Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Gay marriage gossip (click to view)
Date: January 13, 2012
If any ambitious student is ever searching for an elegant case study of how social media is making us all more ignorant, biased, and lazy when it comes to consuming news, the last two days of Canadian political drama would be an excellent place to start.
For some time now, Canadian liberals have been in a bit of a pickle. During their country's long heyday of Liberal rule (1993-2006), many of them grew quite smug and complacent about their ability to control the nation's patriotic narrative. They took it for granted, in short, that Canada was a fundamentally liberal country, and it would be forever ruled under something resembling a "liberal consensus" that certainly did not involve professional right-wing demagogues like Stephen Harper. But then Stephen Harper was elected anyway. Cue the confusion and paranoia.
Though Harper has not governed as much of a radical, some sectors of the Canadian left remain so convinced of the incompatibility of conservative politicians with the liberal consensus that they believe he must plan to eventually. Thus, the permanence of one of the most tired tropes of modern Canadian politics: the Conservative hidden agenda to chip away at all the liberal gains of the last decade.
On Thursday morning, the liberal-leaning Globe and Mail published a front page story noting that a lawyer representing the Harper administration had recently filed a brief in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in which he appeared to suggest the government should disincentivize the fad of "gay marriage tourism" which had become briefly fashionable after Canada legalized the practice in 2005.
Actually, to even phrase it that way is to cast unduly sinister aspersions on what were really fairly benign motives. Common-law precedent has long held that marriage tourism of any sort — ie, when a couple marries in a country outside of their own — is only ever legally valid in the long-term so far as the bride and groom's country agrees to recognize it.
Thus, the position of this one, faceless government lawyer was that a certain foreign lesbian couple — a Briton and an American — who had wed in Canada in 2005 and now wished to return to Canada to divorce, were not really married in Canada at all, since neither of their home countries' recognized the validity of their Canadian marriage.
If this sounds like a fairly arcane, lawyerly argument, it's because it is. But it's also precedent, and has long been applied to couples of all nationalities, gay or straight, who trope around the world getting married under wildly different laws than their own countries recognize. This particular lesbian couple appeared to be pressing the point mostly for self-gain; they were demanding $30,000 in damages from Canada's "discriminatory" marriage laws that had the audacity to demand they live in Canada in order to stay married in Canada and eventually gain the right to divorce in Canada.
Well, God help you if you were a Canadian on Facebook or Twitter this Thursday. Endless LGBT blogs seized on the Globe story, rephrased and summarized it a few times, and then churned out scandalous headlines about how "gay marriage was under attack in Canada" and how the Harper government was finally showing its true colours and eroding one of the hallmarks of the Canadian liberal order. Good old Dan Savage, who I am getting more than a little tired of, weighed in immediately, declaring that he and his partner — who had gotten married in Vancouver — were automatically "divorced last night" thanks to Harper. A Baltimore lesbian was apparently "in tears" over the news, according to a CBC story with a wonderfully behind-covering headline ("Is same-sex marriage at risk in Canada?"). Within hours, one guy had even churned out this website, apologizing to the whole wide world that Canada had allowed Stephen Harper to take charge. It now has over 18,000 Facebook likes.
Later that afternoon, the controversy eventually made its way to the Prime Minister himself, who repeated the same thing he's been saying for years and years: his government is not opposed to same-sex marriage and has absolutely no plan to de-legalize it. In an act of good will, the Justice Minister even declared that he would soon introduce legislation to Parliament to undo eons of common-law precedent, and uphold the perpetual international legality of all Canadian marriages performed in Canada, even if the home country doesn't recognize them and the partners don't live in Canada. In the words of one legal blog, this is very much the "kind of xenophobic approach [that] offends the principles of international comity and is generally frowned upon."
Got that? Not only is this government supportive of same-sex marriage, it is now apparently prepared to violate all sorts of understood international legal customs in order to aggressively prove it to the world.
The whole episode was a truly disgraceful example of what an ignorant game of telephone social media has become when it comes to discussing current events. A story is repeated and retold, repeated and retold, picking up all sorts of colorful new facts and spin and conspiracy theories along the way. Eventually, even if the facts people are repeating to each other no longer bear any passing resemblance to reality, it's still a "controversy" that deserves attention by sheer virtue of existing. And then we start to comment on the controversy, and the whole gross cycle begins anew.
There are a lot of liberals and leftists in this country who just want to believe the absolute worst about the Harper government, and they're certainly welcome to do that. And there's clearly a lot of liberal nationalists who are facing some sort of deep, existential dilemma from seeing their supposedly perpetually liberal country under conservative rule, and I guess I can sympathize with that, too. But there is really no excuse for the depths of willing, eager, paranoid ignorance in which much of this country's left is willing to wallow.
Even if you're a Harper hater, one has to wonder if the man is really worth destroying the civility of Canadian public discourse over.
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