Polygamy Already Here

Karen Selick writes in today’s National Post (print edition only) that Bill 171, the Ontario government’s amendments to Ontario’s Family Law Act, while redefining spouse to include same-sex marriages, maintains the little known clause of that law, 1(2), which reads:

In the definition of “spouse”, a reference to marriage includes a marriage that is actually or potentially polygamous, if it was celebrated in a jurisdiction whose system of law recognizes it as valid. R.S.O. 1990, c. F.3, s. 1 (2).

Colby Cosh commented on this back in December.

The reason for its inclusion seems to be based on the custom of recognizing marriages from other jurisdictions, namely foreign ones. This has the advantage of not requiring immigrants who are married to remarry when they arrive in Canada. The same principle applies among the provinces. People who get married in New Brunswick automatically have their marriages recognized in British Columbia. But what about Alberta? So far as I know, the Alberta government won’t recognize same-sex marriages performed in jurisdictions like Ontario that make them. It is a hope of same-sex marriage advocates in the US that ones performed in Massachussetts, where it is legal, will be recognized in other states because states in the US apparently have fewer legal means to withdraw these arrangements of mutual recognition of the marriages they perform. Federalism in Canada appears to give provinces greater autonomy on this (and many other) issues. I’m speculating on this comparison and am willing to be corrected.

Even so, will the principle of having marriages from other jurisdictions recognized serve as a point of entry for advocates of polygamy to mount a Charter challenge? Or will advocates of same-sex marriage, who imbibe the rhetoric of inclusion and tolerance, suddenly decide some are more deserving of inclusion than others.

Religion in Europe - Not Dead Yet

Yesterday I noted a Christian Science Monitor article comparing attitudes toward religion and public life in the US and Europe. Today they have the second installment and notice a bit of a resurgence in Europe. Nothing big, but large enough that Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading contender to be France’s next president, has made integrating religion better into France’s notoriously secular and antireligious political scene one of his top priorities:

“Politicians should not talk only about the economy, about social affairs, about the environment or security. We should also tackle spiritual questions,” he said in a series of interviews published last November as a book, which has already sold 65,000 copies. “Religion’s place in France at the beginning of the third millennium is central.”

Suggesting that the state should subsidize churches and mosques - a radical break from the country’s 100-year-old secular tradition - Mr. Sarkozy insists that he will “continue to argue for a new relationship between religions and the public authorities.”

There are many, many reasons to be pessimistic about religious freedoms in Europe. But the fact that one of France’s leading politicians is openly charting a different path bears some hope. One just hopes that as a notoriously ambitious politician, Sarkozy views religion as something more than a force to obtain political power. (hat tip: k@chikel)

Comparative Religious Freedoms - and Lack Thereof

Recently I wrote about Kelo v. City of New London (Conn.), which is currently before the US Supreme Court. At issue is the principle of “eminent domain”, a 5th Amendment right that allows municipalities to take private property away in the name of some public good. Now there are several illuminating commentaries on what’s going on: Mirror of Justice, Professor Bainbridge, and Claremont. The Becket Fund has written an amicus curiae which outlines the religious freedoms issues. Professor Bainbridge gets to the heart of the problem in quoting Russell Kirk:

[F]reedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth.

For its part, The Beckett Fund argues that at stake is the health of the primary providers of public goods, churches and religious organizations:

If tax and economic interests trump all, religious institutions will be the primary targets for the bulldozers in the name of greater tax revenues for municipalities. Land owned by religious institutions–our nation’s quintessential public good providers–risks being forcibly transferred to purely private commercial developers.

Looking northward, Angry in Great White North alerts us to a Globe and Mail story on the Ontario government’s decision on how churches and religious organizations are to handle the same-sex marriage issue. The government is changing its laws to amend the meaning of “spouse,” and assures churches that no church will be required to marry a same-sex couple of they don’t want to. However, AGWN observes that there’s an entire area of church/religious organization activities between the altar and street, and things look murkier on how churches and religious organizations will be affected. I quote at length:

So what constitutes “sacred” property? This is a complicated question. The Attorney-General may be under the impression that the Church building itself is “sacred”, but not, for instance, the Church Hall connected to it.

But what of a hall located in another part of town, managed by a lay organization, but ultimately owned by the diocese. Is that sacred? There are no relics of the patron saint, no altars, no tabernacle (the tabernacle is the little box to the side of the high altar in which the host is stored — it has a little curtain in front called a canopeum).

Doesn’t sound too sacred. No cool Latin words like “canopeum” seem to apply. But in Catholic tradition, properties were often left to the Church in the name of the patron saint. “To Saint Mark I leave…” and the parish or diocese takes secular ownership of the property in the name of the saint. In the eyes of the Church, it is ecclesiastic property. How about in the eyes of the province?

What about properties that are partly owned by the Church? If the Church owns more than 50% of the publicly traded shares, is that good enough? What about a plurality of shares?

What about a property that was not owned by the Church, but then becomes Church property by virtue of a purchase or a bequeathment? Can the Church then toss out gays and lesbians that were using the property for marriage ceremonies?

These are legitimate questions. For instance, I spoke with a leader of religious organization last week who told me that his organization has a pension plan regulated by the Alberta government, which has amended the meaning of “spouse” to accord with the new federal guidelines. This now obliges his organization to pay out pensions to same-sex partners even though the organization has a bona fides exception from human rights law that allows them not to hire people who do not fit with their mission statement. Does this mean that they must pay out a pension in case one of their employees suddenly reveals that he/she has a same-sex partner? How does this affect their bona fides exception in other areas?

The interface between churches/religious organizations and the public sphere is changing in both the US and Canada. Developments in the law in both countries suggest that while religous freedom will be protected, it’s getting harder for churches & organizations to breath.

Despondent Canadian Soc Cons

Enter Stage Right recounts past failures of Canadian social conservatives to develop a forum to share ideas, and offers some advice. He doubts the blogosphere will help much.

How Liberalism Lost Religious Voters

The American Scene has a useful summary of Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne’s article on how and why religious voters lost confidence in liberalism (in The New Republic; subscription required). It wasn’t Karl Rove or Ralph Reed. It was the 1960s and the shift from economic/social justice to issues related to privacy (i.e., sexual liberation, abortion, etc.). Materialism to postmaterialism, but also public issues to ones that deal with the self in isolation of the public interest.

Liberals, Welfare, and…. Forced Prostitution?

The Young Liberals have a resolution for next week’s Liberal Party convention to have prostitution removed from the Criminal Code of Canada. If prostitution gets legalized, as it is in Germany, will we see cases of the poor getting forced by the government to work for brothels in order to qualify for social assistance?

Just wondering. (hat tip: Proud to be Canadian)

W & WW

David Kennedy writes in this month’s Atlantic Monthly (and reprinted in today’s National Post; subscription required for both) that one can best understand George W. Bush’s foreign policy of promoting democracy abroad as a continuation of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy that began in World War One. Kennedy observes that Wilson’s foreign policy was based on the view of expanding the principles of the US Constitution to the international order, which meant a world governed or at least restrained by international law and one composed of representative democracies. The international and domestic dimensions go together in the Kantian belief that democracies don’t go to war with one another. As Philip Bobbitt observes, this meant that signatories to landmark peace treaties like Versailles had to commit themselves to representative democracy. In essence, international law pushes the constitutional laws of various regimes, and vice-versa. For Wilson, who pushed the decrepit monarchies and quasi-republics of Europe toward representative demoracy, and Bush, who’s doing it for Middle Eastern despots, the US takes on the role of pushing this international-constitutional law tandem forward. Also for both of them, it might mean unilateralism or even breaking international law in order to save international law. The actions of Bush are well known. Bobbitt argues that Wilson used German attacks on US merchant marines more as an excuse to enter World War One rather than seeing it as a threat to national security as he argued.

Kennedy’s article is worth-reading, though I think his pious tone distracts from the fundamental realpolitik point he’s trying to make.

A majority of Canadians oppose Bush’s foreign policy, especially to promote democracy abroad. Fair enough. But Canadians for the most part also believe democracy is a good thing and that democracies generally don’t go to war. In short, Canadians are as Wilsonian as Bush is, except that they don’t think the US should promote it. Then who should? The UN? An institution that allows countires like Libya and Sudan on its human rights commission? Canada? Yeah right. Canada ranks somewhere in the mid 30s in terms of commitments to peace-keeping operations, well back of perennial peace-keepers like Bangladesh who has a fraction of our GDP. Maybe with the Liberals spending for another 1,000 troops we think that we can take up the mantle of sherrif of the world. But I doubt it. They can’t be bothered to include airlift in their military budget.

“Roe” vs. “Roe v. Wade”

Norma McCorvey, the petitioner who went by the name “Jane Roe,” in the 1973 landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court, “Roe v. Wade,” had her plea to strike down the original decision denied by the Supreme Court. She had hoped it would reverse the original decision.

You read that correctly. Roe wants “Roe v. Wade” struck down. Moreover, she never even aborted the original child in question. She put it up for adoption.

Religion in US & Europe

The Christian Science Monitor has a somewhat interesting article describing the differences between the US and Europe over the public place of religion. Summarized, Europeans want freedom from religion while the US wants freedom to be religious. The differences are due in part to historical experience. European attitudes derive from the problems of religious wars while the US was born by people who simply left and found a new place to practice religion. Even so, one can’t help but to suspect that the Europeans have confused two visions of secularism, one, drawn from the Anglo-American view of liberty, that affirms diversity of viewpoints including religous ones, and one drawn out of the French Revolution that tries to remove any kind of public participation of religion in the public sphere. Check out Wilfred McClay’s “Two Concepts of Secularism” for a good comparison of these two views (subscription required).

The European viewpoint is grounded in the belief that a political order can be sustained without recourse to any kind of public acknowledgement to the supernatural:

That thinking does not sit well in Europe, where human rights are rooted in a tradition of secular humanism, which holds that mankind is capable of ethical conduct and self-fulfillment without recourse to the supernatural.

This is a tough one. One can think of atheists who are moral and noble. But would one want to trust an entire society with this? I can’t help but to think of Immanuel Kant, one of the key Enlightenment philosophers whose views on reason and moral autonomy frame European discourse, who conceded finally that a society does indeed require a civil religion to sustain its moral order. While Kant himself preferred republican government, European politics, and the way that they enforce their postmodern moral order, looks more like a managerial state that enforces a multicultural religion of post-Protestant guilt for a whole host of historic injustices, both real and imagined.

Feminists Their Own Worst Enemies?

A recent essay arguing how and why feminism has failed to produce public intellectuals. Prefeminist era female public intellectuals abounded: Hannah Arendt, Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag. Who’s there today besides Camille Paglia? Germaine Greer, Susan Faludi, Gloria Steinem?

But there’s a big difference between these women and their forebears. They are all professional feminists. They don’t simply espouse feminism; they write about little else.

The author perhaps overgeneralizes, as she mentions Naomi Klein as well, even though her concerns go beyond feminist issues. Even so, I guess this is what happens when concern with one’s self and one’s body is done within a postmodern intellectual framework where there’s nothing else to contemplate.

As Arendt might say, these intellectuals recognize nothing that’s “public,” making it impossible for them to act as public intelletuals.

Read the exchanges between the LA Times editor, where this article was run, and a University of Southern California feminist professor.

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