Mon Feb 7/05
Touch 'em all, George...

With all due respect, Barbara Kay's January 27 column about how gay marriage is akin to a broken window on an abandoned car — that is, once polygamists and other matrimonial misfits notice it, they'll strip the vehicle clean — was basically a Mitch Williams slider. The part of Joe Carter was played today by George Jonas:

It's interesting that people who raised few objections while the institution was being dismantled — while the wheels and doors of the derelict car were being vandalized — now rise to the defence of the hood ornament.

Isn't it, though? Kay's column reads like an artifact from the early, early days of this debate, so it hardly seemed worth it to point out that defending marriage at this late date, after the stony silence that met all the other erosions of the platonic ideal of inviolate marriage, necessarily smacks more of anti-homosexuality than of pro-marriage. Still, I'm glad Jonas did so, because his column today is brilliantly written — one of the best things I've read in a Canadian newspaper in some time. (You non-subscribers should be able to read it here in a week or so).

I don't share (or entirely understand) his pessimistic tone, though:

Same-sex marriage isn't going to be the death of an institution with a 45% failure rate. When nearly every second wedding ends in divorce, the institution is already buried.

I agree to a point, but I'm just not sure "death," with its attendant mourning, is the right word. To me, the idea of indissoluble marriage isn't just anachronistic — it's barbaric. Obviously the prospect of no-fault divorce has lowered the stakes, but one only has to look at the millions of happily married Canadians to know that the institution of marriage, insofar as it involves two people committing their lives to each other, is both healthy and ultimately indestructible.

(I have waded in with a few thoughts on this on the Shotgun, if anyone's interested.)