I’m afraid I don’t agree that anything fundamental is at stake in the debate the Canadian federal government has called for on “a fundamental issue” (The Toronto Star), a “social problem which needs attention” (the Prime Minister), and “a very important social issue” (the Justice Minister). That would be the right of same-sex partners to legally marry. It’s actually pretty elementary, a matter of equal treatment under the law, and I think most people will reach that conclusion or already have.

There is a vocal, sanctimonious, scared pantsless minority that is passionately opposed, and they will lose, sooner or a bit later. In the process, no hard or significant issues for the rest of society will have been raised.

That’s too bad and has as much to do with the current bent of the gay rights movement as with the inadequacies of politicians. Governments aren’t philosophical debating societies. They deal in legislation. But the way legal issues are posed can be affected by the way social movements get them out there. Forces such as feminism and the gay rights movement have at times broached truly fundamental questions, which are then reflected in law and public debate.

Take, for instance, the issue of equal pay for work of equal value, raised by the women’s movement a few years ago. It went well beyond the matter of equal pay for the same work, which almost everyone agreed on, and asked about the problem of “women’s work,” work ghettos, the forms of stereotyping that made those possible (girls are nurses, boys are doctors); and then on to the difficult, controversial question of how to compare jobs that are not the same. There were some legislative results, and a general airing that was good for the state of democracy.

In the West, the gay rights movement or its historical predecessors have raised basic questions at various points: the 1890s (think Oscar Wilde and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”); the 1920s; and the movement that grew out of the late 1960s.

Among those questions have been ones about monogamy; about the connection, or not, between sex and intimacy (“the bathhouse culture,” as Eleanor Brown called it in Thursday’s Globe and Mail); and about the relation between biology and sexual preference: Are we encoded for these things or is a shifting range available to everyone? These questions travel far beyond the moralisms of fundamentalists and social conservatives on whether gay sex is evil. They are relevant for all members of society, and it’s valuable to hear them discussed.

Besides, they frequently reverberate to bear not just on sexuality but other realms. When you start ruminating on sex, you often end up thinking about everything else. I have in mind Wilhelm Reich’s books in the 1930s on the relation between sexual repression and the rise of fascism. It may sound odd, but try reading them: They’re persuasive.

In the 1960s, sexual “liberation” seemed organically related to political, social, economic, even educational liberation, and to the release of human potential. Today, how often do you hear about liberation? Most people are satisfied if they can hang onto a little health care and maybe get the kids through to a BA. What a diminution.

That’s why I call the narrowing of focus among many gay rights advocates a pity and a loss for everyone. They seem down to one aim: being like everybody else. Let me add, real fast, this is understandable. It’s no one’s duty to push the boundaries and ask basic questions; it’s just useful for us all if they do.

I know someone whose brother came out and turned politically to the right around the same time. Her theory was that he felt so sexually outrageous that at least he wanted to be conservative and unoffending in every other way. There was a flip version among some Communists during the 1930s who were often very sexually respectable and “bourgeois,” as if to compensate for being economic and political revolutionaries. And the gay movement isn’t alone; feminism has largely abandoned its radical impulses.

In fact, we live in an era well inoculated against basic questions. Think about the effects of September 11th. Before that, antiglobalists, many of them anarchists, had been raising questions about the nature of capitalism in this era, much as socialists did in the years before the First World War.

The effect of September 11 has been largely to quell those voices. Or take the unmomentous resignation of Joe Clark and the renewed calls for conservatives to unite the right. But what is the right? And are conservatives inherently right wing? (I’d happily argue they aren’t.) Those questions don’t get debated or, for the most part, asked.

But, whoa, I don’t want to sound nostalgic, as if other ages excelled at basic questions. People keep quoting Pierre Trudeau, who said the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. But if he had been really serious about that, why hadn’t he got the government out of the marriage licensing and divorcing game altogether?

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.