Cotler Concedes Same-Sex Marriage Amendments Don’t Mean Much
June 8, 2005 · By Tom Cerber
Justice Minister Irwin Cotler conceded that the amendments to the same-sex marriage bill that Paul Martin agreed to don’t change much:
Liberals will tweak their contentious same-sex marriage bill but can’t guarantee ironclad religious protections, admits Justice Minister Irwin Cotler.
Churches won’t be forced to perform gay weddings, he says.
But it’s beyond his legal reach to protect provincial marriage commissioners or religious organizations who turn away same-sex couples, he conceded Wednesday.
“That’s right,” Cotler said, when asked if his hands are tied by jurisdictional limits.
Ottawa has the authority to define marriage, but provinces have the power to solemnize weddings.
A range of conflicts has already emerged.
Conservative Justice critic Vic Toews suggested the feds would have to bargain with each individual province over the solemnization question, raising the spectre of side-deals analogous to those Martin made with Maritime provinces over off-shore revenues. I doubt it would be that haphazard, at least on the issue of marriage itself, because several provinces have already gone ahead and legalized same-sex marriage. However, it gets a lot more messy when it comes to penumbral issues like rights of marriage commissioners and religious organizations like the Knights of Columbus who find themselves in a legal battle for refusing to rent out their facilities.
Even so, this is just the beginning of the mess that Bill C-38 is going to bring.
UPDATE: AITGWN thinks that Martin might be setting Cotler up to be blind-sided.
[...] Human Rights Commission busy-body come after them, as happens now) (see here, here, here, here , here, here, here, and here for [...]
[...] For at least a year now, intelligent conservatives have maintained that the Liberals’ same-sex marriage legislation represents a significant threat to religious freedoms in Canada (see here, here, and here for examples). Today we recieved the first substantiation of those claims: “The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has ruled in favour of two lesbian women who claim they were discriminated against by a Catholic men’s organization when they booked a hall for their wedding reception in the fall of 2003.” [...]
[...] For at least a year now, intelligent conservatives have maintained that the Liberals’ same-sex marriage legislation represents a significant threat to religious freedoms in Canada (see here, here, and here for examples). Today we recieved the first substantiation of those claims: “The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has ruled in favour of two lesbian women who claim they were discriminated against by a Catholic men’s organization when they booked a hall for their wedding reception in the fall of 2003.” [...]