Yes - Village Magazine

May 2015 3

Online

www.villagemagazine.ie

@VillageMagIRE

Village Magazine promotes in its

columns the fair distribution of

resources, welfare, respect and

opportunity by the analysis and

investigation of inequalities,

unsustainable development

and corruption, and the media’s

role in their perpetuation; and

by acute cultural analysis.

Editor

Michael Smith

editor@villagemagazine.ie

Advertising

sales@villagemagazine.ie

+353 1 873 5824

Art Director

Allister O’Brien

Editorial Board

Niall Crowley, Joan Fitzpatrick

Bride Rosney, Michael Smith

Contributing Editors

Niall Crowley, John Gormley

Printers

Boylans, Drogheda, Co Louth

Village is published by:

Ormond Quay Publishing

6 Ormond Quay Upper, Dublin 7

sales@villagemagazine.ie

Issue 37

05.2015

EDITORIAL

Yes

Vote yes for gay rights, but

stay reserved about state

support for marriage

HE case for gay rights, pioneered in

this country by David Norris through

the courts and the European Conven-

tion on Human Rights, is unanswerable.

Everyone has the option – philosophically

– to believe the equality of gay people or to

deny it. But the fact is that if people chose

– in a practical or political way – to regis-

ter their oﬀence at what others get up to

where no nuisance is caused to third par-

ties, there would be no end to the

asymmetrical busybodiness that would

undermine public and individual welfare.

For this reason society is best served by

freedom for consenting adults to exercise

whatever sexual preferences best fulﬁl

them.

Village feels no more need to indulge the

preferences of gawkers that others should

deny their sexuality – the Iona Institute’s

Breda O’Brien recommends gay abstention

– than it feels the need to indulge the pref-

erences of bigots that seek to count people

as inferior by virtue of their race, sex, able-

bodiedness or any other accident of birth.

Indulgence of such bigotry would be a char-

ter for Nazis and eugenicists.

Village is driven by an egalitarian

approach to rights. It is not impressed

with assertions of rights to property by

those with lots of it for example (the

O’Donnells and the Quinns), or noisy cam-

paigns against property taxes, at least fair

ones, or against capital acquisitions and

gains taxes.

It treats very seriously the ordinary

right to life, as the most fundamental man-

ifestation of the equality of humans; it

promotes equality of education and equal-

ity of health treatment. It believes in

equality of quality of life. And Village con-

siders that future generations have an

equal right to the fruits of the earth giving

rise to an obligation to care for the envi-

ronment, sustainably.

Equality is Village’s stringent thing.

Equality of rights is not something to be

casually touted around. If something

should not be a right then there should not

be equality of the right. For example, Vil-

lage would not acknowledge the right of a

ethnic minority to form a gentlemen’s club

that excluded women: there should be no

right to form clubs that exclude women so

there should be no equal right for that

ethnic minority to do so.

Against this background while it takes

gay rights very seriously, it is much less

impressed with the case for marriage, even

gay marriage.

Marriage should be an emotional and

social privilege not a legal right.

A right is something that everyone can

avail of. Marriage is something that only

people who are linked through love can

avail of.

Furthermore, marriage discriminates in

favour of the fortunate (those lucky

enough to be linked through love), includ-

ing through tax advantages. Egalitarians

would ideally indulge only institutions

that promote the less fortunate, not insti-

tutions designed to enshrine iniquity.

The understandably fraught debate on

marriage equality in  has been

remarkably unphilosophical with the Yes

campaign absolutely ascendant in the

media and amongst decision-makers but

characteristically driven by emotionalism,

a visceral and right-on sense of the modern

and, for the most part, a freedom-

dressed-up as-equality-agenda which says

if straights have a right to marry then so

too should gay people – without ever ques-

tioning whether straights should indeed

have that right, whether marriage serves

the vision of a progressive society.

This unradical view of society begets a

politics that wishes to get the state oﬀ the

back of the citizenry.

Village’s agenda is for the state to be

active in promoting the needs of all the

oppressed.

In a society

that elevates

marriage, and

where the

options are Yes

or No, it would

be terrifying

to vote against

an apparently

cherished

agenda for a

minority which

has traditionally

been

discriminated

against

‘

continued on page 4