What are they thinking?

If you’ve been coming around here for a while, or reading my column elsewhere, or maybe even stopping by since the Pundit days, you know how I feel about gay marriage. There are issues I’m willing to bend on, ones I don’t think are totally black and white, ones where I grant the other side has a good case. This is not one of those issues: I could not vote for or support any politician who campaigned against it.

Yes, I’m going somewhere with this. See, because I work at a mostly conservative paper (though admittedly, one considerably less socially conservative than it once was), I’m very familiar with both sides of this debate. And that’s why was so horrified to see this over the weekend.

The notion that gay marriage somehow poses a threat to heterosexuals has always struck me as ridiculous. More and more people, I think, have slowly come around to that view. So social conservatives have fallen back on claims that it’ll wind up violating religious freedoms – that before long, it’ll be impossible for churches to teach what they’ve been teaching for eons.

Until now, there’s been nothing to justify that fear-mongering – particularly since Ottawa has gone out of its way to provide protections for churches that don’t want to wed same-sex couples. But now, we have activists suggesting that churches lose their charitable status – something that would force many of them into bankruptcy – if they make that decision.

This is an incredibly ill-advised campaign to launch – partly because it’s wrong-headed and unnecessary, and partly because the timing is just bloody awful. Just as opponents of gay marriage are desperately looking for a way to bolster their flagging cause, they’ve been handed one on a silver platter – a way to scare fence-sitters who’ve generally been leaning toward the 'live and let live' approach.

Frankly, I still have a hard time seeing churches being penalized for refusing to go along with the new definition. But with that possibility now on the table, making the case that gay marriage poses no threat to anyone may have just gotten a little more challenging.