Mr. Speaker, this issue has moved Canadians to action and to become involved, reinvigorated as active members of the Canadian democratic process. I have had interventions from several thousand of my constituents, more so than on any other piece of legislation, even Bill C-68, and we know how controversial that has been and how many people have come to the fore on that. Several thousand of my constituents have told me that they are also against the purpose of this bill. They also wonder why we should be occupied by this matter rather than the more pressing issues that affect millions rather than a few hundred Canadians.
It reflects the nature of our modern age, perhaps even the corruption of our legal system, that a very vocal minority can put their issue on a national platform even when the vast majority of Canadians have better things to do. And they still claim they have no voice.
I know the Prime Minister will feign outrage at this, but we are pretty tired of his phony moral stances over here. It has taken him only a few years to run completely from poll to poll, from one side of an issue to the other. He has now exhausted every position he can hold on every issue. He has nowhere left to run.
Speakers on all sides of the House have articulated the background to the introduction of Bill C-38, but not everyone has been playing with a full deck of facts. The former justice minister said in the House that the traditional definition of marriage was safe and secure and that the Liberals had no intention of changing anything. Not that long ago, like every Liberal promise, those words disappeared after the election.
Despite voting to take every action necessary to protect our foundational institution, those same Liberals stood by while junior court after junior court defied the Supreme Court and Parliament and thousands of years of history to claim they have discovered words in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that are not actually there at all.
The Prime Minister claims to hold the charter sacred while he lets judicial activists distort this document into radical new shapes. He says nothing while judges claim they find words where none exist. This is not progressive. This is radical and there is always a danger to the overall common good when a few radicals hijack a national document and use it to push their own agenda.
A few of my colleagues in the House circulated a letter in which they claimed no one was behind the push for same sex marriage. It just sort of sprang up from the ground. We are not sure how it came about. The radicals we are concerned with are a group that wants to overthrow the institution of marriage because it does not conform to their social view. But they are not the only radicals at work. Greater conflicts are coming. When a democratic government participates in the breakdown of its own foundations, it cannot know where that process will end and neither can the radicals who are pursuing this narrow agenda.
The Prime Minister said that this bill is about minority rights. He is wrong. The Supreme Court has said that he has a choice to legislate on marriage because the definition is up to Parliament. It did not say he had the right to establish or create a right for marriage. No one has a right to get married. When we believe we have found a mate that we want to spend the rest of our lives with, there are a number of options. Some will shack up, as the saying goes, and not care about government or parental approval. Some will seek government approval after a time and get benefits and pension rights. That option is open to everyone now.
Some will enter into what they hope is a lifetime commitment. They will look at the list of prohibitions contained in the marriage act and finding they qualify, will get a licence and undergo a solemnization ceremony at city hall or in a church. They will promise to stay together for life and raise their children in a loving household. Not everybody makes it through their whole lifetime, but no one regards divorced individuals as second class citizens which is one of the spurious complaints of these radicals.
If I had a right to be married, I could ignore the rules set out in the marriage act, ignore any rules of solemnization in my province and certainly reject any fees they try to charge me for that process. If I had a right to get married, I would tell the clerk that I am not paying for the licence because it is my right. What about divorce? My wife can never divorce me because that would contravene my right to be married. That is how spurious this is.
Many people are miserable after divorce and it is not because they lose half their income. If the government shared the court's preoccupation with people's feelings and dignity and actually believed it was guaranteeing rights, surely it would bring in legislation to force people to stay together, or maybe provide a spouse to anyone who still wanted to exercise his or her right to be married. It is a lot of nonsense of course.
Society, not courts or governments, created the institution of marriage to provide security to men and women in a relationship they could both understand and count on and to create a unit that nurtures and protects vulnerable children as they grow and learn about their heritage. We know this breaks down often in our society and it is tragic when it does, but people do cope. Children can be and are raised in a variety of environments and turn out well. We are not talking about what everyone must do, but about what society has come to understand as to what is best for the most people most of the time.
The radicals would have us believe that because the guidelines do not include every possibility, they are flawed and must be rewritten. They have obviously convinced the Liberal cabinet, apparently, in the last few months that by rewriting the rules of society, all will be happy and we will not have to rewrite any more.
It is ironic that the Prime Minister now wants to paint himself as the great defender of minorities. We know the gun registry is an onerous document that targets a law abiding minority in this country. We know that Bill C-68, as written, tramples on at least a dozen rights from the Constitution and, as it is clumsily applied, violates a dozen or so more. So far, no Prime Minister has stood up for this minority.
We have had language laws imposed in this country that the United Nations has recognized as illegitimate, but not one Prime Minister has seen fit to help minorities where votes are at stake. So much for fundamental rights.
Our primary food producers are abused by trade disputes, hammered by unreasonable restrictions and taxed off their land. Their crops are seized and sold, and they get nickels back while somebody else makes millions.
There is the ongoing case of single income families that the Supreme Court admitted are discriminated against, but apparently they do not have much of a lobby over there. There is not a single Liberal standing up for their rights.
The whole process is pretty selective and clearly more about what is fashionable than what is right. The methods used by selfish radicals and their Liberal allies to manipulate discussion are reprehensible. Just because we say it is about minority rights does not make it so, especially when the rhetoric can never match these actions.
The Liberals claim to stand for a repressed minority, but this minority, which is really a small part of a minority, seems to have access to government and courts that most Canadians cannot even dream of. I have heard some Canadians say that we should just throw in the towel and give in whenever someone makes enough noise. Often they reflect a level of frustration about the lack of control they feel in the political process. Sometimes they are apathetic and do not realize that what is at stake is more than marriage and more than the demands of one politicized section of one minority.
To give up would be a mistake for two reasons. What the Liberals are pushing here is illegitimate and giving in will only make things worse, paving the way for more demands for so-called rights. They are prepared to let a few activist judges not interpret the Constitution but to continuously remake it without any input from the people who have to live with those consequences.
Canadians who let the government get away with that are guilty of putting their future into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of radicals whose demands we cannot imagine at this time.
What about marriage itself? Some people say, since they will still be married afterwards, what is the big deal? The same sort of dismissal greeted the change in divorce laws, and probably the insanity and lack of debate that passed for abortion laws in this country. The fact is, when a group manages to alter an institution that affects all of society, then many other changes creep in, whether we object to later consequences or not.
We are not talking about changing marriage here. We are talking about changing society. Professor Thomas Sowell points out that marriage is not an institution that grants rights. On the contrary, it imposes responsibilities. He writes:
Marriage laws have evolved through centuries of experience with couples of opposite sexes--and the children that result from such unions. Society asserts its stake in the decisions made by restricting the couples' options.
Society does not tell individuals what to do; it only provides a framework to carry on that society for posterity. It is ironic that the radicals would invite the government into their bedrooms to take away their rights under the guise of claiming new rights for themselves.
Journalist John McKellar, who founded HOPE, Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism, reports that the January 2001 same sex wedding in Toronto was an embarrassment for most gay communities, not a triumph. He said, “Better to stay at home and clean out the fridge when your public image is so embarrassingly represented with such maudlin specimens of martyrdom”.
What Mr. McKellar objects to and what every thinking Canadian should object to is the Liberal's knee-jerk reaction to every claim of discrimination and hurt feelings. He also said, “This is no time for the modern, feel good, pop culture mentality that stands behind C-38”.
He counts himself among the happy, successful and independent gays and lesbians who do not wake up every day finding hate, bigotry and discrimination under the bed, and go running to the courts, governments and human rights commissions for a lifetime of therapeutic preferences.
McKellar is describing the heart of what is so objectionable about Bill C-38 and, of course, last year's Bill C-250, for that matter. There is a disturbing trend today to bend the purposes of society and democracy to the will of the few with the hope of making one group feel good about itself. In the meantime, everyone else's right to free speech and opinion, everyone else's right to a dependable social order, and everyone else's right to enjoyment of property is trampled in the misguided rush to satisfy the perceived feelings of a minority of a minority.
In closing, I have always personally supported the traditional definition of marriage. I will continue to support and fight for the rights and freedoms of all Canadians to order their lives as they see fit, and I unequivocally reject the false assertions in Bill C-38.