Mon Feb 14/05
Forever holding their peace

Prince William, university student, is 22. Prince Harry, shiftless lager lout, is 20. Their father, the Prince of Wales, is 56.

Tom Parker Bowles, shiftless lager lout-cum-moderately successful food columnist, is 30. His sister Laura Parker Bowles, fellow aspiring journalist, is 25. Their mother, Camilla Parker Bowles, is a one-hundred-percent post-menopausal 57.

In other words, the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles has nothing, but nothing, to do with children.

These two people, who have neither the desire nor the means to procreate, will obviously do nothing to harm society, and no one is objecting to their union on such grounds. In fact, I've yet to see a principled argument raised in anger against any man-woman couple, be they real or hypothetical, no matter if they too lack the desire, the means, or both, to bring children into the world and raise them to fruitful adulthood.

And yet, to accept the "think of the children" argument against gay marriage, I must believe that every man-man or woman-woman couple, necessarily lacking the traditional means for childbirth but very possibly possessing the necessary desire, will somehow "weaken" the institution of marriage as a whole. Marriage is about children, in other words, except when it isn't — like with Charles and Camilla — but even then it still is, symbolically, except when it's homosexuals who are doing the marrying, in which case it is not about children, and not only is it not, but it actually negatively impacts the lives of the men and women and children living in all the straight marriages that are, or aren't, about children.

No sale.

There are compelling arguments to be made against gay marriage, and they have much less to do with what marriage is than with what marriage (civil marriage, that is) is for. Why does the government encourage (i.e., pay) people to marry? If it's simply to promote childbirth, then giving the same benefits to homosexual couples, senior citizens and virile twenty-somethings strikes me as downright foolish. I'm not saying that argument is watertight — indeed, I think marriage is about far more than childbirth — but it does have a few things going for it: it isn't anti-homosexual, it isn't entirely nonsensical, and it tugs at the purse-strings. Stephen Harper would do very well to use it, or something like it. I shan't wait up.