Marriage Equality Referendum: Gay people should not pay price for improving the rights of children

I WAS sitting in a theatre the other night when the couple beside me started holding hands. Two men.

“Now for ye,” I thought. “Holding hands in the theatre!”

Let’s be clear. I grew up in a leftie house which was visited by gay couples. My closest friend is a gay man and I have brought him and his partner breakfast in bed. I am probably not much less gay-friendly than most gay people of my generation. But when I noticed two men holding hands beside me in the theatre I thought, “Now for ye. Holding hands in the theatre!” And then I thought, “their relationship could have the same status as mine under the Constitution” and I looked away.

That’s when I began to think, for the first time, that the Thirty-Fourth Amendment could work to free up gay people. I don’t think it’s really about marriage at all. It’s about the freedom to hold hands in public. I can’t really imagine what it’s like to want to touch your lover’s hand in public and be too afraid, or uncomfortable, to do so. Nor can I imagine what it’s like to spend your whole life in hiding. But I guess it would be enough to corrode and even destroy a person, bit by bit. And that would in turn destroy more people.

READ MORE: Marriage Equality Referendum: No campaign does not value each child

I hate the bombast and lies on both side of the referendum campaign. I hate the Yes Equality poster which shows 13 people standing in ones and twos and threes in gender-free solidarity like teddies at a picnic. I hate the No posters which feature children. I have read the amendment and I have read the Children and Family Relationships Bill and I am satisfied the amendment has nothing to do with children.

That’s because marriage does not necessarily mean children and marriage does not give anyone the right to a family. And despite what the Constitution says, the family is no longer founded on marriage in this society. Have a look at the birth statistics which show fully one third of babies are born outside marriage. Or cosy up with my kids and me and watch re-runs of Coco Television’s Don’t Tell the Bride in which the couple’s children regularly feature as page boys and flower girls.

The legal change which reflected and forced the change in the nature of marriage was the abolition of the status of illegitimacy in 1987. After that date, the children of married and unmarried parents had the same rights under law. You would have to dig very far into the moss to find a person today who thinks there should be such thing as an “illegitimate” child.

This was not always the case. My mother, who grew up in the 1930s in rural Donegal, used the word “bastard” quite often. I remember expostulating with her when she used the term in front of a friend who is adopted. She defended herself by saying “bastard” was “purely a descriptive term”.

A description of what, precisely? No doubt some things have been lost because of the collapse of marriage as the foundation of the family. There were probably couples who stayed together because they had no choice and ended up being glad they did. But it created a sub-class of parents and children who were resourced with orphanages and Magdalene homes. I wouldn’t want to go back to them.

We couldn’t if we tried. Our culture nowadays means nearly all of us see a child as a being with his or her own rights. The UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child and its reflection in our Constitution gives children “natural and imprescriptible rights” and insists that “the best interests of the child” must be the guiding principle in court decisions affecting the child.

This change towards the children with rights of their own, as opposed to rights by relationship to their parents, has only come to fruition with the prosperity and law and order which allow us to exist outside the tribe. Our tribe nowadays is our nation state.

The problem is that national laws to protect all children are not in place and that is impacting unfairly on the Marriage Equality campaign. All children should have the right to be raised by their biological parents, if that is possible or in their best interests. All children should know the identity of their biological parents and that is a right which adopted people still don’t have in Ireland. All children who can’t be raised by their biological parents should have the protection of an adoption process founded on the child’s best interests, something which children born through Assisted Human Reproduction with donor gametes do not have.

READ MORE: Marriage Equality Referendum: Voting yes is about ensuring fair play for all our children

There should be no such thing as a “commissioning parent” as stated in the Children and Family Relationships Bill. All non-biological parents should go through an adoption process. Instead we have created a sub-group of children whose non-biological parents are not screened at all. This is a trip back to the past, annulling children’s rights in favour of the economic standing of parents. In anthropological terms it is a recipe for disaster.

No child, and no piece of a child, should be bought or sold. I think we should ban the transfer of a child or a piece of a child to non-biological parents. The non-biological parents of children born by gamete donation abroad should go through screening to adopt that child. I think we should ban commercial surrogacy and the biological mother should remain the mother in any non-commercial surrogacy.

It’s very simple. Biological identity should be non-negotiable. The State needs to ensure as far as possible that children raised by parents who are not their own will be safe and well. Why, when we ask the new partner of a mother to go through a process before he can call himself “father” to her children, do we allow a man to “commission” a son or daughter with his partner and someone else’s sperm, no questions asked?

If all children’s rights were upheld in our law it would be crystal clear that extending the right to marriage to same-sex partners is not about children. It would be crystal clear that in our society, where people live a long time, contraception is available and children have their own rights, marriage has become a contract between two consenting adults.

Children’s rights still have a long way to go before they are fully vindicated in this society. But that is not the fault of gay people and they should not pay the price for it on May 22.

Marriage does not necessarily mean children and marriage does not give anyone the right to a family.

READ MORE: AUDIO: Donegal priest to vote Yes in Marriage Equality Referendum

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