Angry in the Great White North

From the Toronto Sun:

Bill Dalrymple, 56, and best friend Bryan Pinn, 65, have decided to take the plunge and try out the new same-sex marriage legislation with a twist -- they're straight men.

"I think it's a hoot," Pinn said.

They're doing it for the tax benefits. I mean, thanks to Bill C-38, now law, marriage has nothing to do with sex or children or commitment. It's just something to do, like going for drinks, or to a movie, or shaving. You do it because you feel like it, and because it's your right to do it whenever you want and in any way you want.

Now two straight men are going to take advantage of "marriage" for monetary reasons.

This has generated some sharp words:

Words of warning came from Toronto lawyer Bruce Walker, a gay and lesbian rights activist.

"Generally speaking, marriage should be for love," he said. "People who don't marry for love will find themselves in trouble."

To be fair, Walker says that he isn't personally insulted, because "he believes in personal freedoms and rights".

So have come to the end of the line? Marriage was developed as an institution millennia ago to provide stability to society by providing guarantees to men about the paternity of children. Same-sex couples demanded marriage for themselves, even though they cannot have children. So marriage stopped being about children, and therefore stopped being about sex. Now it was about relationships and benefits. But the law doesn't demand any particular emotional relationship, so now all that's left is the tax benefits.

Marriage has moved from the Church to the Tax Department. Fill in this form, and your marriage will be recognized in 4 to 6 weeks. Don't forget to attach your T4s. If you file via e-marriage, your marriage will be recognized within 5 business days. In this case, keep your T4s on file for up to seven years in case of a marriage audit.

So what happens when one of these two in this "couple" meets a woman he likes? If it's serious, then what? Does Bill divorce Bryan? Can Bryan sue Bill over lost benefits? Can he demand alimony?

Why not pursue a parallel marriage? Technically that's bigamy and is illegal under Part VIII of the Criminal Code "Offences Against Conjugal Rights". But Bill and Bryan's "conjugal" relationship is purely financial. Indeed, the word conjugal is defined to mean "of or relating to marriage or to married persons and their relationships". If a married relationship is allowed by law to consist purely of a financial relationship, and that people are allowed to enter into a marriage with the explicit expectation that the relationship is purely financial, then is it bigamy to remain in a financial but not sexual relationship with one partner, and in a sexual but not financial relationship with another?

But that would be wrong. That would be changing the meaning of marriage in such a way that we could not possibly predict the consequences, and just to please a very few number of people. In fact, it would cutting the heart out of marriage altogether, and leaving a meaningless shell behind open to all sorts of abuse by those who are looking out only for their own interests without regard to what marriage means to the community as a whole. Thank goodness for gay rights advocate Bruce Walker arguing that this would be a mistake.

[To those with trouble with this sort of thing, the last paragraph was soaking with sarcasm.]

See more at Outside the Beltway.