Swallowing a camel.

It had to happen.

Same-sex benefits are about to become legal in Canada. So are "gay" marriages.

In May of this year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the province of Ontario's definition of spouse--which previously applied to heterosexual couples only--violates the equality guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by discriminating against "gays" and lesbians.

The landmark ruling by the high court now recognises same-sex spousal support. This means that both federal and provincial governments will have to rewrite hundreds of laws already on the books across Canada.

At issue was a case involving the break-up of two Toronto women. A woman to whom the court refers as "M" wanted her lesbian partner to pay her support after their 12-year relationship ended in 1989.

Writing for the majority in an 8-1 decision, Justices Peter Cory and Frank Jacobucci ruled that such discrimination cannot be justified because it undermines the very purpose of the law--to ease financial hardship for needy individuals after a break-up, and to shift the burden of support off the public welfare system and leave it with individuals who have the capacity to help their ex-partners.

"When a relationship breaks down, the support provisions help to ensure that a member of a couple who has contributed to the couple's welfare in intangible ways will not find himself or herself utterly abandoned," they wrote.

The result is that Ontario now has six months to rewrite a section in its Family Law Reform Act to give homosexuals and lesbians the right to sue for alimony. Otherwise, the court will strike down the section which obliges only married and common-law heterosexual spouses to pay support.

While the high court insisted it was not redefining marriage, merely dealing strictly with the law governing the effects of a relationship break-up, the ruling "effectively accords long-term, same-sex relationships the same weight the law accords opposite-sex unions," said Peter Stock, a spokesman for the Canada Family Action Coalition. Canadians "understand marriage to be (between) a man and a woman, and they're not going to accept this."

Really? Despite Justice Minister Anne McLellan's recent reassurance that in the eyes of the government the word "spouse "refers to a member of the opposite sex, more than 50 per cent of Canadians recently polled have no problem with recognizing a same-sex "marriage" to be as legitmate as a traditional heterosexual marriage.

Considerations of morality and truth notwithstanding, the big winners are the lawyers who will get tons of business from acrimonious gay couples now equipped to fight in court over who gets the toaster. This is progress?

The big losers are truth, marriage and family. As usual.

It's an old-fashioned idea, I know, but all the evidence shows that marriage was instituted by God for the procreation of children and for their safe rearing into adulthood. Within the Church, it also becomes a sacrament, a holy order, an indestructible bond between a couple agreed before God and man. As such, it can be battered, beaten and berated but never dissolved, no matter what the courts decree and no matter how many marriages may falter. And human experience confirms this.

Strangely enough, it is exactly this close bond that many "gay" couples seek with each other. Ditto for the families they have through unnatural means. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it is imitation nevertheless--at best, a poor substitute for the real thing; at worst, a crime against nature.

Naturally, the Vatican rejects such artifice and frowns on conferring legitimacy on homosexual couples by giving them government benefits such as pensions or public housing, or by allowing them to marry. Earlier this year, Pope John Paul publicly deplored efforts to give "gay" unions the same recognition as marriages between men and women. He also lamented the "widespread deterioration of the natural and religious sense of marriage."

The Pope's long-standing position is that homosexuals should be treated compassionately but homosexual sex is out. As is all sex outside marriage.

"It's not possible to ignore the growing phenomenon of simple de facto unions and the insistent opinion campaigns to obtain conjugal dignity for unions even among people from the same sex," he said in January. "It is only in the union between two sexually different persons that the perfection of the individual can occur, in a synthesis of unity and of mutual psychic-physical completeness." He then dismissed as incongruous "the pretext to attribute conjugal reality to the union between people of the same sex."

The Supreme Court of Canada disagrees. So much so that it has gone Out of its way to confer legitimacy on "gay marriage" by stealth. By choosing to rule unnecessarily on a case that was settled some time ago, the high court has ushered in the eventual legitimization of homosexual "marriage" through the back door, regardless of McLellan's assurances.

"You blind guides!" Jesus warned the scribes and Pharisees. "You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! Woe to you." He might have been describing the Supreme Court of Canada.

Paula Adamick writes from London, England. Her column appears here every other issue.