A rchive Date
[ 12-03-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2005/02/02/917471.html
Redefining marriage contrary to nature
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
2005-02-02
As our federal Parliament prepares to debate the issue of same-sex marriage, a debate whose outcome is more or less known in advance, it might be useful to reconsider the subject from the perspective of nature.
Our intellectual elite, mostly gathered on the left, look upon those who maintain faith in a higher intelligence addressed as God as being soft-headed.
For this elite, higher intelligence is nature, whose functioning they have deciphered as evolutionary, and in this view nature as god would not be a misrepresentation of those holding the idea of evolution as a sort of secular doctrine.
Let us then consider briefly this debate in terms of natural law.
We might describe in one sense, all of nature being suspended in a web of laws that we humans understand only imperfectly. The reason is simple, for we are ourselves a part of nature, not standing outside of it to comprehend and explain it with serene Olympian detachment.
However limited or imperfect is our knowledge of nature in its completeness, through observation and experimentation, we have a certain grasp of nature so as to function within it with some degree of efficiency and imagination. Planes fly, ships float on water, computers work, energy can be harnessed, or released from matter as in the workings of stars.
The entire, complex edifice of our civilization functions in keeping with the laws of nature we incrementally discover and put to work for ourselves. From the most elementary particle to the most complex organism, nature designs for itself its universe of matters and events by its own mechanism, or logic, of trials and errors.
The force at work as nature evolves - from an electron spinning around its molecule to volcanoes erupting, planets maintaining their orbits and stars eventually dying - is a form of energy, or gravity, or the curvature of space. Whichever it is, or there may be other possible explanations, modern physics is yet to provide a singular theory explaining the force of nature that is simultaneously a force of creation and destruction.
When it comes to life, from fishes to birds to mammals, nature, as evolutionary biologists explain, has experimented profusely to produce the flora and fauna we have on Earth. We are also an intimate part of this grand design.
Here nature discovered, or accidentally arrived at, the secret of life's procreation by arranging coupling of opposite-sex pairs of living creatures - now understood as a part of natural law.
The morality of natural law is the determining by nature between what is life-advancing, life-sustaining, and what is life-retarding, life-depleting.
Human civilization was instinctively - if we continue with the language of evolutionary biology - built on the recognition of cementing nature's design for procreation through establishing social norms for mating and raising families.
We came to define these norms under the heading of marriage, by which we meant the pairing of opposite sexes, of man and woman, and according such a relationship a somewhat special place in our social arrangements.
Now, as part of nature, we may refrain from passing any judgment on other forms of mating.
But we will be right to insist marriage is the form of mating consistent with natural law, and any dilution of this definition will be inconsistent with and subversive of natural law, generating inevitable consequences whose life-retarding effects future generations will fully perceive and experience only over time.
From this nature-as-god perspective, we need to let our political leaders know their effort to redefine marriage from its accepted norm is wrong-headed and contrary to nature.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays. Home Page
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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