Canadian Senate Expected to 'Rubber Stamp' Homosexual Marriage Bill
by Chad Groening
July 11, 2005
(AgapePress) - A pro-family activist in Canada says there is very little hope that homosexual marriage will not become the law of the land now that Parliament has passed its same-sex "marriage" bill, known as C-38, and the Senate vote on the bill is largely a formality.
Brian Rushfeldt, co-founder and executive director of the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC), has been urging pro-family Canadians to contact their senators and urge them to vote against the homosexual marriage bill. However, he estimates the chance that the Senate will do the right thing by voting against the same-sex marriage legislation as "virtually none."
In fact, Rushfeldt says even attempts to temper the provisions of the legislation are unlikely to make it through the liberal Senate's approval process. "There were a couple of amendments that a couple of the senators tried to introduce," he points out, adding, "I don't even think any amendments are going to get passed in the Senate. I think it's going to go through just the way it went through our Parliament with the same wording as Parliament sent up to them. They can just rubber stamp it."
The main reason the Senate is likely to pass the homosexual marriage bill unchanged, the pro-family activist explains, is that the Canadian political system has resulted in a predominantly liberal legislative body in recent years. Unlike the Senate in the United States, he notes, Canadian senators are appointed by the nation's chief executive. And in the case of the current Senate, most of the lawmakers owe their seats to very liberal government leaders.
"All these senators are appointed by our prime minister, basically," Rushfeldt says, "and not just this last prime minister. Our senators are not elected at all; they're all appointed people. They've been appointed mostly by liberal prime ministers, so the high majority of them now are liberal senators."
Therefore, the CFAC spokesman doubts the Canadian Senate will to do anything to derail the same-sex marriage amendment recently passed by Parliament. "There's no way that this thing has a hope of getting stopped, in my opinion," he asserts.
Rushfeldt says he expects the Senate will approve the same-sex marriage measure by the end of this week. The Canadian Parliament's 158-133 vote approving C-38 last month sent the bill legalizing "homosexual marriage" on to the Senate. Approval there will add Canada to the list of countries that have legalized same-sex marriage nationwide -- a list that so far includes Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
