Ethics: Intimate Unions: Legal Recognitions: A warm welcome to GayandRight from refWrite + critique
Today, the staff of refWrite welcomes to our Blogroll on the right-hand margin the conservative Canadian blog, GayandRight. Since G&R forthrightly continues "supporting gay marriage." our warm welcome includes making our own refWrite approach clear both to GayandRight and to all our other readers and blogging colleagues listed. We commissioned one of our number to compose in the firs-person singular, a critique to which we could all assent. And we decided to run it here today as a blog entry, while also placng our Welcome+Critique somewhat more permanently in the midst of our Blogroll entries and other matter in the right-hand margin. Do click-up G&Rfrom time to time, and enjoy the full scope of their skills, conservative concerns and contribution to Canadian political thinking across the spectrum, among which concerns G&R's support for "gay marriage" is but one, albeit an important one. For refWrite - Owlb, Politicarp, Anaximaximum, and Scowlie Owlbie (intern).
I strongly disagree with Gayand Right's position in "supporting gay marriage." To me, the very term "gay marriage" is an oxymoron that robs the word "marriage" of its precise function to indicate a unique kind of intimate union, the particular kind constituted one man and one woman, a distinct kind of intimacy where the two partners for life (wife and husband) together cross the gender difference between them, actually a constellation of physiological, tempermental, and gender differences which could become a boundary to the extent of a barrier to the couple's fullest possiblity of journeying amidst differences together - something that is an irreducible part of their particular kind of union. Included in that 1man1woman particular kind of intimacy, mutuality and reciprocity there are some specifics of difference that need to be respected in detail, yet as a constellation - the whole bio-structural, physicochemical-nutritional, mood patternings and life-phases characteristics, trends, and risks medically - to give but one trajectory of examples.
The privileging and prioritization of each 1woman1man union (with full legal recognition when the couple asks for it and willingly seals it for such public-legal recognition by exchanging the necessary vows and having them recorded for the purpose of the state's documentation; but also to some measure, public-legal recognition for time-tested enduring common-law relationships as well): all this is proper to the state in deciding upon recognition, regulation and various measures of support at law. The state, it should be interjected here, has to set its priorities in its own interests, in order to fulfill its own typifying task. Even in the recognition of 1woman1man intimate unions, however, the woman is less served in our present medicine than is the male - whether he be a husband in traditional marriage, a single male (perhaps or perhaps not dating or courting), or two males in a male-homo intimate union. We males are benefitted with a male-determined medicine in Canada and all North America, but one that does not serve women and girls as well as they deserve. This becomes important in deciding to recognize or withold recognition from the intimate unions of two women. An intimate union between two women, who correspondingly take upon themselves publicly, vows of intended permanence and "to the exclusion of all others" in the functions of complete partnered-intimacy, could be recognized in law as such, without "reducing" that kind of intimate union to the same kind of union that obtains between two males. A Lesbian intimate-union is different from a male-homo intimate-union, and both are different from a marriage, which latter requires a unique kind of journeying together, in difference from both the other kinds.
The state should priortize marriage as such, from among these three kinds of intimate unions, whether or not the provinicial or Federal state actually comes to recognize by a decision of the voters thru their Parliamentarians the other two kinds of intimate unions, separately. I advocate the position of Stephen Harper's proposed alternative legislation which sharply contrasts - tho it does not do so quite well enuff for me, since it carries forward the myth of a generic "same-sex" intimate union, where instead Harper and the Tories should honour the difference between a Lesbian union and a male-homo union, so as to achieve a coherent set of thawts to back up policy of the Canadian state on these questions - but to be sure, I still am with Harper in sharp contrast to Paul Martin's ram-thru legislation to destroy the traditional definition of marriage and to deny both its inherent structural uniqueness and also to undermine the prioritization at law that it deserves. It was for these two reasons, I believe, that Paul Martin packed the Supreme Court of Canada, and in the glaring lite of his sham "review" of the appointed justices, the Court itself did not dare simply decide the issue in question, but referred the matter back to the Prime Minister's minority government. The vote on the proposed Martin legislation to destroy the legal basis of the uniqueness of traditional marriage has been postponed, after the governmebnt nearly fell on the issue of the NDP's May add-on to the February 5 budget. We are at an interim.
The continuing problem that will derive from the erroneously generic notion of "same-sex" - which notion is a terminological condition of denial about the difference in kind and need that may be justly determined regarding female same-sex couples in contrast to male same-sex couples - a continuing problem that Harper's approach cannot root out, due to the jurisprudential-mendacity buildup in the Canadian courts which are palpably determined for ideological reasons to re-write the list of Rights in the Charter, and so subvert the Constitution of Canada - which served it's day but which is proving to have been horribly conceived just a few decades after enactment. It was done in haste. and was seized upon by a newly risiging ideological philosophy of law that will hurt us all in the end. GayandRight can't see past the abuse of "equality" to wipe out differences by reducing everything of a sort to a kind: "the same." I say marriage, Lesbian intimate union, and male-homo union - none of these three are the same as the others, each is different, each is a kind of a certain sort; that is, they are all intimate unions, the closest sort of human ethical bondings, but they are different kinds of ethical bondings. - A staff member, homo Christian of refWrite
We invite the ladies and gentlement who produce GayandRight to compose a reply to this blog entry. And, if permitted, we would be happy to republish it here for all our own blog readers to reflect on. - Owlb
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