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From CatholicInsight.com Reviews - Books
WRITTEN BY Douglas Farrow PUBLISHED BY BPS Books, 2007 ISBN: 0-97844-024-2, Softcover, pp. 132, $15.56 CND
According to Douglas Farrow, the federal government’s redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples threatens freedom. In Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage, Farrow, an associate professor of Christian Thought at McGill University, makes three central arguments to this end.
First, a government that knows not its limits and redefining a millennia- old institution transgresses those limits is a general threat to it citizens.
Second, the state will inevitably be drawn into “a nasty custody battle” with “the natural family unit for the country’s children.”
Third, once homosexual relations are recognized as normal and as valid as heterosexual relationships, the state will stamp out any opposition to the distinction.
Marriage, Farrow reminds readers, is“not merely an institution of restraint” necessary for the society’s moral fibre, but “an institution in which society invests some of its most important ideals.” If marriage includes homosexual couplings, then opposition to this ideal can legitimately be squelched.
We already see this in Europe and Canada, where principled objections to homosexuality are being criminalized and those who hold such views being excluded from participation in public life.
As current examples, witness Canadian human rights commissions being asked to punish religious magazines and political parties for expressing views critical of homosexuality, and the exclusion of Catholic charities in England from adoption services if they refuse to place children with homosexual couples.
That is, if homosexuals are allowed to marry, the freedom to question homosexual behaviour is not likely to be tolerated. Hence it is indeed logical for Janice Gross Stein, a University of Toronto professor, to call for Christian churches to lose their charitable tax status if they continue to consider homosexuality sinful. The problem is not with the consistency, but the premise: that homosexual couples deserve equal treatment in marriage.
Farrow’s observation that the hubris of the all-encompassing, all-knowing state, recognizes the central threat, that of a government that knows no limits. We are about to subjugate ourselves, Farrow warns borrowing from Karl Barth, to a lordship of the lordless, a state that “knows no bounds.” The state’s belligerence in defence of its near official ideology leads to a situation in which the state, not the church, threatens the “division of duties and powers” today.
Farrow says that the earthly authorities fail to understand that“sin is a matter of conscience requiring as a remedy priestcraft, not statecraft.”
The state thus turns the Trudeau/Globe and Mail line about keeping the state out of the nation’s bedroom, on its head, for with same-sex ‘marriage’ the state now assumes that all consensual sex that occurs is a public matter. When the government fails to consider marriage’s central role in the creation of future generations of Canadians, it reduces the civil institution to mere “coupling and copulation” or“state-approved fornication.”
This state would become ever more interfering, enforcing private immorality. How long do you think liberty would last under such a regime? As part of the custody battle for the nation’s children, the main battlefield is education. The state, not parents, will decide what morality children will be taught.
Parents who seek to protect their kids from immoral teaching by home schooling or sending their children to private schools will find a jealous state interfering with the rights of parents to determine how to best educate their children, lest anyone have the audacity to teach that homosexuality is wrong.
Farrow recognizes that the gay activist battle for same-sex ‘marriage’ is not about human rights (if it were, he says, it would have heeded the rights of parents and children), but rather “everything to do with a revolt against the family.”
He traces the largely Marxist roots of homosexual activism against the restraints of marriage and the privileging of family life to conclude that radical homosexuals want to undo marriage, not enjoy its fruits. (With their biological limitations, how can they?)
In the words of one recent manifesto signed by hundreds of American activists and professors, these activists want to go “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage.”
In Canada, we have already seen this with the so-called three-parents case in Ontario in 2007 in which the Court of Appeal recognized a lesbian couple and a boy’s biological but minimally involved father as his legal parents.
The battle for polygamy is being set. And who knows what further challenges to the definition of marriage and family there will be in the not-so-distant future.
It is folly to believe that the issue is closed and that the final result will be the extension of marriage benefits to homosexual couples. Once the male-female restriction is thrown out, there is no reason to maintain other limits.
The state has already demonstrated that it can do away with the man-woman limitation so there is no reason why it need maintain that marriage is limited by a union of two people. If gender does not matter, neither does the number. Other arrangements must and will be accommodated. If marriage is only about sex, not procreation, then whatever sexual arrangements can be imagined can be recognized by law through marriage.
Farrow says the same-sex ‘marriage’ debate is far from over and that declarations by politicians and pundits that the debate is closed is ‘wishful thinking’. This debate will cease when marriage ceases to matter.
That is both an encouragement to hope and reason to worry.
Paul Tuns is editor of The Interim, Canada’s life and family newspaper. Ù © Copyright 2003-2006 by CatholicInsight.com |
