Tomorrow, the Supreme Court of Canada will almost certainly recognize same-sex marriage.
Today, I read the first coherent argument I have seen against the prospect. It was written by a Catholic priest (surprise, surprise) in the National Post. I have tried to retrieve the article electronically, but alas, in order to read the Post online you must subscribe to it. Silly. This forces me to paraphrase what I read,and it went something like this:

Gay marriage is not the beginning of the end of marriage, but rather the end of the end.
The beginning of the end came with no-fault divorce, a development which allowed married couples to break their contract pretty much on a whim (why stay married?); the middle of the end was common-law relationships (why even get married at all); and now we have same-sex marriage, which allows any two people to marry. Marriage has thus devolved from a sacred contract, almost impossible to break, into something that seems meaningless, since any couple can do it, arguably nobody needs to do it anymore to gain its benefits, and it can be broken so easily.

I really have to give this columnist credit for advancing something a little more thought-out than the usual "God hates faggots" tripe I see so thinly veiled from propagandists with Focus on the Family and their ilk. Indeed, he has forced me to think a little bit in order to refute his claims. He has not fallen prey to the slippery slope fallacy that enchants moralists (what's next, polygamy? A man marrying his sister? A woman marrying her cat?") Nor has he fallen into the "marriage is only for raising children" trap, which , frankly, amazed me given that he is a Catholic priest. He seems to have given a good deal of thought ot his position. I respect that. So I will respectfully try to rebut his arguments.

In examining his arguments, it occurs to me that he views marriage as a social contract, made primarily for the benefit of society. I'm not so sure I agree with this assumption. Marriage, to me, is an intensely personal commitment, made between you, your spouse, and whatever Higher Power you may or may not believe in. The public declaration is an indication of how strongly you feel about the rightness of your action. The benefits that marriage confers are largely personal.

When I married Eva, I didn't think for one second about forming 'the basic building block' of human society. I did think long and hard about the kind of commitment I was entering into, and how we would grow together. Somewhere between a third and a half of all couples divorce. So what? We're not other couples.A whole whack of people choose to live common-law. So what? We're not them. Now, Adam and Steve down the road will be able to commit themselves to each other in the manner of my wife and I. We're not Adam and Steve, either. Their marriage, or the marriage of my friends Jen and Doug, or the marriage of my wife's parents, or any other marriage or common-law relationship you'd care to name, do not affect my marriage in any way.
We did prominently mention children in our vows, because we meant (and mean) to have them--or, as it turns out, raise them. But children are not an obligation of marriage. There are married couples who choose not to have kids at all, and this choice does not invalidate their marriage. There are married couples--lots of them!--who choose to have or adopt children, and who turn out to be phenomenally bad parents. This also does not invalidate their marriage. Likewise, there are parents who choose not to get married, and they too fall all along the parenting spectrum from awesome to awful. Their relationship is not something I would choose for myself, knowing what I now know of marriage; but that's just it. It's not my choice to make, it's theirs.
Now, there will be gay couples. Some of them will even be parents. Whether they are good parents or bad parents, or not parents at all, in no way diminishes their commitment to each other. Should they get divorced, just as with heterosexual couples, it wouldn't mean they were never married. (The Catholic Church is the only institution I know of that tries to rewrite history in this way.)

If the arguments against marriage truly had any weight, we would see a marked decline in the number of marriages. According to Statistics Canada, the number of people getting married in Canada has increased every year for the last three. And the number of divorces has decreased every year for the same period. Clearly, people are disregarding all the reasons listed above why they shouldn't get married. They are instead commiting publically to each other in greater and greater numbers.

Tomorrow, I predict that gays and lesbians will be able to join the parade to the altar nationwide, should they choose to. Tomorrow, at 9:45 a.m., think of your spouse and remember all the reasons you married him or her. Can a court judgment render those reasons any less a treasure?

I don't think so.