Gay marriage vote bids to change Ireland
Vote challenges Catholic Church’s waning power A yes vote costs us nothing. A no vote costs our gay children everything
• Barely a generation ago, Ireland outlawed homosexual acts and gays often faced a stark choice between leading secret lives or emigrating to more liberal lands. This week, in the world’s first national referendum on the matter, the Irish could vote to legalize same-sex marriage.
The campaign ahead of Friday’s constitutional referendum has featured searing testimonies designed to make the voters of this predominantly Roman Catholic nation look in the mirror.
Members of many of Ireland’s most prominent families have come out in hopes of challenging their neighbours’ attitudes to homosexuality. The contest has pit the waning power of the Catholic Church against the secularminded government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny.
“A yes vote costs the rest of us nothing. A no vote costs our gay children everything,” former president Mary McAleese said at a gay rights event in Dublin this week after her only son, a 30-year-old airline executive, revealed he is gay.
McAleese, a canon scholar and former legal adviser to the church, spoke of her son’s experience of bullying and isolation as a teenager, and of friends who learned that their own sons were gay only when they tried to kill themselves.
The government’s campaign effectively began in January with a 36-year-old Cabinet minister, Leo Varad- kar, declaring his homosexuality so that he could campaign for a “yes” vote from a position of honesty.
The public confessional has been busy ever since, with a stream of entertainers, sports stars and political and business leaders offering their tales of learning that a close friend or family member was gay — but had kept their true identity secret to avoid social intimidation.
“For too long now, people haven’t been able to be true to themselves,” said Conor Cusack, who is one of the few openly gay athletes in Ireland’s native Gaelic sports scene. In radio and TV debates, Cusack has challenged the views of other well-known sportsmen who say they’ ll vote no.
“Emotionally, I have been in a prison since the age of 17; a prison where I lived a halflife, repressing an essential part of my humanity, the expression of my deepest self; my instinct to love,” wrote Ursula Halligan, one of Ireland’s best known political correspondents. She came out as a lesbian this month at age 54.
“At every turn, society assumes and confirms heterosexuality as the norm. This culminates in marriage when the happy couple is showered with an outpouring of overwhelming social approval. For me, there was no first kiss; no engagement party; no wedding,” she wrote. “And up until a short time ago, no hope of any of these things.”
Gay marriage is legal in 19 countries, including Britain and most of the United States. But with the exception of three U.S. states, the measure has been enacted solely by lawmakers, not in referendums.
Ireland is holding a nationwide vote because of its conservative 1937 constitution written by then prime minister Eamon de Valera in collaboration with Catholic Church leaders. Its family section proclaims inalienable rights for married couples, but doesn’t specify that a marriage must be between a man and a woman — an omission that reflects the age’s dominance of Catholic teaching and the traditional invisibility of gays in public life.
While some politicians called for the government to legislate directly for gay marriage, Kenny’s attorney general advised that, as with all social issues detailed in de Valera’s overarching constitution, any changes in law would have to be approved by referendum and formally added to the constitution, lest it be legally challenged as unconstitutional.
Ireland’s previous government in 2010 did legalize civil partnerships for gay couples, resolving problems involving property ownership, pensions, tax benefits and other financial matters. But a constitutional reform commission in 2013 recommended legalization of full-fledged marriage for gays, citing more than 150 shortcomings with civil partnerships, and Kenny backed the recommendation.
His government’s proposed amendment to permit marriages of “two persons without distinction as to their sex” requires a simple majority of referendum votes to become law.