We should think about the children and vote ‘yes’

Former President Mary McAleese and Justice Kevin Cross have reassured middle Ireland that a ‘Yes’ vote on same-sex marriage will not undermine the the rights and status of families.

ONE of the most striking contributions to the same-sex marriage referendum debate was on a chalk board in the street. It read: “If you don’t like gay marriage, blame straight people, because they are the ones who keep having gay babies.”

The message is clear, across all forms of nature: gays and lesbians have been around forever, and, despite the best efforts of people like Adolf Hitler, always will be.

So, why doesn’t everyone just accept that, live their own lives, and not begrudge equality to others?

While some in the ‘No’ camp are so cranky and deliberately offensive in their rhetoric that you could believe they are secret agents for the ‘Yes’ side, many of the (at least) one-third of the population who tell pollsters they will be rejecting the reform have real concerns that need to be addressed.

READ NEXT: Gays should be allowed marry the person they love. It’s that simple

This is why the pointed intervention of the former President, Mary McAleese, and the judicial rulings of the Referendum Commission’s chairman, Mr Justice Kevin Cross, were so important. While the official ‘Yes’ side often appears to be speaking to itself, the former president and High Court judge spoke directly to ‘middle Ireland’.

Ms McAleese fired an emotional bullet, Mr Cross let off a volley of impartial legal views, and both had the same result — they shot down the phoney foxes of the ‘No’ side, who are warning that a ‘Yes’ vote would damage parental and children’s rights and change traditional marriage for the worse.

McAleese brilliantly turned the ‘No’ argument on its head, telling Newstalk: “People have been saying it is about children, and we believe it to be about Ireland’s gay children and their future. The adult children, the children yet unborn, the gay children. We want them to be born into a world where, when they fall in love with someone they can express that love fully and that they can live the kind of life Martin and I have had.”

Mr Justice Cross was more clinical, but just as effective, sweeping away the ragged arguments the ‘No’ side has draped over the referendum. He crisply stated that a ‘Yes’ vote would not alter the status of marriage in the Constitution, and would not have any impact on children’s or family rights, as that had all been dealt with in legislation passed through the Oireachtas.

The sheer, deliberate wrong-headedness of the ‘No’ side is exemplified by the fact that while they accept Mr Justice Cross is an impartial legal expert, they still do not believe him.

‘Ah, but’ they say, ‘a ‘Yes’ vote will mean we will never be able to pass a law insisting that children can only be adopted by a differently sexed couple’.

And that may be so, but who would want such a cold, rigid law in the first place?

All adoptions should be focused on the best interests of one person, and one person alone — the child.

So, if a child has been fostered by a same-sex couple for three years, has bonded with them, and desperately wants them to be their official parents, why deny the child that?

There should only be one bias in deciding the future of a child and that should be solely what is best for them individually. Whether that is with a heterosexual couple, a same-sex couple or a lone parent is a matter for the experts entrusted by society to decide.

Deeply offensive comments by the Bishop of Elphin, last month, which included his claim that gay parents were not “real” parents, threw the Catholic Church onto the backfoot, but that attitude is emerging again from the campaign shadows, with a leaflet being distributed to mass-goers urging a ‘No’ vote. Rather than lecturing others, may be the Church would be better listening to Ms McAleese again, following her statement of the obvious that “a very large number” of Catholic priests are gay and the Church is in denial about the fact.

“It isn’t so much the elephant in the room, but a herd of elephants. I don’t like my Church’s attitude to gay people. I don’t like ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’. If you are the so-called sinner, who likes to be called that? We also know that within the priesthood a very large number of priests are gay. Things written by Pope Benedict, for example, were completely contradictory to modern science and to modern understanding, and to the understanding of most Catholics, nowadays, in relation to homosexuality,” she said.

Maybe the Church w ill be taken more seriously on issues of human rights once it has dealt with its own deep-rooted, internalised homophobia?

And there’s that word again — the H-bomb — homophobia.

It is a sad fact that some people are intrinsically homophobic, just as some extremely ignorant people are racist.

But I do not believe the majority of ordinary people who are considering voting ‘No’ are homophobic. They just need reassurance and a real debate in which their concerns can be aired.

If their fears are not addressed, in a calm and constructive way that shows them to be misplaced and unnecessary, they will tell the pollsters ‘Yes’, because that is the seeming national consensus — and go into the privacy of the ballot booth and vote ‘No’.

You do not get to be chairman of the Fine Gael parliamentary party by being a raving liberal, but, in another blow to the ‘Nos’, the holder of that office, Dan Neville, has urged a ‘Yes’ vote to help end the stigma many gay teens feel.

“Bullying of LGBT youth has been shown to be a contributing factor in many suicides. Gay people in Ireland have a ten-fold risk of self-harming behaviours and are seven times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexuals, according to 2013 research by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland,” Mr Neville told the Dáil.

What message will a ‘No’ vote send to those vulnerable children? “You are not equal here: Get out. Kill yourself. We don’t care.”

Within living memory, 20,000 people were sent to the Nazi death camps for being gay.

After ‘liberation’, survivors were refused the compensation given to other persecuted groups, and were even forced by the Western Allies to serve out the remainder of the sentences that the Nazis had imposed on them for their ‘crimes’.

Gay and lesbian people were still officially criminals in Ireland as recently as the 1990s.

It is time for change.

The ‘No’ side is right: we do need to think of the children on May 22.

Think of them and then do as Ms McAleese has urged and vote ‘Yes’.

DISCOVER MORE CONTENT LIKE THIS