Why Thousands Of Catholics Voted For Marriage Equality In Ireland

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Marriage equality supporters celebrate outside of Dublin castle, Ireland after learning the final result of the nation’s referendum on same-sex marriage over the weekend. CREDIT: AP

by Jack Jenkins Posted on May 27, 2015 at 8:03 am

Last week, famously Catholic Ireland voted overwhelmingly to legalize same-sex marriage in a national referendum, making it the first nation in the world to enact marriage equality through a popular vote. Within hours of the results, several journalists and pundits painted it as a victory for secularism and a telltale sign of Ireland’s willingness to abandon the Catholic Church, which staunchly condemns same-sex marriage and whose leaders urged their congregants to vote against LGBT equality. The Church’s longstanding influence on Irish life, they concluded, was ending.

But while the narrative of a dying church is tidy, it fails to account for a religious and distinctly Catholic movement for LGBT equality quietly triumphing in Ireland and elsewhere. To be sure, recent census results show a marked growth in Irish who don’t affiliate with any religious tradition, and a notable drop in the number who attend mass each week. This is largely due to the dark specter of the child sex abuse scandal, which was particularly horrific in Ireland, as well a younger generation fed up with conservative views of homosexuality. But for all this talk of a vanishing Catholic Church, Ireland remains a deeply Catholic nation: although more than 62 percent of Irish who voted in the referendum supported same-sex marriage, a full 83.2 percent of the population still claims to be Catholic.

So how did so many self-identified Catholics vote for something their Church blatantly forbids? There were no national exit polls for the referendum, but Ursula Halligan, a prominent Irish TV news presenter in Ireland, offered a clue earlier this month in an op-ed for the Irish Times. In it, she detailed her own struggle with sexual identity — explaining how she fell in love with a girl at 17 — before boldly claiming that her support for same-sex marriage was not a rejection of her faith, but a passionate embrace of the person God compels her to be.

“As a person of faith and a Catholic, I believe a Yes vote is the most Christian thing to do,” Halligan wrote. “I believe the glory of God is the human being fully alive and that this includes people who are gay.”

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/05/27/3662968/thousands-catholics-voted-marriage-equality-ireland/