Canada’s new law will help tourism — and maybe change society

By Terry Prone

Partly because they're not used to being in the news, and while some people like Mr Gogarty can spend almost a century in obscurity and then take to fame like native speakers, most are not comfortable with sudden fame.

SARS put Canada on the front pages, worldwide, in a way it will never forget, not least because it kicked its tourism industry in the shins.

However, the Law of Unintended Consequences is now roaring into action, and while it's hard to unkick a shin, the new law earning Canada fresh international coverage has already increased the number of visitors from the US, and may increase overseas visitor numbers, too.

A Canadian holiday could figure in the plans of at least three couples I know, all friends.

They are all solid citizens and high achievers, these six individuals. They have bought or are buying their family homes.

The oldest couple is re-designing their back garden so they'll be better able to cope with it as they move into their seventies.

The youngest pair are moving house because one of their mothers, a widow, has cancer, and is going to need nursing, which they both plan to deliver, personally.

They are the kind of people, these couples, who take their wine bottles to the bottle bank.

If they borrow a book, they return it within a couple of weeks. Respectable, middle-class people who manage to operate in high-profile businesses while never seeking publicity for themselves.

Quite like the stereotypical Canadian, in fact.

Because they are essentially private people, they hope some other couple will serve as the test case to establish whether a Canadian marriage will be recognised in Ireland.

They would prefer not to have to subject themselves to the opprobrium, not to mention the cost, of testing Irish law on recognition of a Canadian marriage contract between persons of the same sex.

Half the states in America at the moment are seeing this process in action, as couples wishing to legally commit to each other for the rest of their lives take their summer vacation north of the border, and are married there.

When they return, many of these gay couples taking advantage of Canada's new law will present their marriage certificates to home state authorities to test their local legality.

In strongly conservative, Bible-belt states, opposition is already vocal, with politicians and religious figures vowing to fight to the death the possibility of gay couples ever being considered as married under the law.

Together with the Catholic Church, they see Canada's law as a profound threat to the sanctity of marriage and its central position and function within society.

The first few couples pictured after their Canadian nuptials didn't look much of a threat to marriage.

Grey-haired men in suits. Matronly women in their fifties.

Standards-smashing iconoclasts they weren't. Just the kind of solid, pleasant people who are the regular attendees at the meetings of the Neighbourhood Watch, and who would be easy touches for sponsorship for the mini-marathon.

Yet their very seeking to become a lawfully wedded legal couple is seen as a threat to the institution of marriage.

Now, one could see (although not necessarily agree with) the point about divorce devaluing marriage: if you can't enforce marriage as a life sentence, some people will not only seek to get out of jail, but may even become serial offenders.

Couples who judge their marriage not by its happiness or contribution to the happiness of others, but merely on its duration, could feel that someone who "gets away with" a four-year rather than a forty-year span has got it soft.

But that rationale cannot apply in the case of gay marriage.

The overwhelming majority of those seeking Canadian same-sex marriage are couples who have been together for decades.

They want to emulate, rather than eviscerate, solid, stable, long-term marriage partnerships between loving husbands and wives.

They cannot imagine why loving husbands and wives in solid, stable, long-term marriage partnerships would be upset by their emulation: since, rumour hath it, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Some are upset, however. The deeply religious among those married couples find the concept of a gay "marriage" comes with built-in inverted commas: it couldn't be real, because marriage was invented for the procreation and care of children.

However, to extend that into a wider rationale that same-sex marriage would erode the societal position of marriage is to ignore the realities.

The societal position of marriage was changed irrevocably, long before any talk of gay unions coming under the rubric.

The twentieth century took marriage and gave it a right royal belting. Officially and unofficially. Officially, divorce came in.

Unofficially, and without anything like the same publicity, young people in huge numbers stopped buying the idea that pre-marital sex was bad.

Against the wishes of their parents, they tried it and liked it.

Then they moved in together and tried out the living-together thing. A lot of them liked that, too. Over twenty years, single-parenthood became common, and was frequently not an accident but a choice.

Parents and grandparents have had most of their assumptions and expectations about marriage knocked silly.

The famous Kubler-Ross process people go through when told they have a terminal illness is not unlike the phases the older generation underwent in the face of the changes in marriage: shock, denial, bargaining, depression and eventual acceptance.

People often had no choice, as it was their children or grandchildren who were living together, having children outside of wedlock, separating, divorcing.

Interestingly, too, the physical restrictions of old age have played their part in broadening tolerance.

A century ago, those who lived to an advanced age with concomitant physical problems like arthritis found themselves in a steadily diminishing circle of people and ideas.

They heard the same things from the same people. Today, people who live to an advanced age, who find it difficult to get around because of arthritis, end up staying at home and hearing a huge variety of things from different people through radio and TV.

Take just one example: incest. An eighty-year-old living in 1900 might die without ever hearing about it, whereas incest, together with all its emotional, legal, genetic and community implications, is a current issue for the thousands of elderly viewers of Fair City.

Which is why, if some politician "pushes the envelope" by proposing that Ireland should recognise Canadian same-sex marriages, people in long happy traditional marriages will shrug and wish the gay couples the happiness within the institution they've had themselves.

Of course, the chances of any Irish politician doing this are somewhere between slim and none. This envelope will stay unpushed.