I thought last year's Vatman and Altar-Boy Wonder cartoons on same-socks marriage would be my last swing at the issue. After all, there is little anyone can do to stop gay and lesbians from tying the knot (in Canada, anyway). Even the vote in Parliament that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is planning this fall is purely symbolic. He has no legal recourse to put back the clock.

But then I read an article by ethicist Margaret Somerville in the Globe arguing that a child's right to have biological parents trumps a same-sex couple's right to marry -- that marriage is primarily our society's ceremony to sanctify procreation (read a Maclean's interview with her here.) She's been getting a lot of press time, since she has just given this year's CBC Massey Lectures (published in the book The Ethical Imagination).

Granted, she comes at it from a secular angle. She is against all forms of technical intervention to create children, except when infertile couples need it. Since gay couples can't naturally have kids, they should not take part in our culture's sanctification of procreation.

Somerville, like the Vatican, seems obsessed with procreation -- and glibly passes over the option many gays (and infertile couples) choose: adoption. She seems to disregard the fact that adoptive parents (and children) will tell you that though there are some obvious differences from "natural" families, they do not result an intrinsically different relationship between parent and child. Defining a family soley on the basis of genetics is as narrow-minded as defining a country soley on the basis of race. To call a child's genetic relationship to her parents an inalienable right seems to me a huge stretch. It certainly does not trump the right of same-sex couples to join in matrimony and carry all the weighty cultural baggage that comes with it, if they wish.

OK, so you're wondering why I didn't say this in the above cartoon (it's the first of probably three). I am too. Maybe religious intolerance is easier to lampoon, especially when it's in the form of men in tights. And a comic strip is, well, a comic strip, and not a written argument. Bottom line is, it's gotta be funny.

Is that a cop out? Is satirizing Catholicism akin to kicking a dead horse (or a dead Jesus)? You decide. Click on "comments" if you have any.

10 Years Ago This Week
David Cronenburg released Crash and Mike Harris started Ontario's hospitals. The first in a four-part series.