The position adopted by the Liberal party as the government of Canada, in pushing ahead with Bill C-38 on same-sex marriage, is based upon the argument for equality.
It has taken the view that denial of same-sex marriage is a violation of section 15, dealing with equality provisions, in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The remedy proposed, to be debated in Parliament, is redefining traditional marriage between a man and a woman to mean "the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others."
Among the many difficulties with that position, apart from the wisdom of wrecking a traditional institution that is not of its creation, is the narrowly enabling manner in which the Liberals use the meaning of equality to offer a dubious remedy.
We learned from experience of the last century how parties on the left and the right appealed to the idea of equality in legitimating their contrary political objectives in organizing society.
It is undeniable that the pursuit of equality as good in itself is desired by all, yet it is also undeniable that there remains a difference, for instance, between formal and substantive equality.
Formal equality is about denying some existing inequality of treatment, such as slavery or colonialism, that subverts the idea -- as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 -- of all human beings being "free and equal in dignity and rights."
Formal equality is about equal opportunity in society for all individuals, irrespective of their ethnicity, gender, faith, or physical or mental disability, under the rule of law.
Substantive equality is about distributive justice pursued as policy by state authority to arrive at an equal outcome or result among individuals or different groups of people with varying capabilities and characteristics.
Inevitably, as history illustrates, the resulting equality is effected by coercive or authoritarian means at the disposal of the state. Yet in pursuing an equal outcome, uniformly grave wrong is done to people individually or in groups.
In the matter of same-sex marriage, the Liberal party is fixated with the pursuit of substantive equality, regardless of what it must break to effect an equal outcome in the meaning of marriage.
The traditional institution of marriage derives its legitimacy, apart from the sort of special status given it by most religions, from how nature works. Its common sense meaning of union between opposite sexes rests on the natural order of living matter, and not the edicts of states, passing fashions of public opinion or the manipulation of living cells in a petri dish.
Formal equality among sexes, and their sexual preferences, is not invalidated by traditional marriage, unless it can be shown this institution by some mechanism has cast a veto on whatever arrangement homosexual and lesbian couples seek for recognizing their union by the state.
This is not the case. Most defenders of traditional marriage are not opposed to the state working out a legal arrangement by which unions of homosexual and lesbian couples are duly recognized and protected, if this is what section 15 of the charter requires.
But the Liberal party has not convincingly explained, nor can it, why it must hollow out the traditional meaning of marriage in pursuing the goal of substantive equality between the union of homosexual and lesbian couples, and the union of a man and a woman in traditional marriage.
This is why the remedy offered -- redefining marriage to suit the political needs of the Liberal party elite and fashionable tastes of influential lib-left opinion makers in society -- is spurned by a majority of Canadians, out of common sense and not bigotry.
