It looks like I was a day early with my post concerning MacDonald- which I also sent to the mother station. It's under yesterday's post captioned, Embrace Hollywood.

I don't know which of MacDonald and Dyer is more annoying. For the most part I've tuned out CBC. I watch only to catch their latest anti-American,. anti-conservative spin on the day's events. I once heard Mr. Bomber Jacket claim that Saddam didn't intend to gas the Kurds- he thought he was gassing the Iranians. That ought to have been the end of Dyer's appearances on CBC, but so long as you are prepared to spout left wing drivel the opportunites for CBC appearances are endless.

CBC, the grand proponents of diversity- but not so enamoured of diversity that they would actually hire anyone with a conservative bent. What a juvenile excuse for a national news network.

I should have noted that Rex Murphy is a closet conservative. Rex is so talented that he's able to camouflage his conservatism through the use of language which none of THEM understand.

Rex Murphy a closet conservative? Wasn't he the one pushing for Trudeau in their greatest Canadian contest? Reminds me of those who used to say that Trudeau was in the closet.

I caught Neil Macdonald interviewing Ann Coulter a couple of months ago. He had a look of utter disbelief on his face when she insisted that she really did believe the MSM is dominated by left liberals. Neil sees himself as a rebel, fighting the corporate news consensus. But then he also thinks the Israel-Palestinians conflict is just another of those age-old fights between two ethnic groups over a piece of land. A case for his misanthropic tendencies. In short, he has little sense of the historical import of a conflict whose horizon, for many involved, is about monopolizing, or not, the terms of monotheism - is the one God a sacrificer, promising future victory for the faithful, or a deliverer from those who would kill us?

truepeers,

One swallow doesn't make a spring. I am not aware of Rex ever criticizing the decision to liberate Iraq, which I think is almost an acid test. Yes, I know all about Hitchens. Christopher doesn't yet realize he's a conservative. In any case read Rex's column in today's Globe. Doesn't sound like a lefty to me.

OK, I just read Rex’s column, criticizing Jack Layton’s declaration that same sex marriage is a human rights issue; L is demanding party discipline - any NDPer to vote against it will get in trouble. Since Jack is a self-righteous nob with fascistic tendencies, as is increasingly the norm for leftists who no longer believe in free and open debate because deconstructionists have taught (most wrongly) that our language is always already the agent of invidious inequalities, I don’t think Rex’s criticism is prima facie evidence of conservatism. Anyone who is not offended by Jack’s thinking, in which democratic freedom is subsumed by the demand to build a new world order, is presumably a practitioner of the Gnostic religion in its postmodern, victimary dress.

As you can see, reading the column has really gotten my blood running. I want to write down my thoughts about how this issue is revealing the lack of a democratic culture in Canada. I welcome any responses to this lonely balloon.

But first a thought about Rex. He strikes me as an awfully decent chap. When I hear him on his phone-in show, he reveals the great quality of being able to respond to all and sundry with a rapid dose of grace, wit, and empathy. These are qualities that only someone who is not fundamentally an ideologue will have. Putting a political label on him might be a mistake. I didn’t watch his paean to Trudeau, whom I consider to be one of our worst prime ministers (didn’t understand nationalism; ran up a huge debt and bureaucracy), though I grant that T’s response to the fascism of the Duplessis era justifies some praise. So, I will listen in future to see if I can imagine Rex a conservative. I was just amused at the thought that anyone on air at CBC could be a conservative, without being a caricature of such (Don Cherry).

As for same-sex marriage, the concept is flawed – whether you are for it or against it is irrelevant in the long run because there can be no such thing. Once we indulge our moral intuition that the present institution of marriage is discriminatory against same-sex couples, and we change the definition of marriage, then marriage itself becomes an invidious distinction that cannot stand. I can well appreciate why gays want rights to benefits and tax advantages, and to the social recognition that same-sex couples have. But if these are extended by recognizing same-sex partnerships as in all respects equivalent to heterosexual marriage, then “marriage” becomes offensive to a single person like myself (who cannot name, e.g., a survivor for my pension), or to two sisters living together, etc. We will start our own fight against the system. In other words, I can accept the state treating people differently if it is according to a consensus that we should maintain the original logic for marriage: the need for society to control, through a kinship system, the potentially disorderly nature of love and sex (especially male-female sex), reproduction, and child rearing; the need to recognize the different biological roles of men and women in bearing and raising children, e.g. the need to define men’s long-term responsibilities re paternity and monogamy. But perhaps such need is no longer paramount in an age of women’s rights and sexual freedoms.

What is in question here is whether we will allow our moral intuition of a fundamental human equality to rule, in which case we must end all forms of state recognition for marriage and the kinship system; or, we can choose to maintain a policy space in which to respect the traditional logic behind giving certain men and women a license to marry, because we want, in future, the government to have the freedom to support families by attending to the biological difference between men and women.

This question, especially in a country that does not have the fertility rate to reproduce itself, should give any thinking person pause. To be as undemocratically self-righteous about this as Jack Layton is to prove one is a twit. Furthermore, to be so certain, as the Supreme Court seems to be, that it is parliament’s right to decide the issue is also questionable. Ultimately, from whom does the state get its legitimacy? – from individuals with rights, or from the families who are the backbone and precondition of any civil society? If our state were built on top of an obviously tribal base, it would be obvious that it got its legitimacy from families and the kinship system, to whom it would have to defer. But since our state and civil society - officially secular and multicultural though it now is - was originally built out of a western, Christian tradition, in which the church had long been minimizing the biological family and extensive kinship - in order to increase loyalty to and power for the metaphorical family of the church, of the communion in Christ (with its officially celibate priests, nuns, restrictions on consanguinity, inheritance rights, etc.) - the answer is not at all clear to me.

But it seems that fundamental constitutional issues are at stake; and anyone who does not think that moving slowly and considering a referendum might be in the interests of maintaining the state’s legitimacy is much more confident that they know what is right, and what future Canadians will want, than I am.