The Ties That Bend
Divorcing Marriage edited by Daniel Cere and Douglas Farrow
Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada’s New Social
Experiment
McGill-Queen’s Press, 2004
(208 pages; $19.50 [US], paperback)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
Canada has been in legal, political, and religious turmoil since June 10, 2003, when, in Halpern v. Ontario, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that no definition of marriage would henceforth be acceptable unless it provided recognition to same-sex couples that is “full and equal to that enjoyed by opposite sex couples.” Copycat decisions soon followed in Quebec, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. Canada’s supine Liberal government immediately agreed without appeal.
No matter that the Parliament of Canada had endorsed the traditional definition of marriage by a margin of four to one (216 to 55) only five years earlier. Within days of the Halpern decision, the Liberal government abolished a Parliamentary committee exploring the issue of same-sex marriage, announced that it would draft legislation to change the definition, and went cap-in-hand to the Supreme Court with a set of reference questions to help it avoid the Court’s wrath in any new definition it might formulate.
All these details of Canada’s rapid decline into same-sex delirium and Supreme Court tyranny are provided by Daniel Cere, director of Montreal’s Institute for the Study of Marriage, Law and Culture, in the opening pages of Divorcing Marriage. He and Douglas Farrow, Associate Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University, have collected eleven well-written and timely essays by Canadian academics, writers, and politicians who find themselves at the center of the same-sex controversy. Together, they provide a history, an overview, and an evaluation of our present crisis, as well as judicious pointers to where it will lead.
This collection is divided into four sections. The first discusses the conflict over same-sex marriage; the second, the casualties that would result from embracing it, particularly the negative impact it would have on children; the third, the excuses for such legislation advanced by the homosexual lobby; and the last, the alternatives the authors think ought to be considered.
The contributors are senior academics and public figures of a generally conservative outlook, including Calgary political scientist Ted Morton; Darrel Reid, the president of Focus on the Family (Canada); and Margaret Somerville, Samuel Gale Professor of Law at McGill University.
Canadian Lemmings
Topical books like this one may have intense lives, but they are almost always brief ones. Divorcing Marriage therefore must be read at once if it is to do any good. And it deserves close reading. Its diagnosis needs to be widely understood if any of us on either side of the border are to have a chance of avoiding its grim prognosis.
Americans who wish to play devil’s advocate might hope that few -Canadians will read this book. After all, they might say, it is not so bad to have on our border a nation of lemmings who volunteer to plunge over any social precipice the chattering classes say is fashionable. A quick and decisive failure of same-sex marriage in Canada might do more to moderate opinion in the United States than many volumes of well-argued articles.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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more on marriage from the online archives
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Marriage Thrives in Reality, Not in Our Dreams by Nathan Schlueter
29.1—Jan/Feb 2016
on Marriage, Moral Corruption & the Christian Duty of Witness by Regis Nicoll
28.1—January/February 2015
on State Impositions & Church Acquiescence by Stephen Baskerville
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