The same-sex marriage referendum debate

[armaghniac]

It only conflates black and white if you think heterosexuality and homosexuality to be diametrically opposed. A lot of us would hold the opinion that they are simply different aspects of a shared human condition.

Heterosexuality and Homosexuality are orientations, my reference to black and white was opposite sex unions and same sex unions which are different actions with different potential and should be treated differently in legal terms. I may have a disposition towards multiple partners and you to monogamy, but in legal terms it is not our dispositions that is of interest but our conduct.

[Maguire01]

If you can find a way that my marriage is devalued by this I will certainly change my opinion to the No campaign as I would hate for my marriage to be devalued in any way!!!!

I suspect you live in the North, so have the DUP defending your marriage.
Marriage has been understood as having a strong association with children, this will now be removed if there is a yes on the basis that this association does not exist.

But there is a general point here. You have the Gilmore defence, that his marriage will be as strong the day after the referendum as before and this is true as a limited point. Marriages conducted in the understanding of the time will not be quickly affected and many marriages will not be affected at all. In a similar way, someone might come on here and say that the welfare system is a disincentive to work, and I might post that the my incentive to work is unaffected by the welfare system. But I have an interesting well paid job, other people in the workforce are influenced in their willingness to work by the welfare system and a badly designed welfare system may well do damage to society as a whole, damage that becomes apparent over time. A badly designed intervention in the meaning of marriage will do damage that is even more difficult to repair.

I have absolutely no idea where you're going with that. What's the parallel with marriage?

[armaghniac]

'Keep your drawers on and pray' doesn't cut it

Did you ever see those simulation games they use for training police officers in firearms? There's a realistic urban setting of crowded buildings in which bad guys are hiding. Images of people pop up and you have a split second to decide before you shoot – is that a bad guy with a gun or a kid with a lollipop? A crazed terrorist in an explosive vest or a pregnant woman?

Give that test to the No campaign in the marriage equality referendum and they just go Blam! Blam! Blam! They want to shoot their bad guys – gay men and lesbians – but they end up blasting away at everybody else as well. Kill them all and let God sort them out. The big problem for the No campaign is that it can't say what it actually thinks.

The core of that campaign is made up of conservative Christians who sincerely believe that gay men and lesbians should never, ever have sex. This view seems to me to border on the blasphemous, since it suggests that God is a sadist who created people with sexual desires that cannot, under any circumstances, be fulfilled.

If you hold to it, though, same-sex marriage is repellent because it gives social recognition to the idea that a man having sex with a man and a woman having sex with a woman can be normal and moral human acts.

But as a political argument, "Keep your drawers on and pray" doesn't cut it. You have to rationalise your distaste by coming up with some general principle that takes the bare look off mere revulsion. And this is where the No campaign has come to grief. For the general principle it has come up with is one that manages to insult, not just gay men and lesbians, but huge numbers of straight people as well.

That principle is that the Constitution must recognise only those marriages (and hence only those families) that are, in the words of the Catholic primate, Archbishop Eamon Martin, "the union between a man and a woman which is open to life" (ie open to the conception of a child).

I am married to a woman – full marks there. But I had a vasectomy 25 years ago, so our "union" has not been "open to life" for a quarter of a century. We're not a proper family.

My late mother-in-law married again (after the death of her first husband) when she was in her 60s. Her new husband was a delightful man and they were enormously happy together. But they apparently weren't a family either because God in his wisdom invented the menopause and she was not "open to life".

On the other hand, my lovely young niece has two gorgeous little daughters who, apart from everything else, brightened up my mother's last years with the joy of new life. But, sorry, she's not married so she and her babies and her boyfriend are not a family either.

This is the problem with the No campaign. In order to get to the tree it wants to chop down, it has to lay waste to a whole forest. In order to find an apparent principle on which it can reasonably deny equality to gay men and lesbians, it has to tell huge numbers of other people that their relationships are just not up to scratch.

It has set a gold standard for constitutional approval of a family relationship – a man who is not sterile having licensed sex with a woman who is still fertile, with neither of them using contraceptives. (Otherwise their pleasures would not be "open to life".)

It hits the target all right – gay men and lesbians in same-sex couplings don't meet this standard. But it's not an arrow, it's a multibore shotgun. It hits people who were not in its sights – at least not for now.

Any married woman who is using contraceptives or who cannot conceive is not really a proper married woman. Any man who is using contraceptives or who is infertile or who is married to such a woman is not a proper married man. Any single parent with his or her kids is not a family.

Rather amusingly, of course, there is one category of people whose marriages are saved by this definition – divorcees. Divorce, for the same people who are campaigning against same-sex marriage, used to be the abomination that was going to radically redefine marriage and have every fat middle-aged husband cavorting off into the sunset with a young floozy. But apparently, it's okay now – at least up to a point. If you're divorced and remarried and still fertile and not using contraceptives, you are now among the elect type A family of man and woman open to conception every time you have sex.

As a campaign strategy, telling straight people that their relationships are illegitimate is, shall we say, brave. But for most actual couples in Ireland, all of us fallen people whose families fall short of a narrow ideal, it has turned a Yes vote from an act of altruism to one of plain self-interest.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-keep-your-drawers-on-and-pray-doesn-t-cut-it-1.2208497

The article is bollox, if you are going to post something then let it be sensible at least. But it is par for the course for the Irish Times which is about as even handed as the TUV.

[Maguire01]

Could someone on here clear something up for me,

If a man and a woman had no intention of having children, would they still be allowed to get married in a church?

This came up when we got married actually, (not that we were intending not to have children).

You cannot get married in the church if you are not intending to have children.

By that standard they must really interrogate anyone over 50 presenting for marriage.

Just looking for holes to poke Maguire.... pardon the pun

I am indeed, because if an argument is full of holes, it doesn't hold water.

[Maguire01]

'Keep your drawers on and pray' doesn't cut it

Did you ever see those simulation games they use for training police officers in firearms? There's a realistic urban setting of crowded buildings in which bad guys are hiding. Images of people pop up and you have a split second to decide before you shoot – is that a bad guy with a gun or a kid with a lollipop? A crazed terrorist in an explosive vest or a pregnant woman?

Give that test to the No campaign in the marriage equality referendum and they just go Blam! Blam! Blam! They want to shoot their bad guys – gay men and lesbians – but they end up blasting away at everybody else as well. Kill them all and let God sort them out. The big problem for the No campaign is that it can't say what it actually thinks.

The core of that campaign is made up of conservative Christians who sincerely believe that gay men and lesbians should never, ever have sex. This view seems to me to border on the blasphemous, since it suggests that God is a sadist who created people with sexual desires that cannot, under any circumstances, be fulfilled.

If you hold to it, though, same-sex marriage is repellent because it gives social recognition to the idea that a man having sex with a man and a woman having sex with a woman can be normal and moral human acts.

But as a political argument, "Keep your drawers on and pray" doesn't cut it. You have to rationalise your distaste by coming up with some general principle that takes the bare look off mere revulsion. And this is where the No campaign has come to grief. For the general principle it has come up with is one that manages to insult, not just gay men and lesbians, but huge numbers of straight people as well.

That principle is that the Constitution must recognise only those marriages (and hence only those families) that are, in the words of the Catholic primate, Archbishop Eamon Martin, "the union between a man and a woman which is open to life" (ie open to the conception of a child).

I am married to a woman – full marks there. But I had a vasectomy 25 years ago, so our "union" has not been "open to life" for a quarter of a century. We're not a proper family.

My late mother-in-law married again (after the death of her first husband) when she was in her 60s. Her new husband was a delightful man and they were enormously happy together. But they apparently weren't a family either because God in his wisdom invented the menopause and she was not "open to life".

On the other hand, my lovely young niece has two gorgeous little daughters who, apart from everything else, brightened up my mother's last years with the joy of new life. But, sorry, she's not married so she and her babies and her boyfriend are not a family either.

This is the problem with the No campaign. In order to get to the tree it wants to chop down, it has to lay waste to a whole forest. In order to find an apparent principle on which it can reasonably deny equality to gay men and lesbians, it has to tell huge numbers of other people that their relationships are just not up to scratch.

It has set a gold standard for constitutional approval of a family relationship – a man who is not sterile having licensed sex with a woman who is still fertile, with neither of them using contraceptives. (Otherwise their pleasures would not be "open to life".)

It hits the target all right – gay men and lesbians in same-sex couplings don't meet this standard. But it's not an arrow, it's a multibore shotgun. It hits people who were not in its sights – at least not for now.

Any married woman who is using contraceptives or who cannot conceive is not really a proper married woman. Any man who is using contraceptives or who is infertile or who is married to such a woman is not a proper married man. Any single parent with his or her kids is not a family.

Rather amusingly, of course, there is one category of people whose marriages are saved by this definition – divorcees. Divorce, for the same people who are campaigning against same-sex marriage, used to be the abomination that was going to radically redefine marriage and have every fat middle-aged husband cavorting off into the sunset with a young floozy. But apparently, it's okay now – at least up to a point. If you're divorced and remarried and still fertile and not using contraceptives, you are now among the elect type A family of man and woman open to conception every time you have sex.

As a campaign strategy, telling straight people that their relationships are illegitimate is, shall we say, brave. But for most actual couples in Ireland, all of us fallen people whose families fall short of a narrow ideal, it has turned a Yes vote from an act of altruism to one of plain self-interest.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-keep-your-drawers-on-and-pray-doesn-t-cut-it-1.2208497

The article is bollox, if you are going to post something then let it be sensible at least. But it is par for the course for the Irish Times which is about as even handed as the TUV.

Why is it "bollox"?

[deiseach]

Learning about Fintan O'Bollox's tool... I mean Fintan O'Toole's bollox...there isn't enough Jameson's in the world to blot out that image.

[Maguire01]

2. You have identified that while some marriages won't be affected some will and then went on to explain something about the welfare system which I'm not really ... HOW will these marriages be affected is more the question I was looking the answer for!! Will there be less marriages/More marriages/more divorce? What is the symptom for Marriage as a whole should Gay people be allowed to wed?

There may be less marriage and more divorce and more children not being brought up by married parents. Now somebody will pipe up and say that this already happens, the divorce can be the best thing in some cases and so on. This does already happen and divorce is sometimes the only option, but you want as little of it as possible all the same.

Equally, there may be more marriage, less divorce and less children not being brought up by married parents. But there's no evidence for your argument that this move will be detrimental - it's equally possible (in the absence of evidence to the contrary), that marriage (as an institution) will greatly benefit.

[The Iceman]

Could someone on here clear something up for me,

If a man and a woman had no intention of having children, would they still be allowed to get married in a church?

This came up when we got married actually, (not that we were intending not to have children).

You cannot get married in the church if you are not intending to have children.

By that standard they must really interrogate anyone over 50 presenting for marriage.

Just looking for holes to poke Maguire.... pardon the pun

I am indeed, because if an argument is full of holes, it doesn't hold water.

It isn't an argument - it's Church defined promises/conditions that should be in place for a Church marriage. The tangent has nothing to do with the referendum. If you want to take issue with the churches requirements for marriage go ahead

[easytiger95]

Well surely they are much closer together than you think.

Goals of marriage (in no particular order)

1. Commit yourself faithfully to an exclusive monogamous relationship to another person (surely not exclusive to heterosexuals?)
2. Raise a family (given how exercised yourself and people like William Binchy and David Quinn are over the prospect of gay people raising children, one thing we can all agree on is that both straight and gay people would like to have children)
3. Live a full loving life with your partner, supporting each other emotionally, financially. (Again, not exclusive to straight people)

So if we can agree that people, gay and straight, enter marriage for the same reasons, then how can they be "different actions with different potential"?

I'm genuinely interested to see your response to this. I hope you do.

As for the legal side of things, the referendum if passed will change the definition of a marriage to a union between two people irrespective of gender. So legally, there will be no difference. You've also spent the last month telling us that all the legal rights that gay people crave from marriage are available already or can be legislated for under civil partnership. So how can heterosexual unions and same sex unions be that different, as you conceive them to be.

[easytiger95]

Sorry all, the above post is directed towards armaghniac (if you hadn;t guessed already!!!!).

[Maguire01]

Could someone on here clear something up for me,

If a man and a woman had no intention of having children, would they still be allowed to get married in a church?

This came up when we got married actually, (not that we were intending not to have children).

You cannot get married in the church if you are not intending to have children.

By that standard they must really interrogate anyone over 50 presenting for marriage.

Just looking for holes to poke Maguire.... pardon the pun

I am indeed, because if an argument is full of holes, it doesn't hold water.

It isn't an argument - it's Church defined promises/conditions that should be in place for a Church marriage. The tangent has nothing to do with the referendum. If you want to take issue with the churches requirements for marriage go ahead

It's clearly being discussed in the context of the wider argument from the NO side that marriage is about having children.

[The Boy Wonder]

Letter to the Editor in today's Irish Independent
==============================

Different can't be equal

A "Marriage Equality Referendum" is what we were originally told we would vote on, and still is.

In the meantime, the Government conveniently brought in the Children and Family Relationship Bill, passing it into law without any public discussion and throwing a spanner in the works. This should have been held over until the equality of marriage' was first decided on. Now the main debate has swung from "marriage equality" to the composition of same-sex families - deliberately confusing the original issue.

Marriage is unique, and thus has no equal or no parallel. "Equality" means equal. A union of male and female could not be equal to a union of two men or a union of two women. Why? Because they are different. Only the male-female union is capable of procreating a natural family and has been so since time immemorial.

The unique marriage union between man and woman, in a loving relationship, to procreate a natural family, with maternal and paternal parents to rear, love and protect them, has no equal on earth. No composition of same-sex family could compare.

If there is anybody in a position to contradict this and provide something more sustainable, I will change my vote from 'No' to 'Yes'.

James Gleeson
Thurles, Co Tipperary



===================================================================================

I hope Mr Gleeson does not mind being quoted here but he succinctly expresses a common viewpoint on the NO side.

[easytiger95]

Letter to the Editor in today's Irish Independent
==============================

Different can't be equal

A "Marriage Equality Referendum" is what we were originally told we would vote on, and still is.

In the meantime, the Government conveniently brought in the Children and Family Relationship Bill, passing it into law without any public discussion and throwing a spanner in the works. This should have been held over until the equality of marriage' was first decided on. Now the main debate has swung from "marriage equality" to the composition of same-sex families - deliberately confusing the original issue.

Marriage is unique, and thus has no equal or no parallel. "Equality" means equal. A union of male and female could not be equal to a union of two men or a union of two women. Why? Because they are different. Only the male-female union is capable of procreating a natural family and has been so since time immemorial.

The unique marriage union between man and woman, in a loving relationship, to procreate a natural family, with maternal and paternal parents to rear, love and protect them, has no equal on earth. No composition of same-sex family could compare.

If there is anybody in a position to contradict this and provide something more sustainable, I will change my vote from 'No' to 'Yes'.

James Gleeson
Thurles, Co Tipperary



===================================================================================

I hope Mr Gleeson does not mind being quoted here but he succinctly expresses a common viewpoint on the NO side.

Which he is entitled to hold BW. To be honest with you, I find the argument from Faith for a No vote to be the most effective, on me as a Yes voter, because at least it has an internal coherency - I am a Catholic, this is my Faith, I cannot vote for this amendment. I don't classify this as homophobia, and i know a lot of Catholic No voters who are agonised by holding this line, whilst also worrying about the welfare of people who they know to be gay, even within their own families.

But I completely agree with Fintan O'Toole's article. I think the No side only has the argument from Faith to go with, but they know there are not enough committed Catholics left to win with this strategy. So they try and argue it legally and logically and fall into the trap he described.

[armaghniac]

Well surely they are much closer together than you think.

Goals of marriage (in no particular order)

1. Commit yourself faithfully to an exclusive monogamous relationship to another person (surely not exclusive to heterosexuals?)
2. Raise a family (given how exercised yourself and people like William Binchy and David Quinn are over the prospect of gay people raising children, one thing we can all agree on is that both straight and gay people would like to have children)
3. Live a full loving life with your partner, supporting each other emotionally, financially. (Again, not exclusive to straight people)

So if we can agree that people, gay and straight, enter marriage for the same reasons, then how can they be "different actions with different potential"?

I'm genuinely interested to see your response to this. I hope you do.

As for the legal side of things, the referendum if passed will change the definition of a marriage to a union between two people irrespective of gender. So legally, there will be no difference. You've also spent the last month telling us that all the legal rights that gay people crave from marriage are available already or can be legislated for under civil partnership. So how can heterosexual unions and same sex unions be that different, as you conceive them to be.

The difference between regular and same sex unions is that those in marriage are willing to form a long term partnership with the other parent of the children, whereas the ssm makes use of a parent somewhere else and is not willing to form a long term relationship with that person, indeed they regard at least one of the children's parents as dispensable.

[easytiger95]

Ok, so you have a problem with surrogacy for same sex parents in certain situations.