When the Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that the immemorial definition of marriage as the union between one man and one woman violated the equity provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, social conservatives opposed the short-sighted and egregious activism of the court on many grounds. We argued that, in addition to misunderstanding (and far exceeding) the proper bounds of the state, the court made the future prohibition of polygamy a legal impossibility. Such warnings, however,
were mocked and ignored by the mainstream media as the hateful hyperventilations of hard-core extremists.
Therefore, now that the British Columbia Supreme Court is considering whether the Criminal Code’s current prohibition against
polygamy would be found unconstitutional, we could relish a moment of vindication – but, of course, we can take no pleasure in being proved right. Indeed, it was only the willful blindness of modernizing, leveling progressives that prevented them from seeing the eminently legible writing on the wall.
Even now, one hears social liberals insisting that arguments for same-sex “marriage” do not necessarily bolster the arguments of polygamy advocates. And, indeed, they are technically correct. But their perspective has been, and remains, deeply flawed. The point is not that same-sex marriage ineluctably leads to polygamy; rather, the point is that if there is no valid argument against the definition of marriage as being between two people of different genders, there can be no argument against marriage existing between more than two people. When the courts accepted the arguments for same-sex “marriage,” they made opposition to polygamy all but impossible: the equity provisions of the Charter could be wielded against any type of perceived restriction remaining in the legal definition of marriage. Same-sex marriage advocates proved the definition of marriage was changeable and challengeable; social conservatives simply pointed out that more challengers would inevitably appear. And so they did.
Seven years ago, we were lambasted for being Jeremiahs who insisted that the sky was falling. Now that Chicken Little has proved to be Cassandra, and our derided prognostications have turned out to be prophetic, we can only unhappily repeat the rest of our prediction: plural marriage would follow same-sex marriage, but even that would only be a beginning. After polygamy, there is no possible union of any kind that cannot make a claim to the honor and title society reserves for the married state. So, when couples, trios, and any other such assortments soon appear before Justices of the Peace to say, “I do,” we will simply, and sadly, repeat, “We told you so.”
