“Same-sex marriage, they said, would be the slippery slope to polygamy.

“Just a few short years after Canadians engaged in a caustic debate over whether two men, or two women, should be allowed to marry, the prognosticators will find out if they are vindicated — however unhappily.”

That’s how this article in the Jan. 21 issue of Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper begins. The article is about the trial of two members of a Mormon offshoot community in southwestern British Columbia who are being prosecuted for their polygamous marriages.

Polygamy is illegal in Canada, but the provincial government in British Columbia stalled for years before deciding to prosecute any members of the community in Bountiful for participating in polygamous marriages. The main concern of prosecutors has previously been that courts could rule that the Bountiful polygamists are protected by constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.

The religious freedom argument will still be central to the defense case. But the lawyer for Winston Blackmore, who has 19 wives in Bountiful, told the Globe and Mail he also intends to cite Canada’s legalization of homosexual “marriage” in 2005 as another defense argument.

One of the peculiar aspects of the commentary surrounding the introduction of the homosexual “marriage” precedent into the polygamy case is the claim by some commentators that same-sex “marriage” is less of a social innovation than polygamy.

“The claims by same-sex couples were, in some respects, very conventional,” said David Rayside, who is identified as “a political science professor at the University of Toronto who studied the same-sex debate” in the Globe and Mail article. “In fact, there has been no significant change in the direction of moving beyond two people.”

In reality, polygamy has long been accepted by some societies, including Islamic ones. Same-sex “marriage,” in contrast, has never been accepted anywhere prior to its legalization in the last decade by a handful of jurisdictions in Western countries.

And Canadian family advocates warned very specifically in 2005 that radically redefining marriage to include homosexual unions inevitably would be used by proponents of polygamy to argue that it too should be recognized under Canadian law, as the Register noted in this article we published in 2007 about the implications of prosecuting members of the Bountiful community for polygamy.

That Rayside should attempt to pass off the false claim that homosexual marriage is not a radical break from the traditional understanding of marriage actually isn’t at all surprising. He is a homosexual activist who helped found the University of Toronto’s “Sexual Diversity Studies Program” as well as the university’s “Committee on Homophobia” and its “Rainbow Triangle Alumni Association.”

Also quoted in the Globe and Mail article making the case for the supposed relative normalcy of same-sex “marriage,” as compared to polygamy, was Daphne Gilbert, a feminist law professor at the University of Ottawa.

In a 2005 article entitled “Private Conscience, Identity and Equality: Limiting Free Speech for the Greater Good,” Gilbert and co-author Jena Gilbert argued religious leaders should not have the right to criticize homosexuality in a “hateful” way, even by quoting from the Bible within their own churches.

The article was written in the specific context of rebutting comments made by Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec City, the primate of Canada, during the debate over whether to legalize same-sex marriage. Cardinal Ouellet warned that doing so could imperil the rights of church leaders to speak out against homosexual behavior.

Gilbert and Jena said that such comments by religious leaders are currently protected by the Canadian constitution. But, they suggested, this constitutional protection should be removed in order to protect homosexuals.

“Everyone has a right to security of the person, and public expression that attacks, marginalizes and degrades the gay and lesbian community violates their security, no matter if it comes from the pulpit or the newspaper,” they wrote.

Added Gilbert and Jena, “If the publication of Biblical passages vilifying homosexuality can constitute an expression of hatred sufficient to offend the equality rights of gays and lesbians, why is speaking those same passages as religious teaching a protected right?”

One of the difficulties for Christians and others who advocate in support of protecting the traditional heterosexual-only understanding of marriage is the strong bias of most major North American media outlets in favor of redefining marriage to include homosexual couples. This bias is especially evident in Canada, as the Globe and Mail’s article about the polygamy trial again confirms.

— Tom McFeely