A LIGHT AMONG THE NATIONS

Summary: Ireland’s two to one vote in favor of marriage equality has been somewhat astonishing. Given the historically conservative nature of the Irish electorate and the power of the Roman Catholic Church in the Irish body politic, the thumping great margin of victory should be a message not only to the Vatican, but also to American conservatives. Of course, American conservatives, contemptuous of “Old Europe,” will ramp up the outrage machine, but today Ireland resumes her ancient role as teacher, and as a light among the nations.

Something extraordinary has happened in Ireland. Conservative, Catholic, isolated, insular, inward-looking Ireland has just voted by a roughly two to one margin for marriage equality. Ireland has become the first nation in the world where marriage equality has become a reality by popular vote. This is not the first time Ireland has led the world.

A thousand and more years ago, the Irish rescued civilization, accumulating and passing on the knowledge of classical antiquity. If Western Christian civilization survived by clinging to pinnacles of rock like Skellig Michael, 18 miles off the Irish coast, it also survived because the Irish sent wave after wave of missionaries and teachers to bring Western, Christian European civilization back to the continent from which it had almost been extirpated.

Today the Irish are again our teachers. Today the Irish have upended entirely the conventional wisdom that civil rights for queerfolk can’t come through a democratic process, but only through judicial fiat. For a long time, it had simply been taken for granted that straight people would never vote to extend basic civil rights protections to queerfolk. Our equality before the law would have to be won in the courts, by appealing to norms enshrined in constitutions and other documents such as the United Nations Charter on Human Rights. The conventional wisdom was enshrined in such simple soundbites as “you don’t vote on human rights.” Apparently, Irish voters didn’t get that memo.

But the Irish, those special and dear people of God, those inhabitants of my ancestral Island, those amazingly steadfast people whose powers of endurance have manifested themselves from Clontarf in 1014, when they sent the Vikings packing, through seven centuries of English occupation, right down to the Easter Rising 99 years ago, have always possessed a capacity to confound the great, the powerful, and the mighty. Just when you think you’ve come to know the ways of Hibernia, something will say to you “stop, listen, and learn how little you really do know of Ireland and her ancient people.”

For given what we all thought we knew about conservative, Catholic, insular, inward-looking Ireland, who would have thought that marriage equality would become law in the 26 counties of the Republic? Moreover, who would have thought that marriage equality would become law by a thumping great margin of nearly two to one? That tremor we all felt coming out of Dublin Castle represented nothing less than a political earthquake.

For, in a very real sense, today’s referendum result is freighted with implications not only for queerfolk in Ireland and around the world but also for the institutional power and indeed, the magisterium itself of the Roman Catholic Church.

Just a generation ago, until 1993, homosexuality was outlawed in the Republic, and legalization occurred only over the objections of the Roman Catholic Church. The power of the Roman Church in Ireland continues to be a major factor in the political life of the Republic. And while gay members of Dáil Éireann have occasionally scored deliciously witty and typically Irish points off Roman Catholic prelates by noting that “the Archbishop may know a great deal about Saints, but he knows nothing at all about fairies,” it had nonetheless been thought that the well-nigh immovable power of the Church would suffice either to scuttle the referendum altogether or ensure a margin of victory so narrow as to raise questions about the legitimacy of a victory for marriage equality or lay foundation for an effort to repeal.

For the Irish electorate to say “yes” to marriage equality and, by corollary implication, to say “no” to the Roman Catholic Church suggests that the political development of the Irish people may have turned a corner from which there can be no actual turning back. Like a child passing from toddler age to the age of reason, the Irish people may have decisively let go of the guiding hand of Mother Church. Indeed, by adopting marriage equality by so convincing a margin, Ireland may just have sent a more powerful admonitory message to the Vatican than the famously anti-clerical and secular Italians have ever managed.  Moreover, the Irish victory for marriage equality should send a message to American conservatives that the world is changing around them, and that Ireland's convincing embrace of marriage equality is a significant warning that their own position is not as strong as they might think.

And if this is the case, the significance of Ireland's vote cannot be overstated. For 700 dark years, the Roman Catholic Church, often horribly persecuted, chivvied, put upon, forced underground, and generally made unwelcome, functioned as the crucial repository of Irish nationhood. During the years of English occupation and Protestant Ascendancy, to be authentically Irish was to cleave to the persecuted faith of one’s ancestors. To be authentically Irish was to embrace with fierce devotion all of the teachings the hedge priests and the fugitive bishops could impart to flocks of faithful Roman Catholic communicants who were, in their own country, as sheep among hungry coyotes.

Indeed, even to this day, the Roman church enjoys something of a privileged position in Irish law, being mentioned in the Constitution of the Republic as the church of the “great majority” of the people. For generations, the Church’s privileged position in Irish law also conferred upon her something of a privileged position Irish politics. Yet, in the run-up to this referendum, not a single Irish political party took an official position in opposition, not even Fianna Fáil, the opposition, Church-allied, center-right party which controls 20 seats in Dáil, and which had been expected to take up the cudgels against the referendum.

Of course of the lack of organized opposition from any Irish political party probably won’t matter a whole lot to conservatives in the United States. While the right wing freakout has yet to take shape, we know that it won’t be long in coming. Given the importance of the Irish diaspora in American politics, and given the fact that even our African-American president Barack Obama has some ancestral ties to the Emerald Isle, cultural conservative, presumably Republican, reaction in this country will be as inevitable as Atlantic breakers pounding upon the granite pinnacles of Skellig Michael.

And that conservative reaction will take a somewhat predictable form. American conservatives, unable to rage against unelected judges “inflicting” gay marriage upon the Irish body politic, will no doubt content themselves with Rumsfeldian dismissals of the Republic as part of “Old Europe.” Old Europe, indeed, that cesspit of socialism and sodomy, which we godly Americans would, in the conservative view, be well advised to abandon to the tender mercies of the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. No doubt, American conservatives will let fly with a whole series of ultimately irrelevant observations about the state of the Irish economy, about how gay marriage will be a stalking horse for ISIS, and how the Irish can no longer be regarded as the kind of people with whom we should have any truck.

But for these few hours, before the ugliness of American politics rears its head, as I look at my window and see flying the tricolor of the Irish Republic which I raised on the pole in front of my house this morning, I can feel immensely, enormously proud of the people of Ireland. I can feel unapologetic for the lump in my throat and the happy tears in my eyes.

For today Ireland resumes her ancient role as teacher; today Ireland stands again as a light among the nations.

-xxx-

Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council. Though he has a name so typically French that it appears scores, even hundreds, of times in any given French phonebook, he is nonetheless a member of the Irish diaspora. He was also one of the first attorneys ever to take on a marriage case in the state of California, back in 1993. This column is not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.