In what has been essentially a non-story, on June 17th, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced that the nation will change its law to allow homosexual marriage, joining Belgium and The Netherlands as the only countries where same-sex couples can legally wed.
“There is an evolution of society,” Chretien declared, noting that the law would allow religions the right to decide which marriages should be sanctified.
We should examine this societal evolution for a moment, focusing on the institution of marriage.
Although there are hundreds of works on marriage extant, dating mostly from the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960’s and rich in absurd revisionist history, it is undeniable that heterosexual pair-bonding has existed since the dawn of man. Moreover, long before any religious systems developed, there was some type of marital structure in place to preserve the family, the basic unit of civilization. The primary purpose of the family was and is, the protection and rearing of children.
The civil/legalistic recognition of marriage, whereby property and inheritance rights were memorialized, dates from the early days of the Roman Empire, and it was during the reign of Justinian (527-565 A.D.) that his famous Codex Justinianeus was created. Before these laws were enacted, a couple could simply pronounce themselves married. Formal Christian religious weddings came much later, and the Council of Trent in 1563 required that Catholic marriages be celebrated by a priest with two witnesses present. Even so, civil ceremonies were readily available in most instances.
Other than the proliferation of divorce, that began in the early 20th century, the “evolution” of marriage, as Jean Chretien would define it, stalled in the Renaissance.
It was not until 1950, when Henry Hay started the gay rights movement, that conventional marriage would be in the cross hairs. Born in England in 1912, and moving to Los Angeles in 1919, Hay left his wealthy family in 1930, and took up with dyed-in-the-wool Commie and gay blade Will Geer (better known as TV’s Grandpa Walton). Hay joined the Party, but switched gears (sorry, I couldn’t resist), marrying fellow Communist Anita Platky in 1938.
The radical couple divorced in 1951, but that was already after Hay returned to his gay roots, and founded the Mattachine Society—the country’s first gay rights organization—in 1950. Credit Hay with inventing the concept of homosexuals as an oppressed minority group, even though they tended to be much better off financially than the rest of society. He would have to wait about 10 more years for the Black Civil Rights movement to explode on the scene, but then all he had to do was hitch his wagon to their train, and let the useful idiots do the rest.
These particular useful idiots would be that class of feckless atheist intellectualoids, who play the “more liberal than thou” game by backing the hip cause of the week. Inevitably, those oppressed gays would make it to the top of the official Commie/Lib dance card, and Hay’s beloved cause would take off like a rocket.
An unrepentant Communist, and conceited to the end (he died in 2002), he and his Radical Faeries fell out of favor with mainstream gays, who were tending toward assimilation.
It is worth noting that the whole same-sex marriage juggernaut is driven primarily by a desire to partake of all the socio-legal goodies that have only quite recently sprung up around married heterosexual couples. These would include spousal medical benefits and the endless family law codes that provide for alimony and division of property. However, few commentators have pointed out that nearly any employed gay individual would be eligible for health insurance, and any analogy to a stay-at-home unemployed heterosexual homemaker (a mother with children) is nonsensical on its face.
Furthermore, contracts can readily be drawn up to protect property interests, and even to establish monthly payments for services rendered, without redefining marriage. But, that wouldn’t be as appealing to an ever-growing number of ignorant and misled sheeple and their evil shepherds, who truly believe that human rights are not given by God, or are even part of some secular intrinsic human dignity, but must emanate from the government.
One thing you won’t hear too much about is any appeal to gay marriage promoting monogamy and greater sexual responsibility, since study after study has trashed this fatuous notion.
To their credit, despite a gay problem of their own, Canada’s Catholic bishops were vigorous in their condemnation of Chretien’s decision:
“Marriage understood as the lasting union of a man and woman to the exclusion of others pre-exists the State. Because it pre-exists the State and because it is fundamental for society, the institution of marriage cannot be modified, whether by the Charter of Rights, the State or a court of law.
The point is not that, because same-sex partners cannot have access to marriage, there would be discrimination. Rather, it is the contrary that is true. Enlarging and thereby altering the definition of marriage in order to include same-sex partners discriminates against heterosexual marriage and the family, which are thus deprived of their social and legal recognition as the fundamental and irreplaceable basis of society.”
Well said, and what better time for the Church to reclaim its moral authority, countering as it should, the perfidious State.