Canada got there first, its next-door neighbour, an initial source of anxious same-sex partners aspiring to marriage-status travelling temporarily to take advantage of an opportunity to marry, is now itself grappling with the legal ramifications through the U.S. Supreme Court of extending the institution of marriage to gays.

While pondering the issue a majority of justices are now questioning the constitutionality of the Defence of Marriage Act of 1996, with a swing-vote justice, making common cause with the four liberals, questioning the definition of marriage as the union of opposite genders reflected in over one thousand American federal laws and programs.

Currently, in 2013, eleven countries -- Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden -- and a few jurisdictions in Brazil, Mexico and the United States permit same-sex couples to marry. In other countries of the world, as diverse as Colombia, Germany, Nepal, New Zealand and Taiwan, bills are pending allowing legal recognition.

France's socialist government has gone through the first phase of passing a "marriage for everyone" bill, but it has come hard up against a roadblock of a public enraged by the move, unwilling to see that legislation passed. That loud and vociferous masses of objectors prefer to maintain current laws recognizing the covenant of marriage between heterosexuals.  And the United States seems to be facing a similar polarity of views.

Progressives in Canada appear to have somehow managed, under the previous Liberal Government of Prime Minister Paul Martin, with the full support of the NDP, the news media, unions, academia and the Supreme Court of Canada, to pass legislation enshrining same-sex marriage as a right in Canada. Canadians, wedded to social fairness and urged under the concept of equality, to accept the change in status of the marriage vows between genders simply shrugged.

It appears that gays and lesbians within Canada also shrugged for the most part. They may have celebrated a victory for equality as they recognize it, but most of them seem disinterested in taking personal advantage of the same-sex marriage law. A scant 16% of Canadian couples who are gay have chosen to avail themselves of this enfranchisement, this legal change in fortune for the gay community.

Symbolic of popular culture, norms have been turned on their heads in the instance of gay marriage recognition. Civil unions which legally entitled gay couples to claim all the benefits accruing to married couples just didn't seem to satisfy the demands of newly societally and legally empowered gays.

Their victimhood status within societies which had so long oppressed them seems to have spurred them to a kind of juvenile pay-back. Society has meekly accepted the accusation of its shame in the past treatment of homosexuals. Which, needless to say, represented a legitimate issue of shameful acknowledgement, while the surrender of an entirely different social more was completely unnecessary.

If the institution of marriage was withheld from them, and maintained solely for the beatification of heterosexual couples, excluding homosexual couples, it was a manifest instance of blatant discrimination and as such intolerable. An ancient custom and tradition of formalizing the institution of marriage for the sake of stability in families benefiting offspring suddenly sprang a huge, unstoppable leak.

Adoptions within gay marriage followed a similar trajectory, with gays making the claim that children raised and nurtured by two loving same-sex partners, whether they termed themselves husband and wife, wife and wife or husband and husband, were far better off than within traditional, dysfunctional families. A rather broad smear, but one that worked to their advantage.

Human intimacy and emotions, human interaction between people are unpredictable and forever hopeful. There are some cultural-social issues that have stood the test of time and proven themselves sufficiently reliable as to be inviolable to change, despite social activism and progressive thought.

The issues of "marriage", "identity", "rights", "equality" and the opportunity to twist and manipulate public guilt to accede to unreasonable demands leaves much to be desired in the sphere of social justice and equality rights.