May 2015 3
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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
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Allister O’Brien
Editorial Board
Niall Crowley, Joan Fitzpatrick
Bride Rosney, Michael Smith
Contributing Editors
Niall Crowley, John Gormley
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Boylans, Drogheda, Co Louth
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Issue 37
05.2015
EDITORIAL
Yes
Vote yes for gay rights, but
stay reserved about state
support for marriage
T
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