Kate, a Canadian blogger, points readers to David Frum’s brief article from a couple of days ago:

In the province of Ontario, the words “wife,” “husband,” “widow,” and “widower” are now all to be stricken from the law. The words “mother” and “father” cannot be far behind.

Ontario’s action is a reminder that same-sex marriage is not just the extension of an existing legal status to previously excluded persons. Same-sex marriage is a revolution in the definition of marriage for everyone - a revolution not just in law, but in consciousnessness.

And one effect of this revolution - and for many proponents, one of the revolution’s aims - is to make forever unthinkable the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband’s duties to his wife - while equally binding and equally supreme - are not the same as a wife’s duties to her husband.

Once we lose that knowledge, we lose the basic grammar of marriage. It is one more reminder that in the same-sex marriage debate, we are debating not marriage’s change - but marriage’s overthrow.

Mark at Section 15 tears apart the piece. His comments are interesting, if you can filter through the haze created by his personal attacks. (Ferengi, Wingnut, Liar)

Where do I start? Frum, a low-tax, small government conservative, believes that government defines for me the nature of my relationship with my wife?! Government defines nature? There’s a conspiracy (see my emphasis above) by many supporters of SSM to apparently brainwash us by altering a legal definition to ensure only the equal application of law?

Relationships were around a long time before government. We seemed to have formed relationships and procreated anyway.

And there isn’t anything currently in marital law which affects how a husband and wife decide to define and meet mutual obligations. I honestly don’t know where Frum is getting any of this. He has his own perception of marriage, but seems to fail to understand that this is separate from the law, which, given his ivy school law credentials, doesn’t wash.