Marriage was not always a legal term. It has only been the positive province of the State post French Revolution, which is a little over two centuries. Yet, you treat the state involvement in the activity (not just a word) as though it was brought down from the Mountain. A mere two centuries in the horizon of human experience does not constitute the norm.

Let’s be consistent, if not radical. If the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, as the Liberal patron saint is quoted as saying, why should the state have any business in deciding who is married and who isn’t?

Either the separation between Church and state means something or it does not. We agree on that, it seems, but not on what it means. If you remove the state from the picture, if you restore the activity to its proper origin, I don’t see how doing that makes of all “marriages” civil unions. You’ve taken a tumble there; you can’t have it all ways. If there is no civil magistrate involved, what is that will make those “unions” civil?

Different under the law? As an aside –because this legalese stuff is really getting boring, have you heard of the Wheat Board? The Gun registry? Life insurance? Progressive taxation? All of these, just to name some, prescribe different treatment under the law. The Bolshevik dream does not really exist in the real world.

Treating people differently under the law because of their sexual orientation is not acceptable under our Constitution. No matter how fair you try to make it by “granting” homosexual civil unions, it is still creating different classes of people.

If the issue is the word marriage, then, the only solution is to leave marriage to churches (which are free to choose who they marry) and ammend/modernize the Civil Marriage Act to only allow civil unions in this country, thus, getting rid of the legal term marriage all together. This would allow churches to decide whether or not they wanted to perform same-sex marriages or not. It would also effectively make everyone in the country’s marriage a civil union, and no one would be treated differently under the law, which is the true issue afterall, no matter what Bonnell wrote.

Liberals who are in the business of deflecting power to the court on thorny political questions already assert that such arrangement would not fly with the Court. That’s prejudging the court’s decision unduly, and wrongly since the Court has already hinted deference to Parliament on this question.

Please notice that I had nothing to say about people fighting back politically. That’s fine; it’s their right. My point was that Bonnell’s alarmist fear-mongering cannot be called journalism; it never presented a different side. Homosexuals may be paranoid for many reasons, but the paranoia-allusion and all that stuff in the article did not raise the question you raise here. That was not the angle of the piece, however generous you wish to be.

I agree with the article, there are more important things that this to discuss this election. However, when put in a corner, which is what Harper’s statements do to many same-sex couples in this country, then it should be no surprise to anyone that they would try to fight back for a right that has been afforded to them by a parliamentary process.