In fact, the stakes weren't all that high. Had Bill 167 passed, it would not have been because the broad mass of people had been persuaded out of their belief that the lower intestine is not a sexual organ. And though the bill failed, the courts will put most of it in place anyway. The real fight, rather, was not between tolerance and bigotry, but between conservatives and conservatism. For a principled conservative would have supported this legislation.

Inconsistency in matters of equal rights is nothing new, though it is more usually the province of the left, notably in a concept of equality so elastic as to make room for laws requiring employers to favour certain groups in hiring over others: that is, statutory inequality.

But then, the left never claimed to be consistent. Conservatives, however, do. It's the whole basis of their appeal: Rights are rights are rights. Unless guaranteed equally and applied uniformly, they lose their moral force. Which makes it not just hypocritical, but self-defeating, for conservatives to make an exception for gays. The conservative who says "yes, but" to same-sex benefits forfeits any right to squawk about hiring quotas.

There isn't a lot of doubt, after all, about where the law stands on this. It requires no more and no less than equal treatment, based on a straightforward reading of existing statutes. Courts at every level have ruled that sexual orientation is implicit in the open-ended list of prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Charter of Rights. The same is made explicit in the Ontario Human Rights Code.

If the law says you can't discriminate, it means you can't discriminate, devising one set of rules for heterosexual couples and another for homosexual couples. Conservative resistance to this idea is, admittedly, in the grand Canadian tradition of having it both ways. But it hardly squares with conservatism's well- advertised respect for the rule of law.

Those on the right, what is more, like to style themselves the champions of the family, and of stable, monogamous relationships. It is thus a little puzzling to see conservatives blocking legislation that would help to stamp the same norms on homosexual life. Indeed, the more flamboyant aspects of the gay lifestyle are arguably a product of their consignment to the social margins. If you want people to join the mainstream, you have to let them in first.

At the same time, conservatives, of all people, ought to be wary of confining the family within too narrow legal limits. Conservatives rightly insist that parents should be free to raise their children as they think best, without the state second- guessing their values. That doesn't mean society gives up all interest in the child's welfare. But the hurdle for intervention should be high - higher than the vague and unsupported misgivings offered against gays as adoptive parents.

Some conservatives grumble that extending employment benefits to same- sex partners distorts their original purpose, which was to support dependent spouses and their children in the absence of a breadwinner. But some gay households do meet that description, while the same objection could surely be entered against providing benefits, tax-free, to childless or dual-income heterosexual couples. But that would mean stripping back a popular middle-class perq. Principled conservatives are supposed to relish that kind of fight.

Instead, by making the sexuality of the recipients the issue, conservatives may make matters worse. In order to defuse such opposition, the federal Justice Minister is considering extending benefits to every dependent relationship, conjugal or not: roommates, live-in parents, menages-a-trois, the works. If the end result of the conservatives' victory in Ontario is mandatory spousal benefits for cats, it will be a curious sort of triumph.