Thu Feb 17/05
No, the other kind of H-bomb

This is the best speech I've ever read by Stephen Harper. It's needlessly long — so very, very long — and it doesn't cover any new ground (and nor should it, really, since it was given on day one of the "official debate"), but it makes Paul Martin look really dumb, which is nice. It's also pretty much coherent, and it makes a rather convincing case for an underutilized argument against gay marriage, namely, incumbency:

I believe [the traditional] definition of marriage has served society well, has stood the test of time and is in fact a foundational institution of society. In my view the onus is on those who want to overturn such a fundamental social institution to prove that it is absolutely necessary, that there is no other compromise that can respect the rights of same sex couples while still preserving one of the cornerstones of our society and its many cultures.

I agree, and I agree with Harper that marriage is not necessarily a "human rights" issue. As I've written in the past few days, if marriage is a union between a man and a woman — never mind how or why for now — then no one but man-and-woman couples are entitled to it, full stop. The best case for Paul Martin's conception of gay marriage would involve proving that marriage isn't a union between a man and a woman. That is bloody hard to do.

But I've been through all this ad nauseum. Point is, I was mildly impressed by this speech. "Much more of this sense-making," I thought to myself, "and I could even consider wetting the end of my Conservative voting pencil." Then I got to page 12 (my emphasis):

The basic human rights we hold dear: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and equality before the law, the kind of rights that are routinely violated by the Prime Minister's good friends in states such as Libya and China, are well understood and recognized around the world.

Where's Stephen? Where's Stephen? There's Stephen! Stephen taking  cheap shots; Stephen annoying the hell out of me; Stephen setting his future government up for colossal embarrassment. (Downgrade relations with the world's biggest consumer, will you? Can we have that engraved in granite?)

That was just a warm-up, though, for this:

Quite frankly the Liberal Party, which drapes itself in the charter like it drapes itself in the flag, is in a poor position to boast about its human rights record. Let us not forget it was the Liberal Party that said none is too many when it came to Jews fleeing from Hitler.

Whoops! Conservative voting pencil dried, destroyed and forgotten about. And Harper wants to vet his MPs' speeches? What an idiot.