Hon. Bill Graham,
Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre/Rosedale
Minister of Foreign Affairs
C/o Constituency Office, 365 Bloor Street East,
Unit 1703,
Toronto, ON M4W 3L4
Dear Mr. Graham,
My thoughts are with you as you and other members of the Liberal Party of Canada join in a working retreat to consider policy and strategy for the coming months.
It is particularly satisfying to think of what you personally will be able to contribute during this week of discussion, having recently listened to thousands of Canadians express their concerns for the future of our foreign policy.
Canada�s principled refusal to accept the Bush administration�s promotion of "preventive war" on Iraq has rekindled hope that Canada�s policy positions can still be both sovereign and conscientious. I hope the Liberal party as a whole feels a strengthened commitment to the values that make Canada�s sovereignty (exercised within a framework of multilateralism) a morally serious recognition of responsibilities as well as a legal right.
It is not a question of foreign policy that urges me to write to you as this week begins, however. It is the question of the redefinition of marriage that concerns me now.
This question is not merely an abstract one for me. I live with a friend of the same gender. That friend, for admirably generous reasons, adopted an infant who is now a seven-year-old boy. We share a household (a co-op apartment) with its work and expenses. Although only my friend is the boy�s legal parent, I also, as his "honourary grandmother", share in caring for him. My income supported the household until I retired as I neared the magic age of 65. Since my retirement, all three of us need Canada�s precious heritage of social programs so that there can be enough income and services (like medicare, God bless it!) for my friend to continue to meet her son�s needs. For all these reasons, I am personally aware of the importance of legal and social support for real but non-traditional expressions of parent-like responsibilities.
But my friend and I have no need to claim that we are "married". First of all, it would not be a true description of our friendship. More important for the present debate about public policy: we receive, without claiming that title, adequate social and legal support for the momentous task of nurturing a child.
Marriage is a very specific term with a very, very long and global history. Every human society has taken marriage very seriously, and has regulated it with deep and (usually) religious concern. Why? Because marriage is the unique state of intimacy between a man and a woman which makes it likely that the man and woman will "graduate" from intimacy into shared, willing parenthood. It is precisely that likelihood that makes marriage uniquely important. It is not merely the mutual support or even the mutual fidelity of the partners to each other that makes marriage so important to society as a whole. It is, precisely, the likelihood of parenthood, shared both biologically and culturally. After all, stability, responsibility, and delight in the long difficult labour of parenting is at the living core of every society�s ability to survive humanely. Children who have received love and nurture and identity and a nuanced cultural heritage are the unique, irreplaceable hope for the human future.
I know�because I live in such a situation�that there are times when it is best for everyone that a particular child be raised, not by his or her birth parents but by some other combination of loving adults. And I know�because we too need such help�that it is crucial for organized society, by means of law, social programs, and respectful protection to stand by the adults who are actually raising a child, whether or not they are the child�s biological parents. I am certainly not against the legal adoption (with all the checks and safeguards that attend any adoption) of a child by persons who are fit for such a responsibility, whether or not they are a married and heterosexual couple. I also recognize that committed domestic life-partners, whether homosexual, heterosexual or celibate, need to be protected (and challenged) by laws and customs that are accepted by everyone.
But all of that does NOT mean that Canada should suddenly move to change the ancient, global meaning of marriage by declaring gender irrelevant to marriage.
The usual, spontaneous, unassisted fertility of a woman and man who are in the state of socially approved intimacy that has always been called "marriage" is no mere irrelevancy. It is a tremendously important "natural resource," as important as the fertility of the soil and of the seas and rivers. Human fertility is a wild and wonderful cosmic power, as "green" and as central to the human future as the oxygen breathed out by trees, or as earth-filtered clean water. Marriage unites precisely that wild and natural biological marvel with committed interpersonal love and with public, life-long social responsibility. By common and ancient consent, marriage retains its deep cultural and spiritual significance also in those cases where there turns out not to be the biological fertility which is the ordinary expectation for a woman-man union.
Surely such an integrating and consequential institution deserves to keep for itself its unique name! Doesn�t it seem like hubris on the part of our generation to declare such a natural /social, anciently-recognized, man/woman uniqueness to be "unconstitutional"?
Other partnerships�same-sex ones, for example�might be mutually joyful, might be socially positive, might sometimes effectively carry the onerous responsibilities of parenthood. As such, they deserve legal support and protection (as "civil unions", for example). But that doesn�t make them the same thing as traditional, heterosexual marriage. And they don�t need the same ancient name that marriage bears.
It seems to me that this issue is about the importance of a critical mass of common intergenerational meaning�meaning that is grounded and rooted in long human experience�even for a society in flux, as ours is.
Multiculturalism and secularism have been in many ways enriching and liberating for the human society that is Canada. We need those two developments. But human societies need something besides diversity, something more alive than neutrality. They need some evocative, influential pools of shared meaning. Especially when life is difficult, people need to be sustained by shared meaning.
If, for example, there were no inherited agreement that public service�in the army, in the police force and fire service, and in doctoring and nursing�sometimes has the right to ask the public servant to risk her or his very life and health for the good of others, we would not have seen the selfless behaviour of doctors and nurses and paramedics here during the SARS crisis. We would not even have seen the uncomplaining exhaustion of firefighters during the very recent hydro blackout in Ontario, let alone the heroic saga of firefighters in New York on that infamous September 11. Deeply shared meaning can evoke heroism from quite ordinary humans. But meaning like that takes generations and generations to gain its true gravitas. We receive its depths and steadiness as a gift from many ancestors, not as a piece of social engineering done in less that one lifetime�s span.
Marriage is even more important than the fire department. Parenting can be as tough as any peacekeeping assignment. Let us treat the inherited, shared meaning of marriage with profound (if not uncritical) public respect. Let us not risk weakening its life-shaping meaning by officially depriving it of one of its unique dimensions: the gendered dimension of the man-woman union with its substratum of likely biological parenthood.
I could say much more, but this is already long for a letter to one�s MP�especially an MP who is also a hyper-busy Cabinet minister. Though I am a religious believer, I have not spoken of the religious "stake" in traditional marriage, or of the ways I believe it to be ordained by the Creator of all. I am aware that in the public mood of the present moment, theological language can alienate many who participate in this debate about the public meaning of the word "marriage".
Thank you for your time in reading what I, and countless other people, so deeply believe to be a matter of the common good.
Yours sincerely,
Janet Somerville
At 03:08 PM 14/12/03 -0500, you wrote:
How legalizing gay marriage undermines society's morals
By Alan Charles Raul
from the December 09, 2003 edition �
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1209/p11s02-coop.html
WASHINGTON - The promotion of gay marriage is not the most devastating aspect of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's recent decision. The more destructive impact of the decision for society is the court's insidious denial of morality itself as a rational basis for legislation.
This observation is not hyperbole or a mere rhetorical characterization of the Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health decision. The Massachusetts justices actually quoted two opinions of the US Supreme Court (the recent anti-anti-sodomy ruling in Lawrence vs. Texas and an older anti-antiabortion ruling, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey) to support the proposition that the legislature may not "mandate (a) moral code" for society at large. The courts, it would seem, have read a fundamental political choice into the Constitution that is not apparent from the face of the document itself - that is, that individual desires must necessarily trump community interests whenever important issues are at stake.
These judicial pronouncements, therefore, constitute an appalling abnegation of popular sovereignty. In a republican form of government, which the Constitution guarantees for the United States, elected officials are meant to set social policy for the country. They do so by embodying their view of America's moral choices in law. (This is a particularly crucial manner for propagating morality in our republic because the Constitution rightly forbids the establishment of religion, the other major social vehicle for advancing morality across society.) In reality, legislatures discharge their moral mandates all the time, and not just in controversial areas such as abortion, gay rights, pornography, and the like.
Animal rights, protection of endangered species, many zoning laws, and a great deal of environmental protection - especially wilderness conservation - are based on moral imperatives (as well as related aesthetic preferences). Though utilitarian arguments can be offered to salvage these kinds of laws, those arguments in truth amount to mere rationalizations. The fact is that a majority of society wants its elected representatives to preserve, protect, and promote these values independent of traditional cost-benefit, "what have you done for me lately" kind of analysis. Indeed, some of these choices can and do infringe individual liberty considerably: For example, protecting spotted owl habitat over jobs puts a lot of loggers out of work and their families in extremis. Likewise, zoning restrictions can deprive individuals of their ability to use their property and live their lives as they might otherwise prefer. Frequently, the socially constrained individuals will sue the state, claiming that such legal restrictions "take" property or deprive them of "liberty" in violation of the Fifth Amendment, or constitute arbitrary and capricious governmental action. And while such plaintiffs sometimes do - and should - prevail in advancing their individual interests over those of the broader community, no one contends that the government does not have the legitimate power to promote the general welfare as popularly defined (subject, of course, to the specific constitutional rights of individuals and due regard for the protection of discrete and insular minorities bereft of meaningful political influence).
Even the much maligned tax code is a congeries of collective moral preferences. Favoring home ownership over renting has, to be sure, certain utilitarian justifications. But the fact is that we collectively believe that the country benefits from the moral strength growing out of families owning and investing in their own homes. Likewise, the tax deduction for charitable contributions is fundamentally grounded in the social desire to support good deeds. Our society, moreover, puts its money (and lives) where its heart is: We have gone to war on more than one occasion because it was the morally correct thing to do.
So courts that deny morality as a rational basis for legislation are not only undermining the moral fabric of society, they run directly counter to actual legislative practice in innumerable important areas of society. We must recognize that what the Massachusetts court has done is not preserve liberty but merely substitute its own moral code for that of the people. This damage is not merely inflicted on government, trampling as it does the so-called "separation of powers." It does much worse, for when judges erode the power of the people's representatives to set society's moral compass, they likewise undercut the authority of parents, schools, and other community groups to set the standards they would like to see their children and fellow citizens live by. Indeed, it is a frontal assault on community values writ large.
It is thus no wonder that many feel our culture's values are going to hell in a handbasket. Yet, neither the federal nor Massachusetts constitutions truly compel such a pernicious outcome. Indeed, to this day the Massachusetts Constitution precisely recognizes that "instructions in piety, religion and morality promote the happiness and prosperity of a people and the security of a republican government." It cannot be stated better than George Washington did in his first inaugural address: "The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality, and the pre-eminence of free government be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its citizens and command the respect of the world."
� Alan Charles Raul is a lawyer in Washington. This commentary originally appeared in The Washington Post. �2003 The Washington Post
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