The whole range of consequences, especially the unintended ones, flowing from any legislation engaged in social engineering can never be predicted in its entirety.
If it could, then, perhaps, the Soviet Union would not have sunk like the Titanic in the slipstream of its much vaunted effort to engineer new socialist men and women who would bear any burden, pay any price, to advance the collectivist goals of their classless society.
Canadian legislation a generation ago, making divorces easy and painless, to relieve couples from the agony of marriages gone sour, was considered humane and progressive.
A generation later, children of failed marriages, single parents, common-law arrangements and other experiments in co-habitation tell a story that could not have been fully imagined then.
It is undeniable that the passage of same-sex marriage bill into law has left the country divided, and in time Canadians will learn the full extent of the harm done in wrecking the traditional institution of marriage on the gilded claims of tolerance and progress.
The arguments advanced by supporters of same-sex marriage were never convincing.
Theirs is at best a Pyrrhic victory, acquired by desecrating an institution through a charade that mocked the principles of democracy the prime minister once promised to defend.
Many in opposing the legislation, as I did, were not defending the meaning of traditional marriage merely on sentimental grounds. It could not be demonstrated, nor was it, that marriage is a right in the same sense that freedom to think and speak is a right, freedom to believe in a religion or not to and freedom to own property are rights.
Marriage has always been a social convention sanctified by all traditional religions for being the seed of family. Hence, the relationship between marriage and family was viewed as the moral basis of society and an integral aspect of the natural order of things.
But the assault on family is as old as the history of family. Human beings, in the Aristotelian sense, are political creatures, and the assault on family has always been a political machination by those holding the natural affinity of family as suspect.
From Plato to Stalin and Mao, the ideologues of state as the guiding hands of human destiny understood the imperative to wreck the family as a natural institution, in order to build their own versions of centrally-directed society, where natural kinship nurtured in a family setting would be replaced by ones designed and approved by state.
Liberal Canada is not quite there, where the erstwhile philosopher-kings will direct Canadians into the making of a godless utopia where the state demands of them loyalty and affection ahead of their families.
But the lib-left disposition in Canada increasingly leans toward state and away from family, and this tendency, continued from matters of taxation to social policies, may eventually mean keeling over from what remains of a free society into a closed society of tolerance for politically correct thinking only.
The defence of the traditional meaning of marriage was in effect defending the traditional place of the family in society. It was not about greater or lesser tolerance, nor about opposing progress in human affairs.
It was also about democracy, about being suspicious of elite considerations on matters where common sense is the more reliable guide in thinking and doing what is naturally and instinctively right and good.
Polls repeatedly showed a majority—in English Canada an overwhelming majority—opposed any change in the definition of traditional marriage.
All mainline traditional religions remain in agreement on the meaning of traditional marriage being a union of one man and one woman. Those religious groups, such as the mainstream Protestant congregations, that have supported same-sex marriage, find their churches or temples ironically declining in membership.
The issue of marriage may now be closed, at least for a while.
But it might be safe to predict, like the subject of abortion, it will not be interred.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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