OTTAWA, July 7, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Canadian Liberal-dominated Senate passed the Bill C-38 same-sex “marriage” legislation through second reading by a 43-12 vote Wednesday. The Senate has adjourned until Monday, July 18, 2005, at 6:00 p.m.
The following 12 Senators – 10 conservatives and 2 Liberals – opposed the legislation: Tommy Banks (L-Alberta), James Kelleher (C- Ontario), John Buchanan (C- Nova Scotia), Wilbert Joseph Keon (C- Ontario), Ethel Cochrane (C-Newfoundland/Labrador), Noel Kinsella (C-New Brunswick), Gerald Comeau (C-Nova Scotia), Gerard Phalen (L-Nova Scotia), Anne Cools (C-Ontario), Terry Stratton (C-Manitoba), Consiglio Di Nino (C-Ontario), David Tkachuk (C-Saskatchewan).
Long-time champion for life and family, Senator Anne Cools, voiced her opposition to the bill. “Honourable senators, as I said before, I wish to register my strenuous opposition to Bill C-38,” she said. “I believe that the issues have been falsely framed as Charter rights issues and equality issues. Marriage is not now, and never has been, a right. It has always been a grand privilege, with its origins as a sacrament of the church, governed by the canon law, received from the civil law into the common law. No sacrament of the church is now, or has ever been, a right.”
“I believe that the judgments of the lower courts finding marriage between a man and a woman as unconstitutional are themselves unconstitutional,” Cools continued. “In fact, the full weight of the Constitution of Canada for 140 years has been to defend and to protect marriage as the foundational unit of the family.”
“Marriage has been thought to be that institution which governs the heterosexual sexual union between a man and a woman,” Cools explained. “This sexual union is driven by the natural human and organic instinct towards reproduction. It is to this specific sexual union that nature and God have entrusted the grand mystery of life called procreation and the bringing forth of issue . . . the public interest in marriage is the phenomenon of procreation.”
“I believe that the conclusions of the Attorney General of Canada and a tiny minority of judges in the country are not only wrong and contrary to our Constitution, but their arrival at these conclusions were based in what I would describe as constitutional deconstruction, constitutional vandalism and, quite frankly, even some social engineering, because their result was not to extend rights to anyone. The result is to alter the fundamental nature and character of the institution of marriage.”
See the full Hansard of the Senate debate:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/38/1/parlbus/chambus/senate/deb-E/082db_2005-07-06-e.htm?Language=E&Parl=38&Ses=1
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