Major Acid's E-Rag
It Strikes Me...
Gay Marriages
It’s one thing to deal with mad cow disease, to respond – or, more
precisely – not to respond to an economic body blow. It’s another thing
to let the gays get uppity.
Alberta’s beef industry is in crisis following the finding of a single
diseased cow. Hundreds of businesses and farms, thousands of jobs, and
millions in taxes are in danger of evaporating. The Alberta government’s
response? Whine to the feds for money, a time-honoured strategy that
allows the province to avoid the necessity of actually acting while at
the same time diverting, onto the feds, citizen frustration over the
inaction. After all, Alberta wouldn’t want actually to defend its beef
industry heritage with its own tax dollars from, say, its own
multi-billion dollar Heritage Fund.
Still, Alberta’s politicians can act. Yes, it is acting in the sense
that a child plays at being a grown up, but it plays well in the press,
and it is done in defense of Alberta’s heritage – the heritage of
homophobic bigotry. It took all of a day for Alberta’s political bosses
to react – at what can only be described as political light speed – to
slap down that dangerous, aberrant group, the gays. It was done, so they
said, in defense of the heritage, indeed the sanctity, of marriage.
Ralph Klein actually used the word “sanctify.” He stated quite clearly
that the Alberta government wouldn’t sanctify gay marriages. Of course
not. No government, at least no Canadian government, is in the business
of sanctification. That’s a religious task. Still, Alberta will not
recognize gay marriages that now take place legally in Ontario, and it
proposes to attempt to hide behind the notwithstanding clause of the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The clause will be invoked to
preserve the status quo of gender-based hate – that is the noxious
heritage that Alberta’s leaders are pretending to defend.
Marriage, they say, is sacred. Marriage, they say, is a union between a
man and a woman, not two men or two women. It is, they say, the bastion
of society, conceived in religious self-righteousness (which they won’t
say) and handed down generation to generation as a sacred duty: marry in
the church (any church) and beget the next generation of faithful who
will, in due course, continue the game. In Alberta, the politicians say,
marriage shall not be denigrated by the gays.
It’s grandstanding, of course; Klein’s government passed a bill in 2000
designed to thwart this very situation. It did so by invoking the
Charter’s notwithstanding clause. However, they are all well aware (or
should be) that they will lose this battle. They have forced some court
time by their actions, a couple years perhaps, but the outcome is
certain. The definition of marriage is a federal responsibility.
Invoking the notwithstanding clause in provincial legislation, regarding
a federal rule, in order to say Alberta won’t recognize the legal
actions of another province, won’t survive examination.
Yet, it is the play-acting that counts, the grandstanding for the
cameras. We, the Kleinians say, are defending Alberta and its
(homophobic) religious heritage. Blame the feds, blame the feds, blame
the feds. Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.
Marriage, they say, is a sacred union. Never mind that in a
multicultural, multi-religious society, one in which the choice to
abandon religion is as valid as the choice to proclaim one’s faith; one
in which personal choice, religious or otherwise, is safeguarded only by
the rule of law that protects that multiplicity, even to the protection
of gays from the fear-spawned hate embedded in the very heritage the
politicians claim to be protecting. And by the way, blame the feds,
blame the feds, blame the feds. Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.
The feds – nudge, nudge; wink, wink – are the scum who won’t protect
Albertans’ religious, homophobic heritage. Oh yes, and by the way, the
feds aren’t really helping with the mad cow problem, either (at least
not until recently). But WE will act, the Kleinians say. We will protect
the heritage of Albertans, the heritage that says that gays are … well,
people, but people with restricted rights. They can’t marry. Only
heterosexuals can marry because … well that’s the way it’s always been,
and that’s the way it should stay in Alberta.
It’s ironic, really. Heterosexuals, by leaps and bounds, are abandoning
formal, religious matrimony. Yet in Alberta, the few who desperately
believe in the rite of marriage, the few who want to participate in it,
the few who advocate marriage as a public vow of deep and symbolic
meaning, are the very ones that the homophobic heritage of Alberta, as
defined by its self-serving political leaders, seeks to keep out.
