Naturally, the media's hypocrisy was the most flagrant. When Reform MP Robert Ringma defended the right of private employers to discriminate against gays and other groups, he was savaged in the press. But when Liberal MPs Roseanne Skoke, Tom Wappel and others denounced homosexuals as abnormal, immoral and worse, they were by comparison indulged as mild eccentrics.

So the Reform Party, the party of caucus freedom, expelled two of its members for speaking their mind on the gay-rights bill, while the Liberals, the party of caucus discipline, allowed 28 of their MPs to vote against the bill with impunity. The Prime Minister defended this seeming inequity by suggesting that the dissident Grits had stated their opposition to banning discrimination against gays in less offensive terms. Oh?

Mr. Ringma, to judge from his public comments, is opposed in principle to the government decreeing whom a private employer may or may not choose to hire. He is against prohibiting private acts of discrimination, period. This may be an excessively narrow reading of the right of freedom of contract, but it is at least a tenable argument. Ms. Skoke, on the other hand, presumably favours anti- discrimination laws in general. She just doesn't like gays. Which is the more abhorrent position?

At any rate, both members were giving an honest statement of their views, which is more than one can say for either of their parties. The Justice Minister, in particular, was more than a little disingenuous in promoting the bill to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act, claiming that it did not in itself sanction spousal benefits for same-sex couples, gay marriages or gay adoptions - the sorts of things that make the public, which otherwise favours protecting gays from discrimination, most uneasy.

True, the act applies only to discrimination in hiring and the provision of goods and services, the traditional equity battlegrounds. But when we speak of discrimination against gays and lesbians, hiring isn't really the issue. We're talking about matters of family law: marriage, adoption, the very issues Mr. Rock insists the bill is not about.

And while family law is, as he says, a provincial jurisdiction, it is nonsense to pretend the federal legislation will not instruct the courts to find that family-law provisions discriminating against gay couples violate the Charter of Rights' guarantee of equality. Of course it will, and of course it should. The government was right to proceed with the bill. But it should have been open with the public about what it meant.

If Mr. Rock has not been completely honest about his sexual-orientation bill, the Reform Party seems more confused. The mainstream Reform position, from which Mr. Ringma was said to have deviated, is that discrimination should be prohibited, but for everyone equally, without singling out particular groups for protection.

This sounds fine - who's in favour of special rights? - but they can't really mean it. No one is proposing, I think, that we should outlaw discrimination against the lazy, or the corrupt. Not all forms of discrimination, in other words, are unacceptable. Only unacceptable discrimination is unacceptable.

So the moment we decide to protect anyone from discrimination, we are inevitably forced to choose whom we will protect, and whom we will not. We could, of course, leave it to the courts to decide: an open-ended provision outlawing discrimination in general, requiring judges to "read in" the prohibited grounds. There's nothing wrong with this. It is wholly consistent with the sovereignty of Parliament for judges to interpret the meaning of broad statements of legislative intent.

But it's a bit of an odd position for Reformers, who generally decry the idea of judges "making law." You can't swing both ways on this one: If you don't want judges deciding which groups to protect, you have to do it yourself. If the Reform Party is against discrimination, it is obliged to say what sorts of discrimination it would prohibit. Which means it has to decide whether gays should be on the list or not.

Should they? How do we decide? The first test of whether a group of people warrant protection from discrimination is to ask whether they are in fact victims of discrimination. No one disputes that, in family law at least, gays are. So the second test is to ask whether the discrimination in question is justified by some larger social good.

Discrimination against the incompetent, we've decided, is; there's a social interest in promoting competence. But is there any evidence of what real harm would befall society if we were to treat gays as equals, in law as much as in life? There is not. The institution of the family is not going to crumble if we let a few more people join the club.

Perhaps in future we might debate this.