Article content

State of the Unions is a week-long Post series on the future of marriage. Today: Bert Archer on how same-sex marriage snuck up on him.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or State of the Unions: The oddest thing about same-sex marriage is how little fuss we made Back to video

This year marks a decade since same-sex marriage became legal across the nation. Opponents in Canada used to, and American ones still do, make dire predictions about the damage letting people of the same sex marry each other would cause to society.

But the oddest thing about same-sex marriage in Canada, it has turned out, is how easily it happened — once it finally did happen — and how little fuss it’s made. When was the last time you even thought about it as an issue? For something as historically controversial — that was in some quarters portrayed as enemies storming the gates of a sacred marital homeland — it is, first blush, a little strange.

My ability to get married sneaked up on me sometime around 2002. I was sitting on a TV panel discussing gay rights in general, and same-sex marriage in particular. Opposite me was a professional opponent of same-sex marriage. The debate was going as it usually did — I would bring up anti-miscegenation laws, he would bring up the centrality of the nuclear family to the social contract — and the host, in this case Michael Coren, would express his pleasure that the status quo was being maintained just before the credits would roll. But this time, the script changed. In the middle of a fairly usual debate, my opponent threw in the towel. “We’ve lost this one,” he said.