Tue Feb 15/05
They killed Kenney!

If civil marriage is solely about childbirth, I argued yesterday, then there's no reason to afford its benefits to homosexual couples, or sterile or post-menopausal couples, or couples in which one or both members have had their apparatus willingly disabled. Which is also to say, as far as I can see, that there's no reason to afford them any benefits at all — no marriage, no civil unions, no nothing. Because if civil marriage is about childbirth and only childbirth… well, no offence, but you same-sex couples and post-menopausal couples and tube-tied couples just aren't selling what we're looking for. Continue to file your tax returns separately and kindly keep your bad vibes away from virile young Canadians and their sex organs.

Of course, marriage is not solely about childbirth. Even Jason Kenney admits that: "Kenney said [this is CTV's paraphrase] he believes marriage is not an 'exclusively procreative' arrangement — but 'that's the core of it'." [Right, except when it isn't –ed.] But Kenney also says this:

I don't deny that all gays and lesbians [all of them?! –ed.] care for each other and love for each other, and indeed that should be considered in civil union relationships at the provincial level.

And that's where I get really confused. If civil marriage provides a certain level of benefits (X) to married couples who are ready and willing to procreate, then surely someone with Kenney's views should be advocating civil benefits for same-sex couples, if at all, totalling Y, where X minus Y equals the greater contribution to Canadian society that procreative couples make. In other words, if you support treating same-sex couples exactly the same except that they can't have the word "marriage," then surely you've abandoned "childbirth is at the core of civil marriage" in favour of "not being homosexual is at the core of civil marriage." In 2005, for better or for worse, this makes for a poor press release.

In Kenney's defence, his politically inopportune point about homosexuals being perfectly free to get married to anyone, gay or straight, so long as they are of the opposite sex, is entirely correct. I liked his analogy between marriage and veterans' and students' benefits: because I am neither a student nor a veteran, he's saying, I can't lay claim to the various benefits those groups enjoy. Makes sense. But arguing for a veteran's pension when one has never served in the military, or claiming student tax credits when one isn't in school, is crucially different from what gay marriage activists are doing. Their opponents, Kenney among them, have essentially conceded them the tangible benefits and are now arguing for the preservation of the word "marriage". To extend the analogy, it's as if the government granted me my veteran's pension and my student tax breaks, but then, unsatisfied, I demanded that the definitions of "veteran" and "student" be altered to accommodate me.

I am sympathetic to this semantic argument, though I think that most people who cling to it do so mostly as a surrogate for their dislike of homosexuals. But governments should not be defining words. When the vast majority of the combatants in this melee have agreed to grant same-sex couples the same tangible benefits as opposite-sex couples, putting the real business of running this country on the back burner while we rewrite the dictionary is pretty freaking gay.