by David Russell
We shouldn't even be talking about this. There are bigger, more important things to talk about. For starters: the economy, vis-a-vis the increased value of the Canadian dollar; the military and its purpose, budget and capabilities; the simply disgusting volumes of tax dollars fluttered out the federal window through the sponsorship program; the long neglected discussion of what the health care system ought to be. In short, the list of issues needing address is long. Very long.
Same-sex marriage is not on that list.
The list is not a list of what's important. To a same-sex couple, the right to have a legally recognized, state-sanctioned marriage may well be one of the most pressing issues they're currently facing. But as public policy, it ought hardly to register a blip on the radar.
It isn't an important public policy issue because it's moot. That's right, moot. I'm not going to talk about whether or not same-sex marriage is good, moral, ethical or indifferent, except to note, as I have before [http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/cana... ] that despite opponents' claims that allowing same-sex couples to marry will destroy the institution of marriage, my wife and I are still happily hitched more than a year after the first provincial supreme court decision permitted the first Canadian gay couple to wed.
It's moot because we have a legal system that has determined that discrimination based on gender does not fit within our constitutional framework. It just doesn't.
Opponents of same-sex marriage argue there is no specific provision in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. That's true. The Charter does not mention sexual orientation at all.
But what the Charter does clearly define - in pretty much layman's terms, no less - is that discrimination based on gender is illegal [http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/#eg... ] . And that's the problem with a legal definition of marriage at all. Because if society defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, that very clearly prohibits a same-sex couple from entering into a marriage contract strictly on the basis of gender.
It's that cut and dried.
Yet when Parliament resumed sitting today after its two month Christmas break (were it that we could all get that kind of holiday time but that's another column) topping the abysmally short government agenda will be a bill to legally change the federal government's definition of marriage to include same-sex couples as well as heterosexuals.
