Back when Canada passed its marriage-equality legislation,

[kentauros]

did y'all get the same conservative and/or evangelical-Christian shit that we're getting?

I've been thinking about that since it passed here and we've seen all of the over-the-top reactions from conservatives. My educated guess is that you didn't, but please educate me and everyone else on this. I can't say I've ever read news of the same hate-filled reactions happening in Canada. I'm hoping they'll settle down in a year or so here.

Thanks!

[laundry_queen]

1. There was a bit

Nothing anyone paid any attention to though. Probably the most high profile person to spew shit was Alberta premier Ralph Klein:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Klein#Same-sex_marriage


Let's just say most public opinion was against him so he quickly backed down. I don't remember it being a big deal anywhere but conservative Alberta (I was in BC at the time). By 2005 pretty much everyone was on board and those who weren't didn't say much...or at least didn't get any air time.

Others might remember things differently...Not sure what may have gone on in other provinces (it started out as a province-by-province thing).

[kentauros]

4. That was my impression from the start.

That it was almost a non-issue, at least negatively so. We're still the nation started by Puritans kicked out of England for being too radical

[Betty Karlson]

2. When the Dutch did it (2001) there was over a decade of controversy over clerks refusing to assist

same-sex couples to get married. There were municipalities that actively sought to protect these clerks. And the way SSM was introduced, the gay movement didn't seem interested in changing minds, but rather in vengeful retribution against "the christians". In 2006, a liberal candidate even suggested disenfranchising all members of religious congregations.

There was a church schism over the issue of allowing SSM to be consacrated in church (the biggest schism since 1886) and when in 2005 a small conservative-christian party entered the government, things finally started to settle down with a compromise (every municipality had to have a clerk to assist with same-sex marriage, but the few remaining refusing clerks were tolerated - until 2012, when the new government decided to outlaw refusing clerks.

Part of the reason that went down well is that by then, the youth movement of the small conservative-christian party had come out in limited support of marriage equality.

That still didn't prevent a candidate in - of all places - Amsterdam to advocate recriminalising homosexuality and punishing it in violent ways, during the 2014 municipal elections campaign. He was not elected, but he was not arrested either.

[kentauros]

5. And here I would have thought ALL of Europe

to have reacted much the same way as Canada. That's too bad it took them so long. I hope it doesn't take us as long, either. The youth are always the key

[Bluenorthwest]

7. The Netherlands has it's very own 'Bible Belt' and anti vaxx religious communities and the whole

trip. Not a huge number of people, but still, there they are.

[MisterP]

3. look up Stockwell Day's trajectory: he tried to bring US-style fundamentalism to the Tories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockwell_Day

Canadian Christianity is more dominated by mainline Protestants and Catholics and Canada barely has more "nonbelievers," but the difference appears to be political

historians of creationism say it won the battle with Scopes and thoroughly lost the war, and even when it was taught in the South it wasn't a *movement* until the late 60s; ultraconservatism wasn't seen as part of the Christian identity until the Baptist coup in the late 70s, which was part of a carefully-orchestrated rightward backlash that ranged from foreign analysts to pharmacists; Reagan rode a wave of the new fundamentalism into office and it's been a core faction of the GOP since then even as it's met with increasing disgust

the biggest debunker of creationists was ... a conservative Baptist

[kentauros]

6. Well, that makes more sense for Canada's difference in this matter

to be more about politics than based in belief. That's part of my impression of them, though my past-wife is Canadian and deeply spiritual. She voted Liberal when she lived there as far as I know

[MisterP]

8. the main parameter does appear to be corporatism--the US does have a strong revivalist and DIY

religious heritage and a history of blessed slavery, self-help that shades into Prosperity Theology, and fundie tomfoolery like McPherson and fake Lincoln quotes before even WWI, and Canada is basically an extractive economy: but at the same time most revivalist movements were pretty pinko for their time, Darwin ruffled few 19th-century feathers over here, the Scopes textbook shocks us today, and the country that based its entire Mideastern policy on some crank's interpretation of the Rapture was Britain

rooted in long US traditions of cutthroat, self-sabotaging individualism but also small-town hostility, the new fundamentalist message is entirely corpo-friendly, something they could've written themselves in their pet think tanks (frankly they're never asked to really change anything about themselves, especially with a screwy version of Calvin's "elect" in the mix: Robertson literally said it's not a sin if you really want to do something--hedonist!)

now, mainstream churches can definitely back conservative status quos, but often change how that's defined--neo-Thomist anti-abortion rhetoric and sexual conservatism even pushed the US Catholic prelates close to the fundies late 70s and early 80s: but I know of women whose mothers told them kissing would make them pregnant, until set straight by some Catholic sex-ed literature (her husband in fact ran off to be a priest, and then a guerrilla, and then the CIA tortured/starved him to death and tossed chunks of him into a river), and the USCCB damned Reagan's economics and Latin policy backwards and frontwards

and my very devout European relatives just stop and stare when I casually mention that 20-50% of this country thinks that the Earth's 10-6,000 years old: it's something that just doesn't happen in even un-secular countries with established churches! (just as all the mainstream sects easily accepted heliocentricity and evolution and anything else once they were satisfied with the evidence)

there's always a tendency to split the world in two--backwards and forwards, progressives or reactionaries, secular and religious--when in fact there's so many moving parts it gets dizzying and you can barely tell up from down!

[Monk06]

9. Steven Harper is an evangelical and a dominionist but he kept his mouth shut because he knew

his religious beliefs would be a game ender in an election.

Born aginers tend to clump together in small rural towns and have no power in the cities. Plus Quebec is atheist for all intents and purposes

[kentauros]

10. Thanks for the information :)

I didn't know that about Harper, but it sounds like he's a bit smarter than his counterparts here. They don't know when to shut up, and yet, it doesn't seem to hurt them, either.