Frank Kennedy
Queen’s Park

The same-sex “marriage” issue is not dead. Just because Stephen Harper says it’s dead doesn’t make it dead. In show business, they have an old expression: it’s not over until the fat lady sings. Harper will be surprised to find the fat lady hasn’t sung.

It was a stupid, convoluted, contrived, contradictory, contemptuous motion that was already slated for doom before it was brought before the House of Commons. The 125 MPs that voted for this transparent piece of fakery were only indicating that this issue was far from dead. At least the Clarity Bill had clarity.

Harper tried to play the violin and the piano simultaneously. First, he announced he was voting in favour of the motion. He was listed as being in favour of it. So, what did he do to push it?  Nothing. Did he turn the troops loose on it? Did all of his cabinet ministers skip breakfast and hurry to the airport and head off to the hustings breathing fire and smoke to round up support for the motion? No. Any frantic phone calls from PMO underlings to members to follow the leader? No.

Both Liberals and Conservative MPs were told that it was a free vote.

On the contrary, PMO flunkies told Conservative MPs if they voted in favour of the motion, they would be “assassinating their own careers.” That doesn’t sound like a free vote. It sounds like the PM is reading from the Putin prayer book. Even in Stalin’s time, you had a choice when it came to voting. You had four Communist candidates running.

Whatever happened to majority rules? The homosexuals haven’t won a country-wide poll yet. Peterborough Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro polled his riding and found that 70 per cent of people wanted the traditional definition of marriage restored. This national craze toadying to a belligerent homosexual minority is destroying the very concept of democracy.

Harper is wrong if he thinks the old question, “Are you still beating your wife?” is a properly framed question. If Harper gets his back to the wall and uses a Canada-wide plebiscite to pull up his ratings and puts forward a similar same-sex Mickey Mouse motion to the one he came up with in December, he is going to hazard losing what credibility he has left.

In all fairness to Harper, he made friends in the pro-life community with the recent appointment of David Brown as an Ontario Supreme Court judge. Brown defended pro-lifers in court in his earlier career as a lawyer. Yes, Harper shut down a host of Liberal lesbian front agencies across Canada that used millions of taxpayers’ dollars to sue the government. (You bunch of freeloaders, kindly use your own money!) And Harper did come through with his election promise to re-visit the same-sex “marriage” issue.

But even Harper’s transparently phony tactics of allowing a muddled motion on the issue would have been easily winnable if the Liberal party wasn’t so anxious to get into bed with the homosexuals and the lesbians. Thirteen pro-life Liberals voted for it and 13 pink Conservatives voted against it. Harper was obviously play-acting and would have kicked himself if his motion had passed.

Harper was the man with a dagger behind the curtain. He could hardly hide his joy at the motion being defeated. I watched a number of Liberal and NDP MPs in Parliament denounce the whole vote as an outright fraud. It was.

Brian Rushfeldt, executive director of the Canada Family Action Coalition, who fought valiantly for the cause, suspected the fix was in while seeing there were often only 10 of 308 members in the House as this extremely important issue was being debated.

Rushfeldt felt that the federal Conservative party had abandoned its conservative values and its core base of support. He said, “The ‘progressive’ Conservatives who are, in essence, liberals, have taken control of the party now. True Conservatives are going to be disgusted.” True conservatives are not going to support a party that doesn’t support their values. Rushfeldt suggests such Canadians are likely to do at election time what Americans did during the recent U.S. national elections, when George Bush abandoned his pro-life agenda – they will simply stay home.

What happened to George Bush might happen to a certain Machiavellian character Stephen Harper. Bush lost control of the House and the Senate. Harper doesn’t have to worry about losing the Senate..