For marriage the bells toll?

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Fig

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...in Québec, that is.

According to the latest studies from Statistiques Canada (the body charged with census data analysis), in 2006, the percentage of free union couples (couples that elect to live together outside of wedlock) in Québec has reached an all-time high and an all-world high of thirty-five percents. Interestingly, it's the LESS urban regions - Saguenay (thirty-five percent), Abitibi (over forty percent), etc - that features the highest result, while immigrants holds down the score of the great urban centers such as Montreal (twenty-six percent).

I think the term paradigm shift is a fair description of this : this appears to be the collapse of nothing less than a multi-millenial institution that, as far back as written history goes, has defined the creation of families and the raising of children. It has evolved over those years, of course, but rejection on this scale is something new, and, in many ways, unprecedented.

I've got to admit, too, that this whole paradigm shift I find...fascinating, for want of a better term. Will it be the end of society, as some conservatives no doubt think? Or will it lead to new - and equally fascinating - social evolutions?
 
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It's all the fault of the gays and now we'll have Nazis riding dinosaurs while rivers turn to blood.
 
I think it's money. Do you know how much a wedding costs these days? So most people think it's the same sex either way to go the cheaper way. There's also no commitment which helps in some perople's minds I guess. Also, the stigma of having (and being) a bastard isn't as strong as it once was.
 
The greatest factor, actually, more than any of these, is most likely the utter and total fall from grace of the Roman Catholic Church in Québec.

Up until the fifties or so, Québec was more Catholic than the pope. It was religious, and religiously dominated, to make Falwell (were he alive) green with envy. Duplessis - the prime minister of the time - would make Dubya looks like a raging atheist.

Today...today churches are for sale, the average Québecer will only set foot in one if he or a good friend has one more relative (marriage or baptism) or one less (funeral). The archbishop of Montreal openly advocate the separation of Church and State, and what few religious days are still acknowledged (Christmas, Easter and St-John-Baptist night) have been wholly converted into secular holidays. And no other church has even the beginning of the base to move into the void left behind by the fall of the Roman Catholic church.

But much more than this, Religion has become a fully private matter. And again, as with the archbishop - it's the believers who are often the strongest advocates of this ; they don't want to impose their faith on others and they don't want others imposing their faith on them. Québec, as an overall society, is very much areligious.

And as such - it's not so much that marriage has lost viability as an option (it costed a lot before, too), but that the greatest force against free union - religion - has all but vanished from the public sphere, and from the social sphere.

(Also, to add in - missed this earlier - but the "stigma of being a bastard" isn't merely not as strong at it once was in Québec ; it's all but a (reviled) part of history. Heck, the proper use of bastard could probably be termed an archaic term in Québec french without being too innacurate)
 
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Evil Figment said:
But much more than this, Religion has become a fully private matter. And again, as with the archbishop - it's the believers who are often the strongest advocates of this ; they don't want to impose their faith on others and they don't want others imposing their faith on them. Québec, as an overall society, is very much areligious.
Click to expand...

Why can't America be more like this?
 
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