Won't be long now ....

said the monkey as he backed into the lawnmower ....

"Court has created the mother of all parent traps"
John Robson, The Ottawa Citizen

You thought I was kidding. On Sept. 6, 2003, when this newspaper endorsed homosexual marriage, I wrote a column ending "Beware: Those who call for nonsense will find that it comes." And now a court says a child can have three parents ... and counting.

The decision strikes me as revolutionary. For starters, it makes polygamy all but inevitable. For if marriage, as two people of opposite sex, can be dissolved by any court and reconstituted as two people of any sex, and if parenthood, as up to two people, can be dissolved and reconstituted as three (or more), how long before a judge says all a child's parents can be married to each other, especially if they all live together?

[...]

As for nonsense, what does it even mean when a court says you can now have three parents? Did no child have three parents until Tuesday? Or have people always had groups of dads and we never noticed? At bottom what is law? Does it create facts, or merely recognize them?

[...]

The problem is not that this ruling gave a child a second "mother." For better or worse gay marriage did that. The intolerable novelty here is that the court did so without delisting the original father. Allowing parents to multiply raises enormous practical problems of child support, access and so on. But behind them lurks a question of principle: Is it really true that you can have more than two parents at one time?

If so, everyone who ever lived, loved and raised a family misunderstood the word "parent" from the dawn of time until light shone down from the bench on Tuesday. Which is what Canadian law now says.

So beware: Nonsense is not just coming. It's here.