Montreal Swinger's Club

I hadn't really heard much about the recent ruling on the Montreal Swinger's Club (and therefore swinger clubs in Canada really...) until I read about it over on Fr. Tom's blog at Waiting in Joyful Hope. According to a CBC article on the recent court case "Clubs that allow group sex and partner swapping do not harm Canadian society and should not be considered criminal, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled..." Here's the text of the ruling of Regina v. Labaye.

I don't have time to comment on all this right now, but I just wanted to point those who were interested and who have been following this story to a recent post by Ian Benson on this issue over at CentreBlog.

Here's an excerpt from Ian Benson's post on the issue:

In the Labaye legal decision, referred to above, the moral conception of citizenship has been virtually obliterated by recourse to a “harm principle” of such open-endedness as to be essentially useless - - a fact noted by the two dissenting judges. In this case, dealing as it does with the court’s role as what used to be known as custos morum (the guardian of morals) we are forced again to look at morals, law and the limits of democracy itself. But that is for another day. First is the general problem of placing too much stock in the general processes of democracy, or, as we could put it more succinctly, “democracy on its own.”