Marriage and gays. (News in Brief: Canada).

Ottawa--" Marriage is threatened but not by gays," wrote Linda Williamson, senior associate editor of the Toronto Sun in her column of November 3,2002. Statistics Canada shows that the traditional family is in big trouble; fewer people are living in the traditional nuclear family, and more and more are living in sin. Marriage is being discounted in Quebec, where 30% of couples live common-law. But the same-sex couples, in all of Canada, amount to only 34,200 or 0.4% of all couples, or one in 200.

Canadians are marrying later, or not marrying at all; they are having fewer children; the number of single parent families has risen to 16%. Blame high taxes, materialism, liberalized divorce laws, and modern attitudes to having children out of wedlock. But, says Williamson, don't blame gays. All of which, she writes, will likely factor into the federal government's dithering over whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to marry. "As one who went from living common-law to eventual marriage... ,I wholeheartedly welcome them to the party." "Besides" she adds, "given these figures, Canada's wedding industry is going to need all the new customers it can get."

In an open e-mail letter to her, one correspondent, Robert A. Jason said that he was troubled "by your ceaseless and biased promotion of the homosexual agenda, abusing your position as an editor to promote (mostly uncritically and unscientifically) a destructive lifestyle harmful to society. You represent the Canadian media which are overwhelmingly socially liberal, and which present a one-sided perspective on the contentious issue of human sexuality, particularly homosexuality and the homosexual agenda."

He complains that Williamson and other newspaper columnists do not tell the truth about the homosexual lifestyle, particularly its rampant promiscuity and disease-chiefly AIDS, but also other horrid STDs.

Comment:

Jason is quite right in his description of bias in the media. But he might also complain that they, and other pressure groups, including courts and parliament, cannot create something which has never existed-the "right" of homosexuals to "marry." There has never been any such thing as homosexual "marriage" in Canada, or any other country in the world (except today in the Netherlands and Belgium). The three Ontario judges who on July 12, 2002, gave legislatures two years to alter their legislation concerning marriage to include homosexual "relationships" only demonstrated their ignorance of the role of the media 's flippant, facetious attacks on marriage; endorsing homosexual unions further undermines our nation.