What's Right.

The North Goes South

Here's what didn't happen when the Canadian government announced that it would comply with the orders of a high (but not supreme) court and write gay marriage into the law of the land. There were no protests from the country's religious leaders: only mild expressions of concern. There were no angry editorials in any of the country's major newspapers. The leader of the conservative Canadian Alliance party had no comment, and most of the country's other conservative leaders likewise kept silent.

After less than a decade of judicial and political pressure, resistance to same-sex marriage in Canada had crumpled up.

In retrospect, it is amazing how fast this change came upon the country. As recently as 1994, a left-wing government in the province of Ontario introduced legislation that would have granted spousal rights to same-sex couples-and had to drop the idea when its own backbenchers mutinied. In 1995, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Egan v. Canada that a homosexual man who had cohabited with another could not claim his partner's old-age pension because they were not "spouses."

Yet even then, it was difficult to be optimistic about the future of the Canadian traditional family.

In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau forced through a radical rewrite of the Canadian constitution that put vast new powers into the hands of the courts. The powers were all the greater because the new constitution was for all practical purposes unamendable-meaning that if the courts did something, it would be virtually impossible for anybody to undo it.

Canadians accepted this transfer of power from elected politicians to unelected judges with astonishing equanimity. Maybe it was the famous Canadian placidity. Maybe Canadians were so fed up with a political system that seemed to deliver nothing but stalemate that they lost faith in self-rule. Or maybe they were simply deceived by all the promises made at the time that Canada's traditionally restrained and deferential judiciary would never, ever take advantage of its new powers.

In the 1990s, they were to be undeceived.

With impressive unanimity, Canadian jurists decided that marriage was the local equivalent of the segregated schools of the old South. In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the province of Alberta had to include "sexual orientation" in its human-rights code. In 1999, the highest court in the province of Ontario ruled that it was illegal discrimination for the province to use the words "man and woman" in its Family Law Act. In 2002 and 2003, courts in Quebec and British Columbia ruled that confining marriage to heterosexuals itself was unconstitutional-and a few weeks ago, Ontario's high court agreed, ordering registrars to begin issuing marriage licenses to homosexual couples immediately.

Meanwhile, the lower courts and the provincial human-rights tribunals worked to criminalize opposition to the same-sex cause. In 2002, a Saskatchewan court ruled that a man could be punished under the province's human-rights code for publishing a newspaper advertisement quoting four Biblical passages condemning homosexuality. In April 2003, the British Columbia College of Teachers suspended without pay a schoolteacher who had written letters to the editor of the local newspaper condemning homosexuality as immoral and urging teachers to uphold moral standards.

Where the courts and human-rights tribunals led, most Canadians meekly followed. By 1996, the percentage of Canadians who accepted same-sex marriage had risen to equal the percentage opposed. By 1999, polls found that a clear majority favored same-sex marriage. Today the majority is quite large, especially among the young: 69 percent of Canadian women aged 18 to 34 favor same-sex marriage.

What happened?

The background to the triumph of same-sex marriage in Canada is the collapse of marriage in the general population. Between 1995 and 2001, the number of couples living common-law rose by 20 percent, to nearly 1.2 million couples; the number of married couples increased by just 3 percent, to 6.4 million. Some 500,000 Canadian children now live in cohabiting households.

The spread of cohabitation seems to have taught Canadians to think about family life in new ways. They are increasingly willing to think of family as a revolving-door arrangement (the average cohabitation lasts only five years), in which parents move in and out of the lives of their own and other people's children.

If you think of coupledom as an ad hoc partnership that may or may not involve children, or if you have become accustomed to the idea that the children in a home will often have a biological relationship with one adult but not necessarily the other, then you will not find same-sex marriage a very exotic idea; indeed, you will be ready to believe that prejudice and hatred are the only possible reasons that somebody might oppose same-sex marriage.

The hard truth is that the demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom of the crisis in marriage much, much more than it is a cause of that crisis. To oppose same-sex marriage effectively, you have to believe that marriage is more than a contract between two consenting adults, more than a claim on employers and the government for economic benefits. You have to believe that children need mothers and fathers, their own mothers and fathers. You have to believe that unmarried cohabitation is wrong, even when heterosexuals do it.

Lose those beliefs and the case for marriage has been lost. It has been lost in Canada. It has been lost in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and France. It will be lost very soon in the United Kingdom. Will it lose in the United States? It is difficult to be very optimistic.