Gay Marriage: Too important for the people to Decide

ersonally, I am largely indifferent
Pp to the issue of gay marriage. I can

understand the need for same-sex
couples to get equal rights in the 21st cen-
tury, but I can similarly understand
concerns regarding the long-term cultural
ramifications that could result from need-
less tampering with such a historic human
institution as marriage.

Regardless, the issue is already being
debated in Parliament, and sides have
already been drawn. The Liberals are gen-
erally in favour of legalizing gay marriage,
while the Conservatives are leading the
fight to oppose such a move. Or are they?
Until recently, it was fairly safe to assume
that the Conservative party would be on
the front lines of defending the tradition-
al definition of marriage. After all, this
was, by definition, the “conservative”
party, the party that was supposed to
defend traditional values, including the
views of Canadians of faith, who still, lest
we forget, compose the majority of this
nation.

However, last week the big headlines
claimed a recent survey found only a mea-

gre 27 percent of Conservative party
Caacons big “urban ridings” approved
Q eptien Harper’s vocal cross-country

campaign to protect the traditional defini-
tion of marriage. By focusing on the
marriage issue, Harper was putting him-
self in a position where he was in danger
of losing votes and, most of all, credibili-
ty as a future prime minister. Seeking to
avoid further controversy on the issue, the
Conservative leader has recently stated he
is going to personally pre-approve all of
his MPs’ parliamentary speeches on the
marriage debate. Presumably, his intent is
to censor anyone wanting to say things
that are too “radical,” and thus potentially
upsetting to the party elders.

With all these condemnations coming
from the elites of his own party, you’d
think Harper was taking some sort of
bizarre draconian stance that no sane
human could ever support. This is cer-
tainly the perspective of the majority of
pundits in the mainstream Canadian
media, who repeatedly condemn Harper
for holding a view on same-sex marriage
that they consider “divisive,” “repelling,”
or otherwise a deterrent to the views of
most Canadians. It is difficult to deter-
mine exactly what is the source of all this
conventional wisdom on gay marriage.
Looking at actual data on the topic, the
exact opposite of the elite opinion seems
to be true. All reasonable polling suggests
that the majority of Canadians actually
support Harper’s view on gay marriage. A

recent National Post poll even put

FEBRUARY 23/2005

Canadian opposition to gay marriage at 67
percent, hardly making Harper’s views the
extreme fringe.

Harper is essentially being asked to
downplay (if not outright abandon and
apologize for even contemplating in the
first place) a policy stance that the major-
ity of the country supports. The entire
debate over this issue just highlights the
strong division between elite opinion and
popular opinion in this country, with the
latter consisting of what we are “sup-
posed” to think and the former being
what we really do. Today, the press, pun-
dits, and political establishments of
Canada feel they are more qualified to
speak on behalf of the collective will of
the nation than the actual citizenry of the
nation itself.

This is hardly a new phenomenon,
though. There are numerous issues that
no politician in this country—even
Conservative ones—will touch on the
basis that elite opinion has deemed it “un-
Canadian” to do so. Capital punishment,
for example, enjoys widespread support

among the Canadian public, yet the idea
that having no death penalty is somehow
a fundamentally “Canadian” belief con-
tinues to enjoy a prominent place among
the conventional wisdom held by this
country’s political elites.

It is this kind of thinking that has
directly led to one of the most nonsensi-
cal myths of modern Canadian
politics—namely that only “Red Tories”
can ever get elected in Canada. Once
again, there is very little hard evidence to
suggest that this premise is based on any
sort of actual logic. Brian Mulroney may
have been a lot of things, but a Red Tory
he was definitely not. John Diefenkbaker
despised the term. Canada’s recent leading
“Red Tories” such as Joe Clark, Kim
Campbell, and John Stanfield are only his-
torically notable for being some of this
country’s greatest electoral failures. Yet
the myth persists that if only those dang
redneck Conservatives could just learn to
“moderate” their positions, they'd some-
how be cartwheeled to power the very
next day.

 

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By contrast, whenever anyone dares
suggest that voting patterns in this coun-
try may be determined more by regional
than ideological identity, such arguments
are dismissed as unwarranted pessimism.
Rather than accept the reality that the
dominance of the Liberal party is largely
due to their unapologetic position as an
Ontario-Quebec interest party (with the
latter status now being obtained through
outright bribery), the intellectual elites of
this country continue to peddle the alter-
nate reality that Liberal electoral successes
can be interpreted as “proof” of a nearly
homogenous liberal Canadian populace.
If national polling on individual issues
seems to suggest otherwise (and it often
does), then such deviations can easily be
dismissed as a sign that Canadians are not
acting Canadian enough, and that they
need to be re-educated on the matter.
When you're living in a country where
every single province could easily pass a
referendum outlawing same-sex marriage
and yet it is the proponents of gay marriage
who are considered the “mainstream,”
you know we’ve crossed the line into a
crazy Orwellian doublespeak world.

As previously mentioned, I personally
believe there are much bigger political fish
to fry than gay marriage, and haggling
over the issue ad nauseum does little more
than distract from some of Canada’s more
pressing concerns—which are numerous.
That being said, it is not a good sign for
our democracy when a small gang of
elites in the upper echelons of the media,
academia, and political party hierarchies
can essentially dictate to the rest of the
country what issues they are “allowed” to
discuss and which ones they should just
shut up and accept. Debate is the
lifeblood of political discourse in a free
country, and if we’re not allowed to open-
ly question the wisdom of altering a
centuries-old human institution, then
what can we debate?

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