Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to put some questions to the member for London—Fanshawe. The member has taken great pains to talk about the procreative imperative of marriage; in his opinion, it is the sole criteria for which marriage should be judged. It seems to me that when we are considering civil marriage this really has never been the operative aspect of civil marriage in this country.
I would like to know what the member would say to a heterosexual couple who has no intention of having children as part of their marriage. Does that make their marriage less than a “true marriage”, in the language that he used? What about a couple that is beyond the age for child rearing or beyond the biological capacity of having children? Is that marriage not a true marriage? Should that couple be prevented from marrying? It seems to me that if we take his argument seriously, we would have to answer that those people would not and should not be allowed to marry. I have some real difficulty with that discussion.
I am also concerned about families that adopt children. Is that not a true family? Is the relationship of those parents not a true marriage in that sense? It seems to me that he raises more questions than he solves by stressing the procreative aspect.
I would also like to ask him if he could point to one example, even in the Catholic church, where I believe he is a member, where a priest has been forced to marry someone who had been previously divorced. It is the church's policy not to marry those folks. Has there been any instance where religious freedom was violated to force a priest to marry someone who had been divorced or to marry a couple who were not both Roman Catholic, let us say? Has the freedom of the Catholic church to make a decision based on that been violated? By extension, why would he think that this is down the road?