Marriage Commissioners' Dilemma

In Canada under the umbrella assurances of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, gays have the rights and the protections extended to them that they have long deserved and demanded. Equality under the law of the land was a long time coming, and when it did it encouraged the gay community as much as it did the greater social community within the country to think of itself as a just society.

It was when gays began to demand their right under that same law of equality to go beyond the assurances inherent in the recognition of civil unions, to aspire to the social-religious sanctions of the marriage contract between same-sex couples that a division was breached in public opinion. Many within the public who firmly believe that the institution of marriage should remain a covenant between a man and a woman did not support gay marriage.

This is, after all, their right to free belief in a free and just society. But the law does commit to recognizing the rights of gays to marriage nonetheless. An expression of the interpretation of the law committed to complete equalities among people, one not shared for many who while committed to the concept of equality cannot see the usefulness of diminishing the concept of marriage by extending it to same-sex couples.

The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal has now issued a ruling that commissioners who perform civil marriages may not refuse to perform that ceremony for gays wishing to formally take part in the marriage ritual, despite their own personal religious beliefs. In other words, the legal interpretation is that it is perfectly all right to impose upon one group strictures that offend their religious beliefs in service to the insistence of equality mounted by another group.

This might make some kind of awkward sense if there did not exist many marriage commissioners for whom the performance of gay marriage does not pose a problem. The alternative of seeking out such a commissioner to do marriage duty for same-sex couples appears a sensitive and sensible solution. The Court found otherwise in their great wisdom.

Which is unfortunate. Unfortunate that to accommodate a minority position that insists it is incumbent on all of society to accept a position that appears unreasonable and religion-offending to others, those others' freedoms have been imfringed upon. A most regrettable conclusion to a deliberately vexing problem.