Mr. Speaker, this, in my opinion, is the most important piece of private members' business presently before the House. There is no more pressing issue facing the House than in what direction we as parliamentarians want to take the morality of the country.
Our actions as parliamentarians have consequences. We must take extreme care not to subvert institutions that form the fabric of our society and way of life. This motion would do just that. That is why I am strongly, unreservedly, and unapologetically speaking against it. That is why, as an elected representative of the families of my riding, I will fight against any move by this or any government to subvert or undermine traditional family values. The family is the very building block of our society, not individuals, because individuals alone cannot maintain and sustain our country, only families can. It is in this defence of the family, the most important and basic union of all, that I give this speech.
I am one of those not so rare people who believe that law is about morality. I believe it is impossible to separate law and morality. All laws are either based on or express a fundamental view of ordering of human relations. That, whether we like it or not, is morality.
I am also one of those people who believe that a liberal democratic society founded upon rights requires a certain kind of moral grounding if it hopes to function. Therefore, if you are like me and you accept these premises, then you must also accept the conclusion that government must not pass laws that threaten the morality upon which fundamental structures of our society are built. It is not only undemocratic, it is dangerous. Government must serve its citizens. It must respect and promote the morality that is the consensus of its citizens. It must not attack it. It must not threaten it. It must rarely seek to change it.
This government does not agree with me. The government and the hon. member from the Bloc who sponsored today's motion think that it is the role of government to subvert the consensually accepted morality of our society, not universally accepted, of course, as no single moral rule is ever universally accepted, but consensually accepted.
Poll after poll show that Canadians are overwhelmingly opposed to changing the definition of family to include homosexual unions. People are overwhelmingly opposed to giving homosexual unions moral and legal parity with the union that sustains our country and sustains our species, that of man and woman. Canadians are overwhelmingly opposed to giving in to the vocal if irrational demands of the 2 per cent of the population who think that sexual preference does not matter when talking about family. However, that does not stop the gay rights ideologues and the radical attackers of the family from shamelessly promoting their narrow special interest cause.
Our Supreme Court is waiting for the House to make its decision on the family. It is waiting for a message from the House. The message my colleague from the Bloc wants to send is that there is no morality, that Canadian law should promote homosexuality, and that the traditional male-female union is not the best model of a family history could ever devise. He is wrong, and I hope that the motion and any other laws like it are stopped before the moral fabric of the country is rent apart by narrow interests' societal engineering.
A respected professor of political history and human rights at Claremont College in California has said that the gay rights movement is the most radical and sinister challenge to emerge to not just sexual morality but to all morality. He did not say that lightly or flippantly, and neither do I. Morality, the structured relations of humans with one another, is based on our natural affinities. It is based upon the fact that we are all human. Human rights are just that: rights that are based upon our common natural humanity.
Nature is the basis of all humanity. It must be. Convention is not enough. Common agreement is not enough. This is a bond to break down in the face of opposition. Morality is, has been, and always will be based on our natural condition as fellow members of the human race, dedicated to self-preservation and the good functioning of our communities.
Allow me to cite Professor Jaffa again, because he puts this argument so well. The reason we regard the killing of people as a personal and societal wrong is because we share a common nature. The reason we regard the enslavement of people as wrong and not the enslavement of cattle, for example, is because we share a common nature with people. That commonality, which is the basis of all morality, is grounded in nature.
Homosexuality, to anyone who has not been brainwashed by the last decade of effective propaganda by the gay lobby, is unnatural. It is a repudiation of nature. Nature requires procreation. Morality must defend the continuation of humanity. Rights must protect those things that promote the continuation of our country and of our species. Homosexuality does none of these things. Homosexuality is nihilistic. It protects nothing, it defends nothing, it continues nothing, and it sustains nothing.
The call for so-called gay rights is an example of an extreme repudiation of nature, an extreme repudiation of morality, an extreme repudiation of every ground upon which we base human rights. There lies the irony and there lies the tragedy of the project our justice minister and his colleagues are embarking on in Bill C-41 and the amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act. There lies the tragedy of the failure of our highest court to firmly and unequivocally defend morality. There lies the tragedy of this government's apparent unwillingness to send a strong message to the courts about the need to protect the family.
Canadians agree with me that we need to protect the family because Canadians have more sense possibly than the justice minister, more sense than my colleague from the Bloc, more sense than my colleague from Burnaby-Kingsway. Canadians understand the importance of the family and of the necessity of natural relationships to our society.
Canadians may not have the fancy rhetoric or the well practised if wrong headed arguments of the gay lobby, but they do have common sense. They have the lessons of history, and that is what this House should be defending and representing.
Governments have defined the family as a man and a woman because that works and because we need that sort of family. It is not because we want to punish someone for not choosing that lifestyle but because we want to reward those who do. We confer benefits upon that kind of union because it provides benefits for us. We have protected that sort of family because it protects our children and ultimately us.
We legally recognize the natural family because we want to promote it. We as a society have the right to defend and protect those institutions that benefit our society. We are under no obligation to protect and codify into law unions or lifestyles that confer no societal benefit. And when there is damage that will be inevitably done to our society and to our shared collective morality by the legal recognition and therefore promotion of homosexuality, we are under no obligation to recognize that lifestyle under law, none whatsoever. We are, however, under an obligation to protect the family from attacks by special interests.
Let me finish by saying that I have never in my experience, inside or outside of this House, heard anyone call for active discrimination against individual homosexuals. No doubt some will build strawman arguments by suggesting that the opponents of the legal recognition of homosexual unions are in favour of this. That is pure nonsense and pure fear mongering. That is up to individuals. However, when someone who prefers living a certain lifestyle that demands of me as a citizen and a legislator that I codify government support for the union that lifestyle spawns, then they are asking for me to approve of, promote, and support that lifestyle. They are asking for my sanction on that union.
As someone who is dedicated to Canada and to the families of Canada, you can count me out. I will not support any measure in law that attempts to make homosexual unions and natural families equal. My constituents have spoken loud and clear. I, unlike some members of this House, including the justice minister, have been listening.
I encourage all Canadians from all over this country to start a campaign. I urge all Canadians, in the name of the preservation of our families, to let your MP, the justice minister, and the Prime Minister know how you feel about the preservation of the family. Stand up for what works in our country. Stand up for the family. Fight back with common sense against motions of this nature.
I urge all hon. colleagues to defeat this motion.