On the face of it, the federal Liberal government’s Bill C-23 is about granting all the privileges and obligations of common-law couples to same-sex partners. Looking just under the surface, we see that the measure would make homosexual unions equal to marriages, since there is currently little difference between common-law partners and spouses in Canadian law. Moreover, as pro-family groups across the country are warning us, it will be but a short step from extending common-law status to homosexual couples to an explicit re-definition of “spouse” and “marriage.” If there is no practical difference between common-law partners (heterosexual and otherwise) and married people, why maintain the “legal fiction” of separate names?

Please don’t tell us it might not happen. Accompanying our lead article this month on Bill C-23 are two charts showing the astonishing “progress” made by the homosexual lobby in re-fashioning Canada according to the gay agenda. (So astonishing, in fact, that it might have been easier had we listed the few areas in which the law has not yet been perverted to suit that agenda.) Each step of the way, the homosexual lobby has demanded just a little more, always skillfully hiding their true goals in order to keep the opposition passive. And each time Canadians grumble a bit, rolling their eyes at the latest pro-gay ruling from the courts and tsk-tsking at the latest capitulation from the legislatures, and then go on about their business. Let no one be surprised a year from now if our Nine Rulers (the Supreme Court of Canada) tell us our “values” have evolved in the previous twelve months, and that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms now requires that we end the “discriminatory” practise of reserving the words “spouse” and “marriage” to opposite-sex couples. And our not-so-benign dictators would be right, in a way: if we’re all agreed that there is no difference between two groups of people, then it really is discriminatory to call them by different names.

When we reach that point, it may finally be clear what the gay agenda has all been about from the beginning: the undermining of the family. Once there is no difference in law between marriage and any other sort of coupling, permanent or temporary, natural or unnatural, then marriage will have ceased to have any recognized social significance. The flurry of gay “victories” in recent years will not, in the end, signify that we have raised homosexual unions, but that we have lowered marriage to the point at which it becomes meaningless. In other words, we will not have recognized a dignity in gay couples that was previously denied, we will have forgotten the dignity of marriage, which was once universally understood. Oh, Canada, indeed.

David Curtin, editor-in-chief