A radical agenda and a slippery slope

Here is Jeff Jacoby's look into the abyss created by the seemingly reasonable and limited push for same-sex marriage:

Massachusetts rolled out a new marriage license shorn of any reference to bride and groom. Couples getting married were now to be officially identified as ''Party A" and ''Party B." The department of public health proposed a similar rewrite of the state's birth certificate, replacing ''mother" and ''father" with ''Parent A" and ''Parent B." To that, Governor Mitt Romney objected, though it is probably only a matter of time until a court orders him to make the change. Meanwhile, others have gone far beyond Massachusetts in embracing the brave new world of unisex marriage. Last month, lawmakers in Ontario enacted Bill 171, stripping the statute books of all references to gender in connection with marriage. No longer do Ontario's laws use words and phrases like ''husband," ''wife," ''widow," ''widower," or ''persons of the opposite sex." And it is not just family and marriage laws that have been de-sexed. Bill 171 eliminates the traditional language of matrimony from more than 70 provincial statutes, including the Gasoline Tax Act and the Public Libraries Act. What is underway here is not simply a tweaking of legal terminology. The crusade for same-sex marriage has never been aimed merely at adjusting the familiar boundaries of married life to make it more inclusive. The real target is the significance of marriage itself — the idea, fundamental to human happiness and all successful societies, that the purpose of marriage is to bring men and women together for their mutual welfare and for the protection and well-being of any children they create or adopt. It is that deeply ingrained belief that the marriage radicals are determined to do away with. One purpose of the official marriage Newspeak is to make such thoughts increasingly unthinkable.

I've already opined on the subject, here, and am increasingly uncomfortable with the vast societal change our courts are forcing on us without the necessary national debate. UPDATE: For reasons that make no sense to me, I Mark Steyn quotation about Irish terrorism ended up here originally, rather than the Jeff Jacoby quotation about gay marriage. Thanks to Patricks' quick eyes, I finally fixed that. I'm more prone to typographical error than the next person, but I've been having so much trouble with Blogger lately, I'm wondering if I can point at least a small finger to a technological glitch.