Ontario ruling provokes shock, disappointment, confusion

“This is an issue that’s not going to go away,” conference minister Mark Johnson told Mennonite Brethren pastors of Ontario in an e-mail following the recent Ontario Court of Appeal ruling on the legality of gay and lesbian marriages.

Johnson forwarded a copy of a lengthy letter to The Globe and Mail from a group of religious leaders, as a “heads up” to MB pastors. The letter criticized the court ruling on several fronts and urged that the existing definition of marriage be preserved.

Reaction to the ruling among church people seems to be shock and confusion, Johnson told the MB Herald. Although the federal government has said it will allow a free vote on legislation redefining marriage, it is not clear what will happen should such a vote fail.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada issued a release saying it was “deeply disappointed” that the federal government has chosen not to appeal the Ontario Court’s ruling.

“The Court unilaterally has altered an institution of vital social significance, and the government apparently has conceded the issue to the Court by not appealing,” said Bruce Clemenger, EFC president. “It is not the role of the Court, nor an appropriate use of the Charter, to redefine pre-existing social, cultural and religious institutions.”

Clemenger also expressed disappointment that the government’s failure to appeal has rendered efforts put into the Justice Committee’s cross-country hearings “moot and irrelevant”.

Vic Toews, Canadian Alliance Justice Critic, also criticized the judiciary’s growing involvement in forming Canadian law. “As a result of the Liberals’ failure to appeal the court decisions ordering a change in the definition of marriage,” he said, “same sex marriages are constitutionally imbedded in Canada whether Parliament votes yes or not to the proposed legislation.”

In Manitoba, MB writer and churchman Harold Jantz argued in a Winnipeg Free Press op-ed piece June 17 that calling same-sex partnerships marriages does not simply give value to homosexual unions but devalues heterosexual unions. Such unions, with their potential to produce children, “carry the burden of socializing the next generation for their role within society.”

Jantz wrote that “unless Parliament takes a principled position” same-sex relationships will be validated as any heterosexual marriage. This, he said, will be “tantamount to placing the desires of same-sex couples over the well-being of children and over society as a whole.”

He cited the recommendations John Redekop of Abbotsford, B.C. had made to government hearings on the issue. Governments, Redekop said, ought to guarantee economic benefits and justice to cohabiting homosexual couples, but their unions should be defined as “analogous” rather than “equivalent” to marriage. He proposed the term “registered household”.

It is perhaps too early to tell how this and other challenges to traditional societal norms or rights will affect churches down the road, says Mark Johnson.

But, he comments, “With things in society becoming so obviously non-Christian, the church will have to become more obviously Christian.”

—Dora Dueck