North America: US&Canada: Canada Parliament junks marriage in favour of generic business-contract

One continent, two countries I love, and yesterday

Yesterday, the Canadian Parliament finally tottered over the brink into the mindless mediocrity of a Liberal minority government and allies (New Democratic Party casting aside democracy to force support of a bad piece of legislation; and Bloc Québecois, the separatist party normal for Canada but so rapidly casting aside the stifling heritage of its peculiar Roman Catholicism that it supported the same creepy irrationality as the Libs it hates and the Socialist totalitarians on the issue). What a legal majority in the 150s to the minority in 130s of voting Members of Parliament (MPs) decided as now the law of the land is a complete demotion of trad idea of iwoman1man marriage. Marriage is no longer recognized in Canada, not as a distinct form of intimate union, not as a unique life-journey of 1woman1man together across the differences. Neither other form of intimate union, that emerging between 2women vowed to each other, and that between 2men vowed together with the same intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others, manages the great task of the 1woman1man journey to create daily a common journey across these differences. What Parliament did was reduce the state's recognition of intimate unions to its one slim same: two persons only. Ostensibly, I would imagine, the feature of vows as to the intention of permanence and exclusivity remain at least implicit - but the new Pitt Doctrine suggests that the Parliamentary majority and the courts regard those features as pale ghosts from the past. They are merely arguing points in the divorce proceedings when they come, in the division of property, including any children. Marriage does not exist now in Canada; a pale substitute of business contract generically applying to any two persons above a certain age is all Parliament and the courts have left to us. Also, we shouldn't lose site of the fact that 2women intimate unions are not recognized and provided for, as such. They are merely one of the optional products one may find in the can(ada). You know, like the label that says "May contain beef, pork, chicken, turkey or llama meat. May contain peanuts." The heroes of the vote are on the losers' side - some 30 Liberals voted against their party, and one Liberal cabinet minister resigned his post in order to break ranks to help bring up the number of joining the 100 Conservatives (numbers correct within a margin of error). "A damned defeat was made," if I may here quote the Bard.

Yesterday, in the USA, there was no stooping to such irrational and cruel nonsense in the name of a misbegotten abuse of the word "equality," a concept of equality that ignores the differences between the three forms of intimate union. Where in Canada, the Tories (Consersatives) did come up with a flawed alternative draft for a law, using the specious terms "same-sex," which is a generic that doesn't exist except as an abstraction to refer to very diffferent specificities in one breath. What is lost in this abstractive rhetoric is the specificty of either 2women or 2men - that is, the specificity of both - specificities not reducible to one another and which constitute two different orders of societal sphere, among the three different forms of intimate unions that do exist de facto within the societal fabric. Where the Tories in Canada did propose a law that would recognize these in a badly-worded way under "same-sex," as said, and under the obsequious and devious term "civil union," there were other possibilities that the stodgy Tories were not creative enuff to think up. Not creative enuff because the blinders of the Roman Catholic Church kept them from thinking outside the Magestrium wornout thawtforms and public strategies which left the broad Christian, Judaic and Muslim populations bereft of good secular leadership. The problem with the Tories is the problem of its Roman Catholic element which is in mental rigor mortis due to its dependent on the RC doctrine of subsidiarity instead of sphere specificity. The Protestant fundamentalist ranters were perhaps even worse in making it possible - I mean, between the brain-dead RCs and ProtFunds, the Tory party was condemned to a stale alternative that never got to the heart of the matter as far as stating in terms understandable to the whole population what is at stake in the state's recognition of marriage as the priority form, and the validity of the two other forms with other names and conceivably other provisions. There was reason to have said there was no such thing "civil union," but now there is good reason to say there is, since after yesterday that's all there is: the state's recognition of a generic business-contract arrangement, without acknowledgement of something preceding its action, a something made by the couple (in one form or another of the three forms of intimate unions). This distinction regarding the uniqueness of marriage has now been obsolesced and we live in NewSpeakland, where words themselves are products of ideologies and not of deference to pre-existent structural norms for different kinds of societal entities made, in the case of intimate unions, by the specific couple themselves together. In the USA, this reality in regard to marriage has not yet been destroyed in the mental microwave oven that some are trying to get into radiation mode. But, in the USA, the opposite malady persists, where the dividers are trying to piggyback their cruel desire to fry homos in a good old-fashioned oven of hatred where no state of the union can recognize either of the additional two forms of intimate unions that do exist and will exist de facto no matter how blind the law pretends to be, as in Canada. There's a huge union of organized yahoos now at work to capture Bush's support for a plain and simple and veritable support for the trad legal definition of marriage to be enshrined in an amendment to the US Federal Constitution, while allowing the states to decide each in turn what is in its interests and those of its citizens in regard to legal recognition of the two additional forms of intimate unions - none of which, when authentic, is a business contract first and foremost.

Yesterday, the President of the USA, stood firm for the spread of democracy against the tyrants and terrorists. I saw a brilliant TV news show this evening on TVO (TV Ontario) where three panelists said Bush's stand was basically correct (while they thawt his argumentation was flawed), but they gave statistics Bush didn't cite regarding how things in many respects have improved in Iraq. Were Bush was praised for acknowledging there can't be much of a deadline set to pull US forces out of Iraq and our time horizon is better thawt in a 10-year framework. That candour and realism from critics of Bush, is much appreciated. Of course, Canada will be no real help with those realities, as the Liberal government and the people of Canada generally have no problem saying Let the Americans do it. Let the Americans defend us. And: Damn the Americans! It's a disease up here, an disease of epidemic proportions.

I love my two countries, but I saw more of the undesirability of Canadian knuckle-brained politics yesterday than I care to contemplate.

Canada terminates the distinctiveness of marriage for a generic business deal