Nation of Bastards

Essays on the End of Marriage
Douglas Farrow

“Erudite and impassioned – an act of faith and of resistance to the insidious claims of the post-Christian and post-liberal state.”
– F. C. Decoste, Professor of Law, University of Alberta

To some, same-sex marriage is evidence that society has finally come of age. To others, it is yesterday’s issue, posing no danger to traditional marriage. To still others – McGill University’s Douglas Farrow among them – it has turned civil society on its ear, creating a new political situation in which several things are no longer clear:

• Is the state the property of the citizenry? Or are citizens, with their cherished personal associations, including marriage, now the property of the state?
• Who “owns” the children, now that natural parenthood had been replaced by legal parenthood?
• Is the family still “the natural and fundamental group unit of society,” as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights claims? Or is the concept of the “natural” moribund?
• What is marriage for, anyway?