Sunday, October 08, 2006

SPECULATION vs. SENSIBILITY

There was a great deal of debate about this over the past week, with conservatives and liberals jumping to their respective barricades. Not surprisingly, the issue of post-same-sex-marriage legistaltion was featured in the Sunday Star's gernerally useless McQuaig-Anderson point-couter-point feature.

Then remaining on the side of sensible there was Mader who, earlier in the week, wrote this:

So I was in the middle of drafting a lengthy post about this when I realized that nobody can possibly have anything useful to say about it.
[...]
Everybody take a deep breath. (Especially you, Ms Jennings.) When the text of the bill comes out, then we can talk about whether it's a slippery slope, or whether it's redundant - or whether it reaffirms in statute a fundamental principle of liberal democratic government that has seemed at times to have nearly been read out of the Canadian constitution. It'll be a good debate to have, if it comes. Until it comes, let's just all admit we have no idea.
Now today the Prime Minister has confirmed the sensibility of Mader's stance with his statements on the issue:
"There is no such proposal. The government is very committed to bringing forward a free vote on the marriage issue, probably this fall, and all this speculation about what we might do afterward is just speculation."
Indeed.

Yet another example that reasonable arguments are best made on a foundation extant facts.

Posted by Matthew @ 12:38 p.m.