I was reading an article the other day online, and I came across this one. Seeing as how this is becoming an issue again (this time in my home state o'NY) I figured it was worth sharing this with the masses.

Those wacky Canadians

While the United States bans same-sex marriage state by state, the Canadian supreme court has endorsed marriage equality for all. Canadians also enjoy less violent crime and better education. Could it be they're smarter than us?

By Karel Charles Bouley II

On Tuesday, December 7, New York State supreme court justice Joseph Teresi ruled that same-sex couples do not have a basic right to marry in New York and thus their constitutional rights had not been violated by being denied such rights. Two days later, on December 9, Canada’s highest court said that the government can redefine marriage to include same-sex couples and paved the way for the country to make nationwide what 86% of its provinces have already done: allow same-sex couples to marry.

Those wacky Canadians.

As I sit pondering the ramifications of these two diverse events, CNN blares in the background about 25-year-old Nathan Gale, who leapt on to the stage during a concert by the rock band Damageplan on December 8, gun blazing, killing four people including the band’s guitarist, wounding two until he himself was taken out by a lone policeman. I think about the fact that Canada has no Second Amendment and thus only 22% of Canadians own guns as opposed to 49% of Americans (according to Slate, http://slate.msn.com/id/2109300) and handguns and assault rifles are completely prohibited. Canada’s violent crime rate is one tenth that of the United States.

Those wacky Canadians.

I start to ponder why Canadians aren’t worried about the moral decay and sure decline into a Gomorrah-esque society that surely will follow their country allowing gays and lesbians to marry but lose my train of thought when a MacReporter headline pops through on my desktop that the jury decided Scott Peterson will be put to death for the murder of his pregnant wife Laci and their “unborn son.” I think about Peterson’s conviction of first- and second-degree murder, a conviction based in pure emotion and no fact whatsoever. There was no smoking gun in the Peterson case, no eyewitness, no murder weapon, no DNA evidence, just a high-profile lawyer and a man who cheated on his wife, all in a circus posing as a trial. A manslaughter conviction at best, but no, as juror after juror got dismissed during deliberations a final verdict came out based in sensationalism and not justice. So now those 12 people decided Peterson—who never confessed, whose fingerprints were not found on any weapon, who was never seen with Laci or her body the day of the murder—should die.
I’m reminded that Canada abolished capital punishment in the 1970s and hasn’t seen an execution since 1962, the year of my birth.

Those wacky Canadians.

As I turn back to same-sex marriage, I’m forced to accept that the ban in 49 of the 50 United States—or at least the lack of legalization—is based in religious views, and that this democracy is moving closer and closer to a theocracy every day. I don’t want to accept it, but how can I deny it as the Ten Commandments monument that was banned in an Alabama courthouse is now halfway through its national tour of 15 states on the back of a flatbed truck? Yes, like Britney Spears and Incubus, the monument is on tour, with devotees in Louisiana spouting phrases like “Vote the Bible” and “Let the values of the men who founded this country rule,” according to a Shreveport Times story on the monument’s visit. Maybe those people are forgetting that the values of the men who founded this country included legal slavery and the limitation of the right to vote to white male citizens who owned land. But maybe they’re not forgetting that at all.
I think of the Conservative Party of Canada, moving to remove references to God in the nation’s Preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, replacing religious references with “democratic parliamentary institutions.” As we move to institutionalize God and the Christian faith in the United States, to codify it in our laws, Canadians move to keep government and religion separate.

Those wacky Canadians.

The fight for same-sex marriage in the United States is enough to make a grown gay man nauseous. Should that nausea become clinical and need to be treated, I’m reminded that in the United States—even if my state has voted to accept medicinal marijuana as a treatment for such nausea—the federal government under the guidance of George Bush and John Ashcroft is doing everything it can to make the Supreme Court say, “No! You cannot have pot as a legal drug for those whose doctors say need it.” Not so in Canada, a country that has again loosened its stance toward medicinal marijuana and may be well on its way to decriminalizing the drug all together.

Those wacky Canadians.

How did this happen? How did our neighbors to the north seem to get it right and we, the land of the “free” and home of the “brave” seem to go so far astray from the freedom from religion that our founding fathers had in mind? Could the cold of the north produce some sort of calming effect? I mean truly, we like to think of ourselves as mentally superior to the rest of the world, and yet it would appear that we are falling behind socially and academically.

Think about it. In a recent study of developed nations’ math skills by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked 28th out of 40 nations. Canada ranked seventh. For reading skills, Canada was third, the United States 18th. For science, Canada ranked 11th, the United States 14th. Let’s face it, we’re not too bright.
And socially, we’re moving back to the dark ages.

It would be humorous, it could be funny, if it weren’t hurting so many of us in so many ways. We’re raising a nation of academic idiots who seem to be relying more on the words of a 2000- to 3000-year-old book of stories for life guidance than textbooks, and it’s not serving us well.
It’s not that Canadians are better, they’re just smarter. It’s a hard truth, but one borne out by statistics. And people who use their brains to rule, instead of their emotions and religion, appear to get it right when it comes to truly caring for their people.

Our founding fathers never considered this. They concentrated on the land of the free, the home of the brave, nowhere did they say the land of the educated, the home of the enlightened. We constantly throw science to the background for what we believe to be the truth, instead of what can be proved. It’s odd that a country founded by men of science, including great thinkers like Benjamin Franklin, a land designed by Freemasons, has become a theocratic land of consumers who buy more than they produce and who learn more about sensational news stories or 2000-year-old fables than practical things like how to spell, read, write, and balance their checkbooks.
Almost every social debate in this country would end if we relied on dispassionate, analytical, or more factual logic when trying to examine the problem. Same-sex marriage would be looked at for what it is, a matter of contractual law, not some social ill. Marriage is a civil contract with rules and rights governed by state and federal institutions. It’s a legal institution, not a social one, and should be handled by lawyers, not priests.
But that makes too much sense.

Abortion is a medical procedure, not a social debate. It’s a procedure between a doctor and a patient governed by certain unchangeable medical rules and guidelines. It’s clinical, not theological. The same for stem-cell research.
Medical marijuana—again, a medical issue, not a social one.

But we don’t have the brains to wrap around such concepts because our leaders like us dumb. Those who are educated, who are enlightened, are called liberals, or worse, un-American. Those who use logic instead of religion to decide “social” issues are pagans, atheists, no matter their religious affiliation.

Let’s face it, we’re a bunch of idiots and now the rest of the world knows it. We’ve elected a president twice who has no command of the English language. We’ve made second-class citizens of so many because they go against “good Christian beliefs.” We stand in judgment of the rest of the world in so many ways, and feel free to invade other nations and set up governments we like, and yet most of us can barely do long division or spell without help from a computer program.

Money and power do not make a country great. Sure, we’ve got that. Big guns and better weapons don’t make a country strong. We’ve allowed our leaders to make us believe that our only job as Americans is to consume and pay for programs like the missile defense system—a system which, on December 15, failed in an $85-million blunder. Doesn’t take rocket science to know that this program doesn’t work. But we’ll keep pressing on with it.

We used to be a country of some of the greatest thinkers on the planet—the greatest philosophers, greatest scientists, greatest adventurers. We were a country of people like Howard Hughes who challenged the skies, of scientists finding the cures, and of people who believed that elevation came through education, not through prayer.

Canadians aren’t better than Americans, just smarter. Literally, smarter. When we get our heads out of a book of fables and go back to educating ourselves in all disciplines, social policy will change. Because any thinking person could look at the United States right now and shake their head with disillusionment and disgust. In fact, most are doing just that.

Jesus is not coming back in our lifetime. I’m willing to bet my life on it. So stop preparing for his second coming and start preparing the way for the next generation of Americans to inherit something worth getting. Start educating ourselves and our youth in more than Ten Commandments and Old Testament ramblings about men lying with other men, and stop debating when life begins from a biblical instead of scientific standpoint.

In other words, America, wise up. Our neighbors to the north are making us look like we arrived in North America on the short yellow bus. When it comes to social issues, let’s deal in facts from educated standpoints, not emotions from theocratic ramblings. Because it’s not too hard to conquer a nation of idiots, and if any of you actually have read a history book, you’d know that no empire, not one, lasts forever. Ask the Romans. Our position as a superpower will slip long before any deity returns to Earth. And it will happen while we concentrate on who can marry whom, what they’re smoking while doing it, or when, exactly, a fertilized egg becomes a human—all while fighting for the right to hold an assault weapon.

Believe it or not, those are the least of our nation’s worries. But most of us are obviously too dumb to know it.

Those wacky Americans.

Karel is a talk-show host on KGO AM 810 in San Francisco on Saturdays and Sundays from 7 to 10 p.m. He can also be heard on the Web at www.kgo.com. His book of essays, You Can’t Say That, has just been published. Find out more about Karel or order the book at www.karelchannel.com. You can e-mail Karel at comments@karelchannel.com.