Canada recently elected social extremist Stephen Harper as a Prime Minister. Harper is against gay marriage.
I am a conservative, family and community based citizen and therefore support gay marriage.
Criminals, pimps, prostitutes, sex offenders and Stephen Harper are allowed to be married. The human rights of these citizens are defended in higher status than gays in many countries. I was proud that Canada put gays rights at least as valuable as a pimp on July 20, 2005.
If the extremist governement of Harper believes that traditional families are defined for having children, then shouldn't all infertile women and men not be allowed to get married? How about couples long divorced and with grown children? Should it be illegal for them to marry?
Marriage isn't just about children otherwise we would consider elderly and infertile people ineligible for marriage.
Denmark legalized gay marriage in 1989 and has seen reduced suicide rates and reduced sexually transmitted diseases. Studies show that married people are happier and are healthier therefore this relieves medical benefits for employers and the state.
During the SARS outbreak I was admitted to an emergency ward in downtown Toronto. The hospital was hauntingly quiet no visitors and no voluteer staff. I came to appreciate the valuable irreplaceable efforts that help run a hospital by seeing it function without its support staff and family visitors. I would have normally imagined I would want a private room but I was so pleased to have the company of other patients. We were not allowed visitors unless they were a spouse. For a glass of water or cup of tea we had to burden the already overwhelmed nursing staff. A hospital is dependant on volunteers, nuns, priests rabbis, family and spouses to help patient care and smooth the burdens on health care professionals. It was a lonely frightening few days.
I came to respect the rights of gays more than ever for gay marriage. Medical decisions would be protected for both partners/spouses and most importantly, any children. Who would visit a child in the hospital? Who would visit school plays, parent teacher meetings, and represent a child in legal matters? We are inviting a new kind of orphan with rejecting the rights to gay couples and families to represent their kids and each other.
We don't have to agree , like or believe in gay peoples sexual orientation to be tolerant. What kind of human are we to allow a child to function as an orphan or a patient to be left marooned within the health care system. We should want to protect inheritance laws that straights already have grown comfortable facilitaitng. Other legal and human rights issues are involved including conjugal visits the idea of justice where a spouse would be forced to testify against their partner and the loss of real estate and lifes work due to ignorance or lack of empathy in the well protected comfortable world of straights. A convict serving time for armed robbery can have conjugal visits. A white collar gay convict can not.
Don't let intolerance and cynicism guide you Canadians! Don't let Stephen Harper talk you out of love and compassion. After political fat cats have a long summer holiday with their families... don't let a few politicians this coming autumn corrupt the proud human rights acheivements of Canada.
I follow a blog called Desert Odyssey by a fun military guy Lucky. This week he was a guest blooger on a another persons blog here. He is an unlikely soul to inspire me with his definition of a family for a post about gay marriage, but inspire me he does with the following universal sentiments...
"To me a family unit is not simply numbers, like a definition of a husband, wife, and 2.5 kids. A family is not a unit just by being a family. It becomes a unit when it becomes one, like parts of a body. When separated the unit suffers as a whole, and the only cure to that unit is to bring them back together again." Lucky
ADDENDUM: In December, 2006, Canada turned down Harper's attempt to outlaw gay marriage. Yippee Canada! Here is the story.
20 comments:
Marriage is about love. My genes made me heterosexual n I'm glad 'cause I've got Little Caz as a result. If they'd made me homosexual I'd have had Little Gaz instead. Who cares. Long as you love someone n they love you end of. Get yer act together Canada.
I have to agree with you on that Candy!
I expected better of Canada for some reason.
You CAN have same sex marriage in Canada right now. This new Prime Minister wants to drop it after summer holidays. He wants the Parliment to vote in September. To their credit, most of those senators say the deal is done and don't want to reopen it. Hopefully they will stick to representing the public rather than this asshole new Prime Minister. (he is anti-womens rights too!!! His handlers told him to staop talking about gays and women so he could get elected and unfortuantely voters have a six month memory. That is why I looked up older articles about him to read his unsupressed opinions)
As a Canadian, I'm pretty pissed off about this vote that's going to happen in the fall. Trust the Cons to reopen something that was pretty much settled. Thing is, I'm not sure marriage is a federal jurisdiction; I believe it is provincial (that's why it's legal in some provinces and not others). I don't see the point of making it a federal issue, especially in a political climate where the provinces want more power and the feds are wanting to offload all kinds of other issues onto them (like funding for cities, for instance).
So I'm not happy, and I didn't vote for Harper. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt at the beginning, but he's screwed up one too many times. My hope is that the opposition parties will come through in the fall.
I wish the Gay Marriage debate would vanish. In a world where people are dying for no good reason and discrimination, why are we worried with what people do in their bedrooms?
This is why I love Pierre Trudeau. Sure, he spent alot but he always held the belief that the government should keep their eyes out of the bedroom of it's citizens.
Ah, Trudeau, how I miss thee.
Bush was on about it according to the BBC this week.
Its so people forget about THE TOTALLY ILLEGAL WAR IN IRAQ.
whoops
Also THE US TROOPS ARE KILLING CIVILLIANS AGAIN.
whoops
no the evil in the world is obviously due to people with moustaches getting married.
Oh, what do you look like?
This is a great entry Candy...I couldn't agree with you more, way to go :)
I'm actually on the GI diet (glycemic index), it's the one most diabetics are recommended to go on, I'm not diabetic, but the thing is, if you eat foods that are lower on the G.I scale, you'll be less hungry (because of how it works with your insulin), and usually they have less calories.
I am actually trying to remove caffeine from my diet, because caffeine triggers a release of insulin, so it makes you more hungry, a no-no for losing weight ;)
You said it - couldn't agree more. I'm a male hetrosexual through a trick of nature and luckily I found a female hetrosexual who loved me so we married. We have children becasue we were lucky and could have them. But say we'd tried and found we couldn't for some reason - would our marriage be any less valid? Nonsenee. Why can't others have the same chance? I've seen this is England - the new civil partnerships (aka gay marriage) is I think a reasonable solution. Particularly as you say the rights of partners to be involved in their partners life choices esp in hospitals etc. It's madness not to allow that.
Right on Candy.
Could anyone explain to me how gay marriage threatens the institution of (straight) marriage? I've never understood that argument. I just can wrap my head around it. How is allowing people who love each aother to enter in a sacred covenant going to destroy traditional families? And if it were the case, should divorce be outlawed? And Las Vegas drive-in weddings?
The last election was really a good example of the elector's short political memory. The same party, with the same candidates, that a few months before advocated getting rid of rights like gay marriage and abortion, simply stop talking about it in public and suddenly, people forget that that's what the Cons are about.
The same thing happened here in Quebec. People elected (former Conservative leader) Charest, who had said, before the campaign, that he admired Harris and would do the same things he did. And once elected, that's exactly what he did. And how did people react? They claimed that they never voted for that! Amazing.
It may be against nature, no one gets killed or hurt because two people who love each other want to live together. We have bigger problems to deal with Candy.
We do have bigger problems to live with. And many people have expressed this to me over the years. Rauf and Antoine you both make this point.
I feel however, that we are a multi-tasking animal and complex enough to not have to be only single issue people.
We can care about gay rights and womens rights(Harper is also against womens rights) AND...we can solve our more pressing environmental concerns.
I believe we have life and death concernes for the environment. Absolutely but I beleive we can multi task...especailly when we respect the simple needs of our populations, those very citizens will have the time to turn their actions towards the community, that also embraced them....
it is a cycle it's not a list or a straight line.
All our human challenges intertwine...
I think perhaps we should rename "gay marriage" to anti-bureaucracy features...because after all it is the bigots and haters working within bureaucracies who use the laws to hinder movement for their victims.
I believe we can multi-task our challenges within our communities.
Beautiful post Candy...thanks for taking the time to put it so eloquently!
Good post on the subject. I just don't get why people get their panties so in a twist about gay couples. It's bizarre.
I wonder if the Western world continues to embrace radical feminism and gay marriage will our birth rate fall even lower? And if our birth rate falls even lower will our defeat by the rapidly growing numbers of Islam occur even faster?
Great post, well done.
Yes. Why make distinction between man and pigs. Both should be treated equally. CANADA Rocks!!
Ma chérie, je suis gay, je connais bien le milieu gay, je suis aussi de droite nationale, mais je suis contre (against) le mariage gay , car c'est une hérésie et un vrai danger pour la civilisation.
La France, contrairement au Canada, est un vieux pays, avec une culture, une architecture, une histoire etc.
Nous souffrons de beaucoup trop d'immigration, de lois de la république francs-maçonnique, et d'une domination poilitique sioniste. c'est une catatstrophe. Le mariage gay serait une nouvelle catastrophe de civilisation car elle contribuerait à détruire la famille.
je t'embrasse !
(I could say it in english but so it makes you practice your french)
For others, being gay, I know much better than you the gay problem, do not share at all your ideas about gay marriage, not at all ! II am a chirstian, It would mean a total collapse of old civilisations like mine. NO !
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