Ireland gay marriage vote a victory for home, hearth
Consider the stunned disbelief, perhaps of a somewhat aggressive sort, that would have greeted anyone who might have told a tavern crowd in Dorchester or Southie three decades ago that Ireland would be the first nation in the world to approve gay marriage by popular vote.
It is a mark of how much has changed in such a short time that Ireland’s vote for gay marriage last week was, in the end, the expected outcome — even if the breadth of marriage equality’s victory was breathtaking.
The referendum carried 62 percent of the vote. Only one of the nation’s 43 parliamentary constituencies, Roscommon-South Leitrim, voted “no,” and even there, supporters won nearly 49 percent of the vote.
The different outcome this time says something about why social liberalism finds its strongest expression these days around gay rights questions. If politics is often polarized because social changes can leave behind both winners and losers, it is far harder to make a case that there are any losers in the effort to provide for equality around sexual orientation. Ireland, a heartland of Catholicism that did so much to shape the Catholic Church in the United States, seemed to see things exactly this way.
But it’s also true that Ireland has undergone a sweeping cultural transformation in a very short time. Irish faith in the church was badly shaken by the hierarchy’s cover-up of the sex-abuse crisis even as the island was overtaken by a raucous materialism during the “Celtic tiger” economic boom of 1995 to 2008.
Yet if God receded from Irish life, mammon received its comeuppance when the financial bubble burst, wreaking havoc. Ireland has since had to rebuild not only its economy but also its sense of meaning.
It’s striking that Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, one of Ireland’s most candid prelates in facing up to the costs and the shame of the abuse scandal, used the referendum outcome not as an occasion for an angry jeremiad but as an opportunity for an examination of conscience.
In words that echoed around the world, he told RTE News that “the church needs to do a reality check, a reality check right across the board.”
And the archbishop specifically focused on the imperative “to look at the areas where we really have to start and say, ‘Look, have we drifted away completely from young people?’”
The Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, was less nuanced, declaring the Irish result as not only “a defeat for Christian principles” but also “a defeat for humanity.”
As if anticipating the Vatican’s response, Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times columnist and one of his country’s most searching social critics, argued over the weekend that while the referendum result “looks like a defeat for religious conservatives ... nobody has been defeated.”
For advocates of gay marriage, the issue is about the equal dignity of human beings — a thoroughly Christian principle — far more than it is about a particular view of sexual morality. Indeed, the very embrace of marriage as a central goal of the gay rights movement can itself be seen as a turn toward an updated brand of traditionalism.