Twenty years ago today, I stood on Parliament Hill with some 15,000 other Canadians, of many races, religions, and walks of life. We were there to object to Bill C-38, the bill by which something called same-sex marriage was to become the law of the land. I gave a short speech (believe it or not, I'm capable of brevity) to which you can listen below. The recording resurfaced just last week. Some readers may want to listen to it first, but I’ll put it at the end anyway.

I want to mark the twentieth anniversary by reminding you of this signal event, which was spearheaded by John Pacheco under the rubric “March for Marriage and Freedom.” Few expected there to be so many in attendance, gathering from near and far, in buses or by car. Even Stephen Harper made a cameo appearance once it was obvious that it was an organizational success. “Looks like Canada to me!” he opined cheerily.

Which is just how the Freedom Convoy later looked to me. But the sight last week of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber being found guilty of mischief, albeit only of mischief, was a bittersweet reminder that it isn’t the Canada of our current crop of leaders. Our political class seems to think we’re all guilty of mischief. We hoi polloi, the many, are in their eyes too many. They look on us and our children, on our liturgies and our liberties, with fear and loathing. When we show up in numbers, however peaceably, they declare an emergency, call out the riot police, and head for the hills.

Back in 2005, this was pretty much unheard of in Canada. No riot police rampaged through the crowds at the March for Marriage and Freedom. Senator Anne Cools spoke immediately after me. (Harper later expelled her from the Conservative caucus, rather less cheerily, after some political spat in which she again spoke her mind, as she was wont to do.) Many others, beginning with Mr Pacheco, spoke before us, from a variety of political parties and persuasions, including the Liberal Party.

“Bigots all,” some said at the time, and still say. “Quixotic, at best—wasting their time tilting at windmills. The new definition of marriage was an act of inclusion that reflected Charter principles and carried the flag for progress in recognizing human dignity, especially the dignity of homosexuals. It did no harm. Its opponents have, for the most part, quit the field. Good riddance to them! They don’t belong in polite society.”

Those who say such things are right about one thing. We don’t see much like this logo any more, except on the very fringes; save perhaps from an outlaw like Bill Whatcott, who keeps popping up, much to their annoyance, in the centre.

Whatcott, I should clarify, was not involved in the March for Marriage and I don’t mean to compare his approach, though I certainly don’t think it criminal, with that taken by the organizers of the march. His particular role seems to be that of a court jester, who points out where the real rudeness actually lies. But anyone who has watched a “Gay Pride” parade would know that.

Critics of the march may be right also about the Charter, the chief problem with which, on my view, is that either its preamble was and is incomprehensible to us or we have submitted ourselves to a ruling class that rejects the preamble, perversely deploying the rest of the document to see that what is contrary to both divine and natural law is nonetheless celebrated by positive law, a topic to which I will return.

But are they right about advancing the cause of human dignity, or might it be more accurate to say that for them “dignity” has become so comprehensive a category that there is now nothing undignified, not even what is manifestly base?

One notes that the distinction between intrinsic dignity and merited dignity—the former being a gift of God that ought to be returned with interest through aspirations to the latter—has all but disappeared. And the more generously dignity has been construed, the less welcome consideration of merit has become. Very protestant, that. But has it made civil society more civil or less civil? Otherwise put, are we making progress while doing no harm, or are we making progress in doing harm?

The only way to answer that question is to take stock of the goods that belong to the institution of marriage as it used to be defined—“the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”—and try to see what has happened to them since that definition was replaced with this one: “the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others.” That is a mammoth task, however, not lightly to be undertaken. Nor should we suppose that twenty years suffices to tell the tale. Twenty years is a relatively short time to observe the turning of so large a vessel as Marriage, or (as I would say) the effects of replacing that vessel with a new and quite different one launched under the same name.

There is something else we must bear in mind as well, which lengthens the relevant period of study considerably and warns us against reaching hasty conclusions about the last two decades. Since the chief good of marriage, traditionally, is reproduction—without which there can be no tradition—we can get at it by considering fertility.

Birth rates, as everyone knows, have fallen steeply in the past few generations. They began falling sharply again in 1958. Births per woman stood then at 3.9, which was already very low, historically, yet well above the minimum replacement threshold of 2.1. Today they stand at 1.48. That is one reason, though not the only reason, why immigration rates have risen so dramatically—too dramatically for most people’s liking, even the immigrant’s own liking. But this fall, and this rise, are not consequences of C-38. If anything, C-38 was a consequence of this fall.

By the time of Halpern, the 2003 Ontario decision that led to C-38, the birth rate was already down to 1.51. It hasn’t fallen much since, in part because immigrants tend to have larger families. That also complicates the analysis, but I think it safe to say that Halpern was more like the Owl of Minerva, flying at midnight, than like a battle flag flying at noonday. The legal change that sterilized marriage—a union of any two persons is not in principle a procreative union—reflected the fact that marriage, as lived by us, had already become something more sterile, something less dedicated to reproduction and child-rearing. The Halpern court said so itself.

It can be argued, however, that the goddess in question was not wise at all, but very foolish, to abandon the procreative good of marriage. How would things look now if Minerva had instead tried to fortify that good? But if she went in search of quite different goods, which (being a goddess of strategy) she afterward wanted to dignify with the old label “marriage,” she went very much earlier than 2003. Earlier even than 1982, when she and Trudeau père gave birth to the Charter. The harvest we’ve been reaping comes from seeds sown long before that, as I’ve tried to explain in a very much longer essay, and a very much longer recording.

Among the tares in that harvest, we may mention a few with which we are all familiar. Stable families are much harder to find than they used to be. Young people are disoriented and disheartened and disinclined to marry. Drugs and homelessness and crime are rampant. Young and old, especially the childless old, look to the state to guide and protect and care for them, even if “caring” for them means cutting them off from what few human connections they have left. And what do they get in return? Taxation and regulation; systemic dysfunction in healthcare and education; at the end of the road, euthanasia. We’ve begun to live and die like the people P. D. James envisioned in her dark novel, Children of Men, but without the light that appears at the end of her tale.

I have warned against blaming C-38 for things of which it is as much symptom as cause. But C-38 should be blamed for some things, among them its negative impact on parental rights. Are the children, such children as we still produce, really our children? Who gets to determine how they will be shaped and formed, what kind of lives they will be encouraged or permitted to live? A fascistic alliance between Big Government and Big Business bids fair to make our children their children, with whom they can do pretty much as they please.

Those who are wont to say that it takes a village to raise a child are coming round to admitting that it takes a child—many children, actually—to maintain a village. Unfortunately, the child may have to be yours or mine, since they are a bit short on children themselves. Their logic, I hasten to add, is impeccable and inexorable. If marriage is not in principle procreative, then it is not educative either. The state, henceforth, will not only assist with the education of our children, it will oversee it. If necessary, it will make home or private education all but impossible, even illegal, as it already is in parts of Europe. It will do so in the name of safety or of children’s rights, or in the name of social harmony and good citizenship, or simply in the name of the state itself and its financial needs. But the state does not love our children. It only fears them or covets them. It is therefore not fit to oversee them, of which it offers proof on a daily basis.

The state is subject, as we parents are, to pressures from ideological and technological and economic forces, to say nothing of the forces of fraud. It is prone, as we are, to errors of judgment. But when it errs, its error touches everyone. And when it wishes to cover a multitude of sins, it does not love but merely lies. It even joins, hypocritically, in the chorus of condemnation aimed at its own residential schools. But we are all wards of the state now. If we were already becoming such, de facto, the passage of C-38 made us so, de iure.

The state’s educational apparatus, many will agree, is no longer directed to making us morally literate or even literally literate. It is aimed at making us useful to the state, in the state the state is now in, which is by no means a good state. The redefinition of marriage as a matter merely of feelings and desires fits the program perfectly. That is why our courts and parliaments never troubled themselves to answer any of the difficult questions that were posed to them about the change in the definition of marriage. It was the same in America, ten years later, as the minority in the Obergefell court noted. There, too, the majority thought it sufficient to say that marriage was about love. What kind of love, love of what—love that was for what and did what—didn’t seem to matter. I sent the Americans a suitable greeting card in commiseration, pointing out that they had just landed “in a nasty custody battle between the state and the natural family for the country’s children.”

I will observe here, in passing, that even the logo of the March for Marriage (the one displayed above) shows some trace of the problem, though it plainly signals its opposition to the program. For the idea of marriage cannot be captured by a figure presenting two people bound together by romantic love, whether or not they are of opposite sex. This version was much better, in my opinion:

But where were we? For the state’s purposes, it is enough that we should have feelings, however disordered, and that we should act uncritically on our desires; in short, that we should be infantilized. The coddling of our feelings, by state agents acting in loco parentis, makes us eminently manipulable, though not, alas, altogether predictable. “AI” has been put to work on the predictability problem, tasked with constant observation, organization, and even medication of the masses. Failing that, there is always coercion, which the digitalization of life—another and still more insidious form of sterilization—makes so much easier.

Coercion is increasingly necessary. With neither moral bearings nor disciplined minds, those being infantilized begin to vacillate between apathy and outrage, while confusing the proper objects of each. Crowds gather quickly to champion causes about which they know almost nothing, even murderous and rapacious causes. Riot police are becoming a regular feature of life in our cities and on our campuses, something we Canadians were not accustomed to until quite recently.

As for the law, which is for the maintenance of peace and order, it is in obvious disarray. Positivism holds sway. Subjectivism prevails. And subjectivism does not lend itself to law or even to arbitration based on norms. It lends itself only to the arbitrary, hence also to the tyrannical. But law, become arbitrary, unpredictable, and tyrannical, is disrespected both by those who have made it and by those who enforce it. It is soon detested by those who are subject to it.

Perhaps our greatest crisis at present, politically speaking, is that both law and the authority to establish law have been undermined to the point where collapse of the rule of law threatens. That, I dare say, is inevitable when positive law is detached from natural law, a process that reached a nodal point with the establishment oif same-sex marriage, but invaded the entire body politic when governance was afterwards detached even from constitutional law during the pandemic pantomime.

A man came to see me the other day, enquiring about the possibility of rejoining politics to ethics. A laudable goal! But Aristotle is long dead, I pointed out, and now God is dead too. Therefore everything is permitted, just as Dostoevsky said. There is no such thing as ethics. How can there be, when nature itself is dead, having died with God? Our social imaginary (to borrow that Lacanian/Taylorian expression) is not one in which we might or might not make recourse to God, and so also to nature and an ethics based on nature. Rather, it is one in which we might fancifully deify nature or stubbornly defy it, or even deify it one minute while defying it the next.

We did not talk about Bill C-38. But what was Bill C-38, if not a celebration of the power to do either or both? Same-sex marriage was pitched as equality in love and equality at law. But it was really the triumph of raw desire, detached from the discipline and responsibility of conjugal love, because detached from procreation. It was a resounding victory in the long war against the natural family undertaken by Rousseau. It was also a victory over the law itself, which requires for its foundation acknowledgment of both God and nature, just as the Charter preamble says. With that victory in hand, it became possible to proceed to a more complete demolition of our legal and cultural traditions.

We might have done better, that day in Ottawa twenty years ago, to tilt at windmills. Real windmills, I mean—those bird-killing monstrosities that mar land and sea and sky, like some plague from the Apocalypse, in a vain bid for the magical Green Energy that will prevent the earth itself from revolving round the sun. For climate change there has always been, and always will be while the world lasts. Some are beginning to cotton to the fact that we will never have much power over it, nor should have. It looks like a more winnable cause, because those who flog Net Zero cause immediate economic pain and devastating long-term decline.

But we weren't there to tilt at windmills, not even the metaphorical kind—those towering “gender” constructs that try to kill sex itself by spinning more magical arms than you can count even when they are moving listlessly on a calm day. The need to protest all that would come later, once C-38 had cleared the way by making the institution of marriage sexless. We were there to defend nature, human nature, at that very point of attack. We were there to defend it for the sake of the children and of the country. We were there “to say No to Tyranny and Yes to Freedom.”

Tyranny wasn't listening, of course. It never does. Even the CBC wasn’t listening, that monster of misinformation into which Mark “SDG” Carney wants to pump another 150 million. None of the broadcast media were listening or reporting that day. Well, almost none. It was a very calm day indeed; no tariff wars, no actual wars of immediate interest, no rioting, no disasters. Things were so calm, in fact, that as I drove back to Montreal the syndicated newscasts were leading with a story about baby food containers that might possibly have defective lids. The only mention of a record crowd of protesters on Parliament Hill that I could discover took the liberty of reducing our numbers to a few hundred and our politics to those of “Harper supporters.” It then moved on to cover a tiny protest somewhere in the GTA, if memory serves, that better fit the preferred narrative on marriage.

Canadian Press, and with it the National Post, soon circulated stories putting attendance around 4000. Both issued a correction about a fortnight later, responding to pressure from Pacheco et al., acknowledging that official numbers were about four times that. Hoi polloi had showed up in greater force than anticipated or reported. Let’s hope that happens again when the federal polls open at month’s end, and that the worst of our betters are shown the door, for what has not been corrected is the trajectory of self-harm we are following.

The best short account of that trajectory, from my own pen, can still be found in Nation of Bastards (2007), which built on my rally speech; though the first two chapters of Desiring a Better Country (2015) are also worth a look, as I think my friends at SSMU would agree, if they didn’t have more pressing matters to concern themselves with at present. Here then is the speech—thanks, DM, for supplying it—which will take only another eight minutes of your time to listen to. The sombre sound from the clock tower, chiming the hours, serves as a fitting interruption. It was four o'clock then. It's closer to midnight now.

“Why are we here?” Douglas Farrow, March for Marriage, 9 April 2005, Ottawa

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