I love reading your blog. I personally have no problem with gay weddings but you left out the fact that the minister could refuse to marry the couple only if there was another minister available to marry them. I would hardly consider forcing a minister to marry gays when it goes against his beliefs. I would agree with you if the couple were refused outright with nowhere else to turn. I do respect the ministers beliefs and his right to hold them but as I am an atheist I wonder if he would give me the same courtesy.
Peter:
The point is that public employees who cannot perform their duties shouldn't be in their positions. Why should a gay couple be referred to someone else? Why should they have to suffer that kind of humiliation? What about mixed-race couples--should "conscience" supervene there?
My point is simple: if a public employee cannot do his or her job, s/he should be looking for another one. Public employees shouldn't be able to pick and choose which part of the public they're prepared to serve, even if there is a proviso that someone else is available to do the job.
There's a serious public policy issue here. I'm all for accommodation in the workplace, but I see no reason why bigotry should be accommodated in the public service. Gays pay taxes too.
We aren't talking clergymen here, by the way, but publicly-paid marriage commissioners.
"Gays pay taxes too."
Exactly why gov't should never discriminate. Great point.
Peter, I'm with you. I never understood all that fuss about integrated drinking fountains. There were perfectly good drinking fountains for the coloured just a few steps away.
Why people who have serious religious beliefs do not find the antics of the Saskatchewan government on this issue something that trivializes religious belief indicates hardly anything at all, I suppose.
Should Catholic commissioners be allowed to refuse to marry divorced people?
A Catholic commissioner wouldn't have to refuse, Buckets, because he or she would not be condoning anything, just as Catholic lawyers defending clients they know to be guilty are not condoning the crime.
The point is that public employees who cannot perform their duties shouldn't be in their positions.
That is exactly right, in my view. Still, I can't help thinking that the work place might have worked out a reasonable accommodation without legitimizing it through legislation.
fergus. Exactly. So why would marrying gays be any different?
It's not. Were the commissioners in question Catholic?
Something tells me that most of those who want to force a JP to marry gays also supports those soldiers who desert the American army over the Iraq war.
No one's being forced: people can always choose not to be Marriage Commissioners, just as JWs can choose not to work in a blood bank and faith healers can choose not to enter the profession of surgery.
But if the public service is paid through my taxes, I have the right to expect that a public employee will not pick and choose whom he or she serves.
I don't quite understand the connection between this and support for the Iraq war. Fascinating.
Oh, and btw, can you find a single instance of a Dutch Reformed Church in Saskatchewan (or Canada) which has in its church order a prohibition of racially-mixed marriages? Or was that an intentional drive-by smear?
If the military is paid through my taxes, I have the right to expect that, after funding his training, a soldier will not pick and choose which war he will serve in. Nobody's forced to sign up for the military in this day and age. But when you do sign up, the soldier has a contract with the citizens to serve in whatever capacity for a specific length of time.
So, if you are against conscientious objectors in the public service (JPs), then you would also have a problem with those in the military.
Seems like a decent comparison to me.
It's a hypothetical, but, since you ask, the DRCSA has officially regretted supporting apartheid, but the churches in SA are still segregated de facto.
I wasn't thinking so much of the church, though, as of a hypothetical adherent, making his way to Saskatchewan and getting a job as a marriage commissioner. Agreed, that's a stretch,although not an impossibility. Probably the Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations would have been a better example, but I tend to like avoiding the wrath of Mike Godwin.
"Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations" (snigger) Surprising that you don't mention the struggle of adherents to the Nation of Islam or some group that actually exists in Canada.
We're talking civil servants here, not clergy. In Manitoba, marriage commissioners have been advised that if they discriminate they lose their licenses. Saskatchewan shouldn't be any different. Wall's proposal will never withstand a Charter challenge and he knows it. Playing to the fundy base again. What's the point?
scary, your analogy fails when we expect our soldiers to follow illegal orders. i fully expect a soldier to refuse to commit war crimes regardless of orders, america's conscientious objectors are opting out an of illegal conflict, a war of aggression without cause. in short they are seeking not to commit a crime. that is a soldier's moral duty and it supersedes orders, though there may be consequences. in a just world, the leaders that took america into iraq would be in the dock awaiting their own little nuremburg.
marriage commissioners have no such defence as gay marriage is perfectly legal in canada. they are working as civil servants and not as religious leaders. their personal beliefs are not part of the equation. they are not sanctioning the wedding, they are functionaries. they don't need to know or approve of or interact with the couple after the fact.
The solution is easy - tell them to decide whether or not they want to do their job or not.
If my spiritual or political beliefs got in the way of me doing my job, indeed if I refused to do my job because of them, I would expect to be handed a pink slip and told to go away.
I met Timothy Findlay's partner. He wrote the scripts for The Nature of things. They were partners and long time companions. A beautiful man.
Because my brother was gay, and may have committed suicide,I asked Tim's partner, shortly after Timothy died: "What was it like for you being gay and attending the U of S in the late 50s."? He said it was quite alright and that he met with little discrimination . Ofcourse he wasn't wearing a badge declaring himself to be gay.
tell them to decide whether or not they want to do their job or not
Wholeheartedly agreed.
Can we fire the people in Toronto who won't do theirs now, or is that different?
Even my libertarian brethren agree that public servants shouldn't be able to discriminate.
This proposed policy is strictly for the social conservatives.
Punch My Ticket - are marriage commissioners in Saskatchewan negotiating a labour contract, bargaining over wages and benefits?
No, didn't think so.
Analogy and equivalence fail.
SF said:
"If the military is paid through my taxes, I have the right to expect that, after funding his training, a soldier will not pick and choose which war he will serve in."
And this is one reason why the argument by taxation never works.
It does when it comes to the public service, though. If taxpayers fund it, they should get equal access to it. There's really no more to it.
But.. but... they can choose to grant a marriage to heterosexual partners where one partner is a child molester, a batterer,a mail order bride, or a marriage for convenience.
"If taxpayers fund it, they should get equal access to it."
And if taxpayers don't pay the same rate?
@Todd: Are you asking if the more taxes a person pays the more services they should get?
Do you actually want to live in that Canada?
Let us not forget Brad W.'s early 90's musings with Tom L.
I'm a communist, Stageleft, so, no, I don't.
I'm pointing out that arguments based on taxation, such as the one that Dawg started with and SF finished handily (and a finish I could see coming a mile away), are poor ones to use (especially against right-wingers): it merely shifts the contested terrain.
Better to point out that people (and that goes for someone looking to get married as well as the civil servant put into such a position) don't deserve to have their own desires frustrated in these regards. If I were looking for someone to perform a civil ceremony for me, it should make no difference to me who does it so long as it gets done in reasonable time. And the employer should be able to accomodate my desire without hitting the employee over the head by finding someone else who doesn't have a problem serving me.
(Budget cuts, of course, make things that much more difficult, no?)
The similarity for Scary's attempt at equivalence is that deserting soldiers are refusing to do what they are publicly contracted to perform because they find it morally abhorrent.
The important distinction, however, is that the marriage commissioners are allowed to simply quit their jobs if marrying gays is too abhorrent for them.
The marriage commissioners are simply not being coerced to an extent anywhere near that faced by deserting soldiers. There is no equivalence.
Meh, once again the conflation of the relgious and legal aspects of marriage rears its confused head.
From a legal standpoint, a marriage is a contract between two parties (a large part of which is about money and property). And that is the *only* aspect which is the legitimate concern of the government - it is properly blind to any alleged "spiritual" aspects, as attributed by one religion or another.
Given that recent jurisprudence has determined that the gender combination of the contracting parties is irrelevant, civil servants who refuse to enact this contract for same-sex couples are in dereliction of duty. It really is that simple -- it's no different than if they refused to marry inter-racial couples, or issue a property deed to a black family buying a home in a WASP neighbourhood.
The more I hear of this sort of nonsense, the more I lean towards stripping clergy of the power to enact the legal side of the marriage contract. Let a couple have any sort of ceremony or rite they, their family, friends and community, find necessary or meaningful. But if they want it legally recognized -- visit City Hall and sign some papers (which you pretty much have to do anyway, to get a marriage license).
Eamon:
I agree with the two-step approach. But then leave the proper term in its proper place. Marriage for the religious ceremony. Civil unions for the City Hall signing.
Adam C:
Before now, a JP enters the occupation with the knowledge that (s)he would only be performing heterosexual marriages. Those who conscientiously object to gay marriages are losing their livelihood and their entire career because their job description was changed on the fly. They didn't sign up for any "coercion". Maybe they at least deserve a grandfather clause in this regard. A soldier, on the other hand, signs up with the full knowledge that they may be "coerced" by their country into traumatic and, from their perspective, sometimes morally difficult situations.
I agree with the two-step approach. But then leave the proper term in its proper place. Marriage for the religious ceremony. Civil unions for the City Hall signing.
As is common with the religious, it comes down to the magical power of words and this "civil union" BS is just a sop to that sort of ignorant thinking. Religion has never had a monopoly on the term "marriage", nor should it expect to get one now. People have always been able to get hitched at City Hall, and they were just as "married" as anyone who went through the holiest of church weddings. 66 years ago, my parents would have gone the civil ceremony route, if their families hadn't insisted otherwise. Was it so much better that a pair of young agnostics submitted to the rites of a religion (Methodism) they no longer believed in? Were their 60 years together made somehow more of a "marriage" thereby?
Adam C:
Before now, a JP enters the occupation with the knowledge that (s)he would only be performing heterosexual marriages. Those who conscientiously object to gay marriages are losing their livelihood and their entire career because their job description was changed on the fly.
Job descriptions always change on the fly. Mine sure has. Presumably, JPs have always been expected to adapt to changes in the law that impact their administration thereof (Q: What do JPs do, other than marry people?). For reasons that I hope I've made abundantly clear already, I simply don't recognize a legitimate right-of-conscience in this case.
Who would want to be married by someone who disapproved.?
Maybe just put a sign in the window: I don't approve of same sex marriage!
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