Canadian Christians stood agape at how quickly “same-sex marriage” became the law of their land. Begun as the mission of an activist Supreme Court, in short order Bill C-38 was voted through the House of Commons and presented to the Senate for what should have been some careful thinking. What were its implications to the law, to children involved, to traditional marriage, an institution that had stood for thousands of years?
Unfortunately, for those observing the televised sessions, little careful thinking could be observed. Instead, pro-homosexual groups, liberal church representatives and their ilk presented their views to a largely uncritical and decidedly supportive Senate. Few alternate views, let alone thoughtful questions, were heard. That is, until Professor John Patrick made his presentation on July 13, 2005 to the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. Unlike earlier witnesses, Patrick was regularly interrupted, and was forced several times to shorten his given hour’s presentation (first to half an hour, then to an immediate halt). Some senators were so enraged, they could hardly speak. Yet through it all, Dr. Patrick remained calm and measured. Here are excerpts from his speech:
Marriage obviously cannot be extended to homosexuals without changing its meaning. The traditional meaning of marriage was between one man and one woman. It is not a question of straight-forward extension. The first question is one of definition. It must be redefined. In order to redefine it, as has already been said even in the short time that I have been here, it must exclude any reproductive function. That is an entirely novel idea in the history of the world. As Chesterton would say, those who propose it are certainly practising chronological snobbery. They would not be understood by anyone in the history of the world up until the last half century.…
When I began in medicine 50 years ago, most of the patients I saw came because of something that had happened to them. Nature or God had struck them down in some way. Even smoking was not their fault because we did not know it was dangerous 50 years ago or at least we were just learning. Only about 30 percent were in the office because of what they had done to themselves.
Now, of course, that ratio is reversed or worse. Most patients come into the office today rather like an iceberg. They come in with an excuse that brings them to the doctor because they feel awful. Say that excuse is a sexually transmitted disease, and they feel guilty about it. Obviously, you cannot not feel guilty about such a thing if you have induced it or collected it, especially if you passed it on to your spouse. Given modern treatment, except in three cases perhaps, we can treat it excellently, so we slice off the top of the iceberg. We do nothing about the guilt. In fact, medicine can do nothing about guilt. Most Canadians are suffering from real guilt because there is objective moral truth, and we all know it. We are in the middle of an extraordinary experiment. We are trying to convince ourselves that we do not know things that we do know. We all know that to do gratuitous harm to other people is wrong. There is no one here who does not know that.…Yet, we are passing legislation and allowing ways of living which do gratuitous harm to others. That is incoherent.
That is the reason we talk so much… about how we feel. Have you noticed that? We do not lay out arguments. We do not deal with our thoughts. We deal with our feelings because our really deep knowledge is moral knowledge. Moral feelings are very unreliable. Moral knowledge is nearly 100 percent failsafe, so we play on feelings.
If you want to read about this brilliantly described, I recommend to you a book by J. Budziszewski from the University of Texas…. It is called What We Can’t Not Know, published by Spence. It is an absolutely brilliant discussion that I think every politician would benefit from reading. He himself was hired by the University of Texas to develop a system of governance that did not require morality. He almost committed suicide before he gave up because it cannot be done.
You, as legislators, are responsible for deciding what ought to be done in Canada.…There is no use trying to found government policy upon physical facts. It always has a metaphysical background and base. We are not discussing it. These patients are in deep trouble because they have even lost the vocabulary to describe their own problem. The only solution we have ever found to guilt in the history of humankind involves remorse, confession, repentance, restitution, reconciliation, grace, justification.
We may not like those words, but they are the only words that will get you out of what you all face just before you die. What are my duties? Is there a God? Am I going to see Him?…Surely Canada should take Pascal’s wager (see below) and work it on that basis, not on the tacit atheism that is currently privileged.…
The question before us is not simply one of recognizing rights which truly exist and have been denied, because there is a prior question. How are rights recognized, and what are their proper foundations? If a right can be established by a court or a Parliament, then the Nazis were rightfully able to kill Jews, but we all agree that is not so because there are deeper realities than courts and governments (who are often wrong and create pseudo-rights while taking away real ones). Real rights always have reciprocal responsibilities. Pseudo-rights do not—one of the easy ways to make the distinction….
The question you must always ask is this: Because law is founded in belief, what belief system would you need to have to logically arrive at this endpoint? We will come to that in a moment.
Do we as a nation have a duty to recognize same sex relationships as marriage? One cannot but feel sympathy for anyone who feels alienated from public acceptance, as is the case with homosexuals, but creating a right to call their relationships “marriage” requires rigorous thought rather than warm feelings. Creating such a right will necessarily have effects. Just as the physical world is consequential, so is the moral world. We all know that if we jump off a skyscraper, we are dead. When we make moral choices, they do not come disconnected from the whole of the rest of the moral universe. They are all interconnected, and that is what we must think about…
Arthur Leff…taught common law at Yale for many years. He was worried about what was happening to lawyers in the 1970s. In 1979 he gave a spectacular lecture at Duke University on the nature and philosophy of justice. The opening is wonderful. I know of no one who can put the problem that faces us in Canada more clearly than this in one paragraph. He is an unbelieving Jew, as far as I can discover. He says:
I want to believe—and so do you—in a complete, transcendent and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us as to how to live righteously.
Obviously, being Jewish, he is talking about the Torah. Why does he want it? It is because, if the law is transcended from God, immanent and available to us, then justice is a possibility because justice and the person are under the same authority. However, Leff goes on:
I also want to believe—and so do you—in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do and what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free; that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good, and to invent it.
Even Canada cannot fudge that one. If you have the one, you do not have the other. That is what we are facing in Canada. Which of those two models will dominate Canada? Are we on our own? Do we do it ourselves or is there Something beyond us? At the deepest level, is justice a discovery or is it an invention?
What Leff does next is something very unacademic.
He writes twenty pages or more of lucid prose, weighing the pros and cons. You can find it in the Duke Law Review for 1979; it is worth reading. At the end he comes down on the Darwinian side of the argument. After all, social Darwinian in the 1970s was de rigueur in the academic environment. He says:
It looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinary, unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel.
In the universities, I now have to explain who Cain and Abel were because the students do not know any more, as they are biblically illiterate. Canadian students no longer understand their own language because they do not recognize the metaphors of that language.
I was often asked to speak to medical students in Frosh Week…. I would say to them, “You will be taught medicine on the bio-psychosocial model. As far as I am concerned, that model has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. My guess is that no more than one of you knows what I just said.”…
Neither do you know what I said, unless you recognize the metaphor. The students thought that I had said that it was a few grams underweight.…That was not what I said. What should have come to their mind was Belshazzar’s feast. Belshazzar had taken the sacred vessel of the Jews and profaned it for an orgy. In the middle of the orgy, a hand starts to write on the wall, as the hand might be writing now on this wall. “You,” says Daniel to Belshazzar, “have been weighed in the balances and are found want-ing, and you will be dead and your kingdom will be gone in the morning.”
I was not saying that the bio-psychosocial model of medicine was a few grams underweight. I was saying that it was profanely and profoundly inadequate because it pretends to treat patients as though they are merely disordered machines, and we are not. Whether we like it or not, we are spiritual beings.
Leff understood all that. He went on and said:
Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked and made us “good,” and, worse than that, there is no reason why anything should…As things stand now, everything is up for grabs.
That is the beginning of the idea that is taught in many departments of the university now, that the law is not actually any more about justice. The law is about power…Quite clearly, that has happened with this bill. Every statistic shows that the vast majority of Canadians are not yet ready for this, at the very least, yet it is going ahead anyway, as though you, in some arrogant way, I must say, know better. Do you? That is what you have to think. One day you will give an account to the Supreme Judge for your decisions.…
Leff cannot live with his own conclusions. Having got to that conclusion, he writes one more paragraph, which is a total non sequitur. He says:
Nevertheless napalming babies is bad, starving the poor is wicked, buying and selling each other is depraved. Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin and Pol Pot…have earned salvation. Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned. There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now:] Sez who? God help us.
He knew what he should do; he was well trained. If you have a technically correct argument and you arrive at an unsustainable conclusion, you must re-examine the premise. Because everyone of us has a desire for justice, we need something beyond ourselves.…
Justices without Leff’s rigor based their assertion of a right of homosexuals to change the meaning of the word “marriage” on no visible intellectual foundations. They just invoked the Charter. The Charter is merely a piece of paper. Where is the argument? It is simply raw, judicial power. They ought to be open about this. Ordinary Canadians have a right to know how their Justices decide these things, because justice is central to our political existence.
Until recently, when the modern arrogance of unbridled individual freedom began to flourish, we understood ourselves as the guardians of a cultural history. We understood we had a duty to hand on to our children the best of what had been given to us. Sadly that is no longer the case.
John Patrick is Director of Public Policy for the Canadian Christian Medical and Dental Society, retired Professor of Biochemistry and Pediatrics from the University of Ottawa, and Professor of History of Science and Medicine at Augustine College.
Belshazzar had taken the sacred vessel of the Jews and profaned it for an orgy. In the middle of the orgy, a hand starts to write on the wall, as the hand might be writing now on this wall. “You,” says Daniel to Belshazzar, “have been weighed in the balances and are found wanting.”