In the Canadian magazine Macleans , Mark Steyn reminds us that some slopes really are slippery :
What’s my line on legalized polygamy? Oh, I pretty much said it all back in 2004, in a column for Ezra Levant’s Western Standard. Headline: “It’s Closer Than They Think.”Well, a mere half-decade down the slippery slope and here we are, with the marrying kind of Bountiful, B.C., headed for the Supreme Court of Canada. Five years ago, proponents of same-sex marriage went into full you-cannot-be-serious eye-rolling mode when naysayers warned that polygamy would be next. As I wrote in that Western Standard piece:
“Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.”
Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, the former Supreme Court justice, remains confident the drawbridge is firmly up. “Marriage is a union of two people, period,” she said in Quebec the other day. But it used to be a union of one man and one woman, period. And, if that period got kicked down the page to accommodate a comma and a subordinate clause, why shouldn’t it get kicked again? If the sex of the participants is no longer relevant, why should the number be?
Ah, well, says Mme L’Heureux-Dubé, polygamists don’t enjoy the same societal acceptance as gays. “I don’t see a parade of polygamists on Ste-Catherine Street,” observes the great jurist, marshalling the same dazzling quality of argument she used back in her days as the Supreme Court’s most outspoken activist on gay issues. A decade ago, she and Justice Michael Kirby, Australia’s most senior gay judge, traipsed from one gay-rights confab to another like the Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall of the international judicial cocktail circuit. But perhaps, back home in Canada, her ladyship ought to expand her excursions beyond the Ste-Catherine Street gay pride march. If you check in with, ahem, certain cultural communities in Canada, you will find polygamy not just “accepted” but government funded. It was confirmed last year that in the province of Ontario thousands of polygamous men receive welfare payments for each of their wives. There are many more takers for polygamy than there ever will be for gay marriage.
