In today's National Post, Michael Coren writes that gay marriage is Canada's biggest mistake..The major problem I have with the Michael Coren article is that there is absolutely no evidence to support his claim.
Let's look at what he has written...
As for polygamy, it’s making something of a comeback — and here begin the objections.
Whenever this is mentioned by critics of same-sex marriage we are accused of using the slippery-slope argument. Sorry, some slopes are slippery. Polygamy is an ancient tradition within Islam — and was in Sephardic Judaism and some Asian cultures. When the precedent of gay marriage is combined with the freedom of religion defence, the courts will have a difficult time rejecting it.
Ok, so his first argument is the slipper slope one....
However, there are no court cases, that I know of, that use gay marriage as the precedent to legalize polygamy. Indeed, isn't Canada's lackadaisical approach to polygamy the real problem. Nobody is every prosecuted and the authorities just turn a blind eye to polygamy.....and that's been going on for decades, well before the legalization of gay marriage.
The state, though, should have a duty to judge and to do so based on its own interests. The most significant of which is its continued existence, meaning that we have to produce children. As procreation is the likely, if not essential, result of marriage between a man and a woman, it is in the interests of the state to encourage marriage.
Of course lesbian couples can have an obliging friend assist them in having a baby, and gay men can adopt or have an obliging friend have one for them, but this is hardly the norm and hardly going to guarantee the longevity of a stable society. Just as significant, it smashes the fundamental concept of a child being produced through an act of love. The donation of bodily fluid by an anonymous person, or that obliging friend again, is an act not of love but of lust, indifference, profit or a mere, well, helping hand.
Have gays 'smashed' the concept of a child being produced through an act of love...or have straights already done that through a variety of means??? And, who says that love isn't present??? Is he implying that there can be no love between gay couples???
For the first time not only in Canadian but in world history we are purposefully creating and legitimizing families where there will be either no male or no female role model and parent. Anyone who speaks of uncles, aunts, communities and villages raising children has no real understanding of family life. Single-parent families exist and are sometimes excellent and, obviously, not every mother/father family is a success. But to consciously create unbalanced families where children can never enjoy the profound difference between man and woman, mother and father, is dangerous social engineering.
For the first time? Gee, come on, give me a break. It's the divorce culture of straights, the rise of single mothers, etc. that have done more to delegitimize the family than ANYTHING gays can do or imagine.
I understand Coren's feelings towards kids having gay parents. But, to claim that these children can 'never enjoy the profound difference between man and woman" is just not true. Believe me, these kids (a very small number I should add) will get it.
Nowhere in Coren's article is there anything about the profound love that can exist between gay partners. The plain fact of the matter is that the only people, over the last several yars, that have really fought for marriage has been gay people and their friends.
