Gay Rights and Commercial Gain

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin says that his government's desire to impose same-sex marriage on the country is a question of human rights, and a defense of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Martin is the paladin of minority rights. He has hinted, therefore, that those who oppose him are enemies of the Charter and enemies of human rights.

Interestingly, he made these comments while standing on Chinese Communist soil, where the deficit of rights of any kind is rather severe, to say the least. If the prime minister is in the mood to lecture people about human rights and about homosexual marriage; if he were really interested in promoting human rights at all, one wonders how he would pass up the opportunity to pontificate on the issue to more than one billion Chinese citizens and their government. Earlier, Martin was in India, where millions of people are left out social functions, politics and the economy by virtue of their birth as "untouchables." He seems to have passed up the opportunity there as well to pontificate about their rights, or about marriage rights for homosexuals in that country, forfeiting an audience of nearly one billion people.

It would seem that human rights and rights for homosexuals to marry are only worthy of imposing on Canadians. The $21 billion worth of goods that we are expected to purchase from China this year, and the $7 billion that they are expected to buy from us, of course, are in no way factors in the equation.