End of OLS - Senate Debates, Drinks, and learning stuff...

[jbailey]

I had a lovely time at OLS working the sound board with Jody, Kevin and 'Mort'. I generally got to see the talks that I cared about, and the ones that I didn't care about weren't too tedious to sit through. Room A was generally a bit cold for my liking, and "Virtualisation Day" was a bit painful to sit through, but those sorrows can always be drowned later on in the evening.

Angie and I enjoyed taking the week together. We were fortunate enough to spend the week staying with Grant, Thibaut, and Thomas who were pleasant roomies. We held a dinner party for them, and several others succesfully without poisoning any of them, and although we ran a little short of food, there was beer and wine to spare!

On Tuesday, Angie and I spent the day watching the Senate debate of Bill C-38, an act to extend civil marriage to homosexuals. While we missed the final vote, the seven hours we spent there were informative. The two sides essentially boiled down to:

1. Marriage should be extended to homosexuals, because section 15 of the charter prohibits discrimination against homosexuals.
2. Marriage should not be extended to homosexuals, because the relationship has no inherent ability to breed.

The best I can say to that is: If all you can think about when you see Angie and I together is that we might be breeding, then it's time to have your head checked. The conservative argument was that extending marriage to homosexual couples moves a marriage from being child centric to being adult centric. This argument devalues the relationship that I have with my wife (despite the fact that we will likely have children one day), devalues the relationships of most of my friends, and doesn't acknowledge that Canadian Unitarian Churches have been performing gay marriage ceremonies for over 30 years. Given that teenagers generally know the basics of sexual reproduction, you'd think that by the time one got old enough to engage in a commitment ceremony, one would be over needing a special badge that says that "when WE fuck, we might make babies".

In unrelated news, Grant uploaded his pictures, and now I have a lovely one with the blue streaks in my hair.

In equally unrelated news, I've been reading Tom Clancy's "Executive Orders" in French. I had expected to learn alot of new military vocabulary. I had forgotten that he's reasonably liberal with profanity, and have been learning new vocab there, too.