Yukon Territory
legalizes gay marriage
A trial court in Canada's Yukon Territory ordered the government to give a gay couple a marriage license July 14.
Territorial Premier Dennis Fentie accepted the ruling and said there would be no appeal.
Rob Edge and Stephen Dunbar married three days later.
The court redefined marriage in the Yukon as the voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of all others, and declared the old definition 'unconstitutional.'
'Hopefully someday nobody will question why same-sex couples want to marry—they'll know it's for the same reasons as everyone else,' Edge said.
The court said it is 'inconsistent' for the federal government not already to have legalized same-sex marriage in the Yukon given that it chose not to challenge top-court decisions that legalized same-sex marriage in the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec over the past 14 months, and that it has announced plans to rewrite federal marriage law to include same-sex couples.
'The judge agreed that justice delayed is justice denied,' said Martha McCarthy, who represented same-sex couples in the Ontario and Quebec marriage challenges. 'He rejected the federal government's arguments that courts should stand idly by while [the federal] Parliament waits for the [Canadian] Supreme Court' to answer some questions regarding same-sex marriage that Parliament asked it to consider.
'This ruling sends a message that governments across the country must now accept the ... right of same-sex couples to marry in a civil ceremony,' said Laurie Arron, director of advocacy for the national gay lobby group Égale. 'It is simply unacceptable to maintain the fiction that capacity to marry, which is federal law, is different from one province or territory to the next. There is one law for the whole country, and that law includes same-sex couples. Governments who don't accept that are leaving themselves open to legal challenges and liability for costs.'
The latest poll numbers show that 57 percent of Canadians approve of full same-sex marriage and 38 percent oppose it.
