Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased and honoured to stand here today and speak in favour of Bill C-38. I can understand, however, the concerns of many here in the House, which I consider to be emotional concerns with regard to marriage and the aspect of civil marriage which we are discussing here today.
If we look at marriage carefully, we can see that it is made up of four components. There is of course the legal concept of marriage. Then there are the social and traditional concepts of marriage, and of course we have the religious concept of marriage. These are the four pieces.
Today many of us have friends who have participated in only one of those parts of marriage, the legal part. In the old days we used to call it the town hall wedding. People were married in a town hall. They have never had a church wedding but they are considered to be married. We know that in fact this has been so for a long time for many people.
Why they wanted to get married, if they did not wish to take the religious ceremony, was that they believed in the social and the traditional concepts of marriage, where they tell their families and their friends and society at large that they consider that bond between themselves to be one that they want to contract for life in the hopes that they would cement their relationship. At the same time, they were therefore able to get all the legal considerations pertaining to marriage.
Therefore, we know that marriage can exist in this country and in other countries around the world where only one component is taken, that being the purely legal component of marriage. I would like to say that this is what we are talking about here today. Let us look at the legal concept of marriage.
Historians have told us that as far back as 2 B.C. and 1 B.C., under Roman law, marriage was a purely contractual relationship between two people, a man and a woman. Marriage was only undertaken among very wealthy families and contracts ensured that property and lands stayed in the family and that there was an understanding of that division.
Marriage also ensured that any heirs of those two people would get those lands and property when those two people passed on, because as we know, in those days many children were not legally of the two people. They did not want bastard children, as they were called in those days, seeking to get those lands and inheritances. It was a purely legal contract.
We also know that in 1 B.C., 100 years later, within civil Roman law, there were homosexual couples who were also allowed to participate in that selfsame marital contract.
I want to move on to this fact that the legal concept of marriage began as purely legal thing. Later on, if we want to go into the religious concept of marriage, we can look at the Council of Trent. Those who are religious scholars would know that the Council of Trent was made up of 24 councils or more and went on between 1545 and 1563. At the 24th Council of Trent, the religious component of marriage was formalized. That council suggested that the marriage would have to be a religious union between a man and a woman. This was only at the 24th Council of Trent.
However, I want to talk about the legal institution of marriage because that is what we are discussing here today. We see it as a separate concept. In fact, the legal institution of marriage saw its greatest evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. For our purposes, let us look at the evolution of legal marriage nowhere else but in Canada.
The first marriage act in 1793 came out of the Anglican church. It was therefore extended only to Anglican priests to marry people. It was in 1798 that the Presbyterians and Calvinists were allowed to marry. At the same time, however, aboriginal people were considered unchristian so they were not allowed to participate. In 1929 marriage extended to other religious denominations. However, it was only in 1871 that Jews were legally allowed to marry in Ontario under the auspices of a rabbi or in other ways.
In 1882 Parliament again debated the legal institution of marriage. The debate then was whether a man could marry his deceased wife's sister. I would like to draw members' attention to those arguments.
The bishop of Nova Scotia of course cited many biblical texts and then said that if a man was allowed to marry his deceased wife's sister, that would lead to polygamy because he would want to marry all of her sisters eventually.
We heard this in 1882 and 200 years later they are still making the same arguments and we are listening to the same thing. Nothing that was promised in 1882 by a man marrying his deceased wife's sister has come to pass.
In 1925 only a man could get a divorce on the basis of adultery, with no proof whatsoever. A woman had to have proof. We can see that even then marriage was an unequal contract.
In 1950 marriage became purely a civil ceremony performed by judges and other officers. That ended the religious monopoly on marriage in Ontario.
In 1970 it was still legal for a husband to rape his wife in a legal marriage.
Thus, we are talking about the evolution of the laws of marriage. What I am saying is that those laws evolved because they were responding to inequities in the system at the time. They continue to do so.
In fact, let us look at the United States, where there were miscegenation laws. In 1967 the first state to change this was Virginia, in Loving v. Virginia, which said that two people of a different race could get married. I think members would be surprised to know that the very last state that made these laws illegal was Alabama in 2000. Prior to that, in Alabama a mixed race couple could not legally get married.
I want to bring to the House this progression of thought to the point that what we are talking about here is righting inequalities that have been going on for two centuries in the whole concept of a legal marriage. We are now seeking to suggest that under our charter, in its complexity, the beauty of the charter is that it has tried to balance the concept of equality under the law with understanding things like religious feeling, tradition, et cetera.
The charter was written so that the legal component of marriage could be extended as part of our equality rights for minority groups in this country while still allowing religions to continue to have their own law, their own dogma and their own decision to do so.
As I said and as I will refer to again for members, the fact is that I have a lot of friends, as I am sure members have, who had a town hall wedding and never did have a religious wedding. This is what we are talking about.
The churches will decide who they wish to choose to enter into that ceremony, that solemnization, and the state is saying that it cannot, under equality provisions in our charter, suggest that any minority group, whether we like the minority group or do not like the minority group, should be excluded from due process under the law to a major legal, social and traditional institution.
That is the basis of what we are talking about here, so it is about minority rights. We do know that in fact the Chinese Canadian National Council, which is supporting same sex marriage, is supporting it on that simple basis. As a minority group, its members fear that if we start suggesting we can discriminate against one minority group, we can start the process of discriminating against other minority groups.
Our history has shown us that in the past we have denied due process of law and access to legal institutions in this country to certain minority groups for various reasons. We only have to go back 50 years ago to the Chinese being unable to bring their wives here and marry or to the fact that we put away Japanese and Ukrainians in internment camps without due process of law.
We are talking here about changing the process of law. That is what we are talking about here: access to the legal institutions of this country, which should not be denied to a minority group.
I will end with one quick thought. There is a group that nobody has talked very much about except to say that marriage is about children. Indeed, marriage is about children. I am here to tell the House that today we know that gays and lesbians can have children because of artificial insemination. I have delivered lesbian women who became pregnant, went to full term and delivered a baby just like a heterosexual woman. We know that heterosexual couples use the same technology to have children if they are unable to have children otherwise.
I am saying that by denying same sex couples with children access to marriage, we are creating a second class of children in this country. We have done away with the old days when we had illegal children, bastard children who had no rights. What we are now creating is another group of children. The children of a same sex couple will not be equal under the law to the children of a heterosexual couple because their parents cannot get married even though both couples used the same reproductive technology in order to have those children.
I am just saying that it is about fairness and it is about equality under the law. I want to speak very strongly in favour of this. I think people who think and who care about equality will in fact agree with me on this one.