Summary: The reaction of both the ‘Murican right and the American left to Ireland’s marriage equality referendum has brought little credit to either side of the American political discourse. While ‘Murican cultural conservatives have been having conniptions over marriage equality coming to the Emerald Isle, American progressives have been waving censorious fingers at the Irish for having put marriage equality up to a vote, because in America, “we don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights.” Yet America and Ireland do not share the same political DNA. In America, making an additional place at the national table for a hitherto despised minority can’t happen by a vote; all of our history of racial insecurity militates too powerfully against it. By contrast, Ireland, which was never hobbled by the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery and all of the racial foolishness and angst which accompanied it, is far better situated than the United States to put marriage equality to a vote, and American progressives’ criticism of the Republic comes across as condescending and culturally imperialistic.
There is an old cliché in politics that you must be doing something right if you are managing to pass off both the right and the left.
It certainly seems that the Irish managed to get things very right by voting, nearly two-to-one, to add a marriage equality clause to the Constitution of the Irish Republic. It's got both sides of the American political divide into knicker-knotting orgies of censorious finger-pointing.
'Murican cultural conservatives quickly got their knickers in knots, swinging into a full-on conniption over the awful thing the Irish had done, over how Ireland had managed, once again, to prove to all God-fearing 'Muricans that Ireland, and the “Old Europe” of which Ireland is part, is nothing but a cesspit of socialism and sodomy, unworthy of being defended by 'Murica against the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Aside from the foolishness of engaging in a love feast for Vladimir Putin, 'Murican conservatives only managed to reinforce the strong negative view of the United States now held by most of the other industrialized nations of the West. By flinging cherry-picked Bible verses at the Irish people, vilifying and damnifying them for daring to embrace the principle of marriage equality, 'Murican cultural conservatives shed more heat than light. Apparently Georges Clemenceau was right to describe the United States as the only society that has managed to go from barbarism to decadence without the customary, intervening interval of civilization.
But if 'Murican cultural conservatives managed to make fools of themselves and reflect badly on their country, the American left has also not exactly covered itself with glory in its comments upon Ireland’s marriage equality referendum. Almost uniformly, American progressives lined up to criticize Ireland for adopting marriage equality by way of a referendum. The standard trope, “you don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights,” has been quoted now so many times as to become nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché.
For American progressives to complain about the methodology by which Ireland adopted marriage equality comes across not only as parochial, but somewhat culturally imperialistic as well. We Americans should remember that Ireland has a rather different political system from our own. Ireland is not a federation made up of numerous several, sovereign states. Ireland is a unitary Republic, whose 26 counties are merely political subdivisions of the larger body politic. Thus, for Americans to complain about marriage equality coming through a referendum bespeaks a certain ignorance, even a certain condescension. Ireland’s constitution is not amended through ratification by a specified fraction of the 26 Counties of the Republic, but through the uncoerced suffrage of the whole population of the Republic.
So, while I can understand the concern of some American legal analysts that Ireland’s marriage equality referendum might give ammunition to the argument that marriage equality should be decided in the United States by popular vote, the separate political histories of our two countries ought to remind us of how completely different the dynamics really are. Ireland, despite substantial amounts of immigration from Eastern Europe and North Africa, still remains a largely homogeneous society, a society composed of women and men whose ancestors have usually occupied the Emerald Isle for tens, even scores or hundreds of generations. The same cannot be said of the United States, which is well on its way to becoming a minority-majority society.
And, in many ways, it has been American discomfort over our transition from a white-majority to a minority-majority society that has driven many of the fears and insecurities which in their turn have fueled opposition to marriage equality in this country. Moreover, Ireland, though not without her own traumas and anguish, never had to contend with the original sin of our own American Union, the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery. Because slavery was a constitutionally protected, integral part of the American body politic at the time of our foundation, the ability of American society to integrate minorities, to include the different, to make room at the national table for the Other, has always been somewhat compromised. For us, voting to make a place for the Other at the national table has never been nearly as realistic an option as it has been for the Irish.
For Ireland, the greatest hurdle to be overcome was not a whole series of race-based fears and Freudian foibles, but what had been viewed as the well-nigh insurmountable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, as Dublin Abp. Diarmuid Martin observed in the wake of the vote, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland needs “a reality check,” it needs, the archbishop added, to get beyond being “the church of the like-minded.” At all events, it does appear, as has been observed among all the chattering classes, that the days of Ireland being a virtual colony of the Vatican are over.
And if, for Ireland, the original sin of the Republic was its excessive identification as a Catholic society, the expungement of that sin has been accomplished with surprising ease, and with a measure of grace Americans would never have imagined. So, to borrow the words of the late constitutional scholar and novelist Walter F. Murphy, it appears that the Irish, having had the church on their backs for so long, are not prepared to let it get on their consciences any longer. And if the Irish have managed to slough the church off the back of the Irish body politic, they certainly are in advance of this country, where our political obsession with Christian religion has precipitated us onto a headlong flight away from the Enlightenment and back toward the Dark Ages
So, because Ireland’s body politic exhibits so many historic, even DNA-based differences from our own, and because Ireland is no longer nearly so poisoned by ostentatious, politicized religion as are we, American progressives need to stop making themselves look as foolish as their cultural conservative counterparts. The entire world does not function according to American norms, a reality we forget at our peril.
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