gracchusdixit

In Ireland, an overwhelming majority of the electorate just voted in a national referendum to make same-sex marriage the law of the land—the first national referendum of its kind anywhere in the world, with one of the biggest voter turn-outs in recent memory.  This is so surprising  and so deeply ironic that it boggles the mind.

After all, the Republic of Ireland is one of the most Catholic countries in the world, long disparaged by many as a social and cultural backwater of almost medieval proportions.  For centuries, Roman Catholicism was more than the majority religion of the Irish people.  It was Ireland’s quasi-official religion, and the Roman Catholic Church was given a privileged role in the country’s public life, exercising sweeping influence on government, education and personal behavior.  It wasn’t very long ago that divorce was illegal, and homosexuality, abortion, and contraception were punished as crimes under Irish law, because the hierarchy of the Church demanded it.  Who would ever have imagined that Ireland, of all places, would take the lead in legalizing same-sex marriage?

And yet, that is precisely what happened.  It was the Irish people who decided to turn the page of history, affirmatively turning their backs on centuries of prejudice, discrimination and oppression.

There is another, even greater irony in this.  The number of Irish voters who just legalized same-sex marriage was 62 percent.  That’s almost exactly the same proportion of the electorate that here, in the United States, would like to do the same.  Like the Irish, Americans started coming to their senses long ago.  Like the Irish, they now believe that it’s time to turn the page of our own history, putting an intolerant past behind us. If we held our own national referendum tomorrow, there is little doubt that same-sex marriage would, by a huge margin, become the law in our land too.

But that isn’t going to happen.  Instead, we are condemned to crawl our way toward this simple act of justice, state by state, one fragile and bitterly contested judicial and legislative decision at a time.  Unless and until the Supreme Court intervenes, which it may yet do, gay couples will be given their rights in one part of the country but denied them in another.  This makes no legal or moral sense, and it never has.

It makes no sense to say, as so many Republicans do, that decisions about marriage belong to the states.  States rights do not trump human rights, and no state should be allowed to deny its citizens equal protection under the law.  It is utterly ridiculous, not to mention scandalous, for a legally married same-sex couple from Massachusetts to become criminals the moment they cross the border into Mississippi—putting aside the obvious question why any decent person would want to set foot in Mississippi in the first place.

And it makes not even a shred of sense for evangelicals to blather on about the danger same-sex marriage might pose to “traditional marriage,” as if such a thing were even remotely possible.  Heterosexuals won’t stop marrying one another because homosexuals do the same thing, any more than bees will stop cohabiting with bees because ants prefer to cohabit with ants.  Same-sex couples aren’t trying to impose their choices on the rest of us.  They merely want the right to make their own choices, the same right we all have.

Finally, it’s about time we got real about “traditional marriage,” which is far from being the idyllic institution it’s cracked up to be.  Half the heterosexual marriages in our country end in divorce, many of them more than once.  Indeed, divorce rates are the highest among the very evangelicals who scream the loudest about the dangers of homosexuality.  With or without same-sex marriage, “traditional marriage” would seem to be an iffy proposition at best.

It may even be that same-sex couples can teach us all a thing or two about the true meaning of tolerance, fidelity., and the love of one human being for another  After all, they’ve had to fight for these things, and they’ve been fighting for years.  In Ireland, they just won their fight.  We could all learn something from their struggle.  And we can certainly learn something from the Irish.