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To be a leader for all Canadians, the Conservative Party leader should now end his lifelong boycott of Pride events and explain whether he would still deny same-sex couples the right to marry, as he said in Parliament. pic.twitter.com/5WEyja6Ov5 — Ralph Goodale (@RalphGoodale) August 22, 2019

The speech is a reminder of what a hideous mess the same-sex marriage debate really was. We should have been talking about two separate things: one, the package of benefits and responsibilities the federal government affords committed couples who meet certain criteria; and two, what to call the package. And Scheer nearly got there: “Marriage does not come from the state and does not depend on the government,” he said. But then he launched an explicitly religious defence of state-sanctioned marriage: “There is no complementarity of the sexes,” he says, using a word straight out of the Catechism.

“Two members of the same sex may … have many of the collateral features of marriage,” he argued, “but they do not have its inherent feature, as they cannot commit to the natural procreation of children.”

This was hardly out of left field. No less than Supreme Court Justice Gérard La Forest made the same argument in the 1995 Egan decision, concluding that “marriage is by nature heterosexual.” And of course, the Canadian institution of marriage is grounded in such religious beliefs. But it has been noticeably secularizing almost from Day One. In 1882 Parliament angered Leviticus fans by making it legal to marry your dead spouse’s (opposite-sex) sibling. The first federal Divorce Act was in 1968. By the late 20th century, marriage benefits and responsibilities had been afforded to millions of Canadians in common-law relationships — i.e., who weren’t even married.