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 | | From: | sordo ™ | | Subject: | Bad week for Canadian Sodomites | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 15:26:55 GMT |
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 | Sun, January 23, 2005
Bad week for the cause
Things just went 'wronger and wronger' for proponents of marriage
By Ted Byfield -- Calgary Sun
The Liberal government's campaign to impose 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"
homouality, adultery, prostitution and graphy "in the
interests of the common good.''
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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 s 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 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
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 marriage.
At the same time, Martin, schmoozing his way through India, found
himself castigated by the Sikhs there for even considering
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 -marriage to Canadian marital law in general.
The conclusion: Recognizing 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 -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
marriage cause.
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