Conservatives in Canada Vote to End Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage – a Decade After It Became Law

Huge Win, Huge Margin

The Conservative Party of Canada, better known as the Tories, on Saturday voted to remove official opposition to marriage equality from its party platform. Same-sex marriage has been legal for Canada’s 36 million citizens for over a decade, since 2005.

“The Conservative party is the party of rights for all Canadians,” claimed Calgary MP Michelle Rempel, shown in the tweet below on the right. “It is long past time that we passed this resolution,” she told about 1500 delegates at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

“It’s about us and it’s about telling to Canadians that you can love who you are, who you want, and that you can be in love, and I hope that also having fair policies at the federal level,” Quebec MP Maxime Bernier said.

The vote, 1,036-462, was not an official acceptance of marriage equality, but rather to take a neutral stance on the issue, removing from its official platform a definition of marriage as being “the union of one man and one woman.” It was not a formal embrace or support for equality.

The National Post reports this change “effectively means the party accepts same-sex unions and that it shouldn’t be in the business of defining marriage for Canadians.”

Many conservatives were clearly angered.

“One delegate had called the resolution an attack on our values and principle . . . family, faith and community,'” The Star reports. “Another opponent said while it protects religious institutions, it didn’t protect individual conscience rights. He said Christian bakers would not be able to refuse a request for a gay couple’s wedding cake, ‘leaving them open to litigation.’ Still another said support for traditional marriage was not about discrimination against gays, but ‘man-woman marriage is about children knowing and being raised by both a mother and a father,’ he said.”

Buzzfeed noted that a “former Conservative MP even cited dystopian literature in denouncing the proposal. ‘In George Orwell’s 1984 book, people in power actually enforced their views by changing the very meaning of words,’ Stephen Woodworth said. ‘And that’s exactly what’s happened in Canada today, we don’t even have a word anymore for the institution of marriage.'”

The Principal Secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau offered this somewhat mocking congratulatory tweet:

 

Image by Alanna Newman via Twitter