with just enough quaint differences to make a visit interesting.
All that is about to change, and some Americans are about ready to dig a moral moat alongside the border. Our basically peaceful northern neighbor has experienced a huge personality change, and not for the better. Liberal Canada is turning itself into radical Sweden.
On Tuesday, the Canadian House of Commons defeated a motion defining marriage "as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others." The margin of victory was small, but the bill failed just the same, and the media quickly claimed the vote as an endorsement of homosexual marriage. [see Washington Post]
An provincial appeals court in Ontario legalized gay marriage this past summer, ruling that denying homosexual couples the right to marry violated "the dignity of same-sex relationships." Hundreds of homosexual couples quickly took advantage of the ruling, and Prime Minister Jean Chretien chose not to appeal the court's ruling. The bill proposed by the Canadian Alliance party was the only hope of reversing the decision and prohibiting gay marriage. The bill's demise means that homosexual marriage will almost surely be legalized throughout the nation.
Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, Archbishop of Montreal, condemned Parliament's action: "If marriage simply become a union of two persons who love each other, must we then permit marriage between a brother and a sister? Between a father and his daughter? Between a mother and her son?"
Conservative Protestants also sounded the alarm. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada released a statement expressing disappointment in the vote and promising a vigorous debate on the issue in coming months. It may be too late.
Janey Epp Buckingham, the group's director of Law and Public Policy claimed that "millions of Canadians oppose the redefinition of marriage, and president Bruce Clemenger asserted that the marriage issue is really not about rights at all, but about legal definition and public policy. "If marriage is reduced to merely a contract between two people, its distinctiveness will be lost and it will be hard for the government to refuse including other types of relationships."
Tuesday's action in Parliament was bad enough, but the very next day the House of Commons moved to include homosexuals under hate crime provisions. Bill C-250 was sponsored by homosexual MP Svend Robinson, who told the media that his bill would "recognize that just as we say it's wrong to promote hatred or violence directed against racial or religious or ethnic minorities, so too, should we say its just as wrong to promote that hatred or violence directed at gay or lesbian people." [see Toronto Globe and Mail]
Others see the bill very differently--as an attempt to silence Christians by criminalizing anyone who quotes the Bible's passages against homosexuality. Brian Rushfeldt of the Canada Family Action Coalition explains that Canadians opposed to homosexual marriage "are already being accused of 'hate' speech by homosexual activists.... When C-250 is passed into law later this fall, the activists will begin to insist on prosecution to silence their critics with criminal sanctions." The bill now moves to the Senate and must eventually receive royal assent to become law. Both sides now expect the bill to become law by the end of the year.
