Canadian Activist: Marriage Vote Signals Conservative Party's Abandoned Values
by Chad Groening
December 11, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Canadian pro-family activist admits he is bitterly disappointed that the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper failed to restore traditional marriage to the people of Canada on Thursday. The vote was 175-123 against Harper's resolution calling for marriage to once again be defined strictly as a union between one man and one woman. The liberal Globe and Mail newspaper began an article on the vote with a bold pronouncement: "Same-sex marriage is here to stay."
Although pro-family leader Brian Rushfeldt, executive director of the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC), had held out hope for a narrow victory in favor of traditional marriage, he says he got a clue about how things would turn out from watching Wednesday's debate process on the resolution. "There were times that there were only ten people out of 308 in the House to listen to the debate," he says. "So obviously, they didn't even have enough respect for the issue to sit in and listen to the points that were being made."
Rushfeldt says unfortunately the Conservative Party has too many members who are not really conservative. He expects that fact will probably cost Harper in next year's expected elections.
"True conservatives are going to be very disgusted," the CFAC spokesman contends, "and it's not that they will go vote elsewhere, because there is nowhere else to vote." What Canadians are likely to do, he suggests, is what many Americans did during the recent U.S. national elections; that is, "simply stay home."
Conservative Canadian citizens will likely just stay away from the polls next election, Rushfeldt explains, "because they won't support a party that's not going to represent their values." He believes the vote on marriage has clearly demonstrated that many of the Conservative Party members in Parliament are not really conservative at all.
"Progressive Conservatives -- which are liberals, in essence -- have basically, in our estimation, taken control of that party now," the pro-family activist asserts. "And the tone that we saw, in both the debate and ten or eleven of them voting against marriage, has set the tone perhaps for a defeat for the Conservative Party in the next election."
Rushfeldt says the lack of a genuine defense of marriage or proposed solution in this week's parliamentary debate has signaled "the abandonment of conservative values." And when a party abandons the values of its core base, he contends, that party loses support.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
