Your existence has been noted in passing

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 2:27 PM - 143 Comments

Canadian Press discovers that Jason Kenney ordered the removal of references to gay rights and same-sex marriage from the new citizenship guide.

When the new guide was released Nov. 12, Mr. Kenney brushed off a reporter’s question about why it lacked any reference to same-sex marriage. ”We can’t mention every legal decision, every policy of the government of Canada,” he said. ”We try to be inclusive and include a summary. I can tell you that if you were to read the old book, you wouldn’t even know that there are gay and lesbian Canadians.” He then noted the caption under Mr. Tewksbury’s photo.

That caption, appearing on page 26 of the guide, reads, “Mark Tewksbury, Olympic gold medallist and prominent activist for gay and lesbian Canadians.”

One great thing about gay marriage: it's simple.

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 5:12 AM - 19 Comments

From England comes news of a couple who want their romantic and economic partnership recognized under the law, but who just don’t have the “right” sexual orientation for it. Oh, you figure you’ve heard this one before, do you?

What Canadians really believe

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 4:11 PM - 80 Comments

An Ontario court judge will soon decide if Canada’s prostitution laws should be struck down. In British Columbia, the Supreme Court will decide if laws prohibiting polygamy can still be enforced. And in the House of Commons, a private member’s bill would make it legal for the profoundly ill to seek a doctor’s help to commit suicide. As a nation we are reinventing, refining—or undermining—our morality in dramatic fashion. In some instances we are asking the courts to do our thinking for us. But in most cases we forge a national sense of right or wrong in the millions of individual judgment calls we make every day—increasingly without the guidance of organized religion.

With so many moral issues at a crossroads, Angus Reid Strategies undertook a national survey last month asking Canadians to consider 21 ethical issues. Their answers—on issues as diverse as animal rights, prostitution, homosexuality and illegal drug use—show some profound divisions by gender and region. But taken together, they seem to reveal a rather astounding liberal tilt in our morality, albeit with some exceptions. Each Canadian steers by his and most certainly her moral compass, and the wonder is we don’t bump into each other more often.

Consider these six sticky moral situations. Which are the most and the least acceptable to you, and to most Canadians?

1. You plan to have an abortion.
2. You wear a mink coat.
3. You favour killing convicted murderers.
4. You think the dying have the right to commit suicide with a doctor’s help.
5. You don’t care if the drugs you buy have been tested on animals.
6. You support medical research using the stem cells of human embryos.

Let’s start by saying there’s never been a better time to be a Canadian mink, or a seal, or a lab rat. Canadians today are more likely to moralize about the treatment of animals than about the lives of our fellow humans. Just 22 per cent oppose euthanasia, but 41 per cent condemn medical testing on animals, the survey found. Abortion is considered morally wrong by 22 per cent of Canadians, fewer than the 31 per cent who have moral qualms about wearing fur. But while four in 10 oppose animal testing, only 17 per cent take issue with researchers using human embryonic stem cells. As for capital punishment, 53 per cent of Canadians consider it “morally acceptable,” a jump of six percentage points since Reid last asked the question in 2007.

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The unlikeliest of gay icons

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 3:03 PM - 0 Comments

In case you were wondering, Diane Ablonczy voted against the Liberal motion in 2005 that recognized same-sex marriage and voted in favour of the Conservative motion in 2006 that would have reopened the debate.

We’re in the fast lane to polygamy

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 11:10 AM - 266 Comments

What’s my line on legalized polygamy? Oh, I pretty much said it all back in 2004, in a column for Ezra Levant’s Western Standard. Headline: “It’s Closer Than They Think.”

Well, a mere half-decade down the slippery slope and here we are, with the marrying kind of Bountiful, B.C., headed for the Supreme Court of Canada. Five years ago, proponents of same-sex marriage went into full you-cannot-be-serious eye-rolling mode when naysayers warned that polygamy would be next. As I wrote in that Western Standard piece:

“Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.”

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The inevitability of legalized gay marriages

By John Parisella - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 1:42 PM - 32 Comments

A rally to support Iowa Supreme Court's decision to legalized same-sex marriage

A headline in Saturday’s New York Times—41 years to the day Martin Luther King was murdered—stated that “Iowa Court Clears Way for Same Sex Marriage.” If a state supreme court in middle America can find that a law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman is unconstitutional, America had better start bracing itself for the inevitable: Similar laws will eventually be struck down elsewhere. True, only Massachusetts and Connecticut currently allow gay marriages. And yes, with Proposition 8, California banned same-sex marriages just recently. But I predict the Iowa ruling is a sign of things to come.

In 2000, I decided to become involved in a presidential primary in New Hampshire to get some real life, hands-on experience in US politics. Not inclined to conservative politics, I looked to the Democratic field, which included then-vice president Al Gore. Gore was pitted against a serious challenger in the person of the former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley. I chose Bradley’s side because I felt an insurgent’s campaign was more freewheeling and attracted people bent on defending a cause more noble than continuing to wield power. Bradley’s campaign did not disappoint and, within a day or so, I was writing letters alongside his campaign’s gay rights committee to argue that gay rights was the civil rights issue of our day. Of course, this was taking place over 25 years after Harvey Milk’s assassination at the hands of a homophobic colleague in San Francisco. What it showed was that we had not gone as far as we thought in promoting equal rights and fighting discrimination. Bill Bradley had defined the issue in a novel and noble way and the gay community welcomed a straight guy such as myself in their effort to promote a just cause. I must admit this was an illuminating and uplifting  experience. After all, my hero was more Dr. King than Harvey Milk.

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Megapundit: What would Elton John do?

By selley - Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 2:11 PM - 1 Comment

Miscellaneous Canadian news
Canada’s pundits are still all over the shop.

The Calgary Herald’s Don Martin surveys the various motions and proposals up for discussion at the Tories’ convention in Winnipeg and concludes “the Conservatives have buried their old guard ways under a hefty slab of mainstream ideas, even though few seem to fit with the economic challenge of governing today.” No more “abortion-limiting, capital-punishing, immigrant-curbing inclinations,” for example—and even if there were some, everybody knows Stephen Harper would lay an instantaneous smack-down on them anyway. Just lots of little ideas, some affordable, some not, and most of which “would not look out of place on a Liberal party convention floor.” Ouch.

The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin pulls back the mysterious “cloak” that enshrouds Kevin Lynch, Clerk of the Privy Council, whose power has reached such levels that he can safely be considered the second most powerful man in Ottawa. (Third most powerful if you count Earl McRae.) And that power is raising some disquieting questions, Martin notes, as the ostensibly apolitical PCO “increasingly vets communications and access to information requests and has come under criticism from Information Commissioner Robert Marleau for obstructionism.” The media traditionally has little access to the executive branch of government, Martin notes, and that was fine “in the days when power was less concentrated at the centre.” Today, however, he deems this arrangement “inadequate.”

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BTC: In search of our own Obama(s)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 3:14 PM - 0 Comments