February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Like abortion, the death penalty and gun control, gay marriage has split American opinion, with a majority of citizens opposed to extending marriage rights to gays but also deeply wary of President George W. Bush’s proposed constitutional amendment that would explicitly define marriage as a state of being only between a man and a woman.
As with the nation’s split, so go the Irish and Irish-American communities. In New York, one of the leading proponents of same-sex marriage is Brendan Fay, who himself married his partner, Tom Molton, last year. He has since set up the Civil Marriage Trail, a group that highlights the experiences of gay American couples who are traveling to Canada to get married, since that country allows them to wed.
Fay sees the issue through Irish eyes, noting constantly the many Irish names involved in what he calls “a new moment in the history of civil rights in this country.”
He congratulated the Irish-American mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, who has permitted several thousand gay couples to get married at city hall in recent days.
He also praised Mayor Richard Daly of Chicago, who said he would follow Newsom’s lead if city ordinances permitted, and also Jason West, mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., who married several dozen gay couples last weekend.
But where Fay sees love, others see one of the building blocks of society under assault. Conservative groups have attacked the move as dangerous and reckless, and Christian groups who are core supporters of President Bush have lobbied successfully for the President to take a stance against gay marriage. Cardinal Edward Egan has condemned same-sex marriage from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
In Boston, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn called the situation “tragic and polarizing.”
Flynn sees the issue as one stemming in part from a failure of leadership by politicians.
“This issue could have been solved by the politicians,” he said. Flynn noted that while the Massachusetts Supreme Court had brought same-sex marriage into law in that state starting in May of this year, it would not be until November 2006 when Massachusetts voters would be able to vote on the issue themselves.
What needed to be done with some urgency, Flynn said, was to pass the constitutional amendment defining that marriage is between a man and a woman, then “long-term relationships or dependencies” could be defined under new legislation.
Asked about the potential for a civil union arrangement as a compromise on the issue of gay marriage, Fay said: “There are 1,038 federal rights and benefits that come with marriage and that includes immigration rights and a host of other rights at the state levels.” Seen as a civil rights issue, he continued, “a growing number of people are taking a stand.”
“This is not about the rule of the majority,” Fay said when asked if, as conservatives argue, activist judiciaries were interpreting new rights into law without good basis. “This is very similar to 1967, when the law against interracial marriage was defeated. Then, a majority of people supported keeping these racist laws against miscegenation.”
Another Fay has a very different opinion: A New Yorker by birth, John Fay lives in Dublin. He is opposed to same-sex marriage because he believes that marriage between a man and a woman, and, importantly, the production of children and the raising of families, as essential for healthy societies.
But Fay thinks the president has made a mistake in taking the issue to the heightened pitch of a constitutional amendment. On his blog, Irisheagle.com, Fay has addressed the issue several times.
“The President has also blundered politically, I think,” he said. “Rather than supporting the amendment, he should have used his opposition to judicial activism as a campaign issue. Overall, however, the economy and the war are the two key issues for this November. I doubt that the gay marriage issue will swing too many people.”
“My view,” Fay continued, “[is that] marriage — one man, one woman — is special. So special that society has to provide incentives to foster and support marriages. Those incentives can be monetary, social, whatever. If you extend those incentives to those on whom no expectation of children can be held, then you lessen the incentive and therefore, support for marriage.”
Some conservatives have suggested that civil partnership legislation as opposed to full marriage ought to be a workable compromise for gays and lesbians to abide by.
Not so, says Sean Cahill, director of the policy institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force: civil unions cannot compete with the benefits and protections afforded to heterosexual couples by marriage.
Cahill is finishing a book about the impact of gay marriage on American politics and has written papers on the issue. It is a simple issue of civil rights for him, illustrated by the words of Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell, who, in pleading the case for the emancipation of Irish Catholics before the British public, noted that “human dignity and freedom are not limited resources. By extending these freedoms to others one’s own freedom is itself enhanced and not diminished.”
“The constitutional amendment is a bone to his base,” Cahill said of the president’s proposed amendment. “The Republicans have been using anti-gay bias since 1980 in campaigns.”
Cahill offered another thought: that as the number of gay couples affirming their partnership through the public act of marrying continues to grow — most recently, chat show host Rosie O’Donnell took the plunge with her partner, Kelli Carpenter — same-sex marriage becomes more and more a lived reality in American society, and not so easily squared off by laws.
John Shields, the mayor of Nyack, N.Y., offered his support to fellow mayors Newsom of San Francisco and West of New Paltz and said: “I don’t understand how extending marriage to same-gender couples undermines traditional marriage or weakens community. Committed relationships benefit not only each partner but also act as a stabilizing force in the community. Marriage strengthens the ties between people.”