An ageing Catholic bishop and a noisy gay rights group spoke up for
children last week. And each did so in the name of the family.
There
has long been one excuse or another for not delivering on political
promises to protect children's rights better in the Irish Constitution.
"Unless we do it, to my mind all the rest is just talk", said Mary
O'Rourke, former chair of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the
Constitutional Amendment on Children, at the Merriman Summer School last
Thursday.
And there will be no referendum on children's rights
this year, even though other promised referendums are going ahead.
Minister for Justice Alan Shatter has claimed that the last government
did too little of the necessary legal groundwork to allow a referendum
to happen yet.
It is the children of gay couples in particular who
are on the mind of Max Krzyzanowski (39).
Max won the 'Mr Gay World'
title in 2009, being described then by its organisers as "a classic
Irish lad".
Last weekend, Max helped to organise a protest in
Dublin calling for gay marriage. One of the reasons that his group, LGBT
Noise, is not satisfied with civil partnership for gays is that civil
partners cannot, as a couple, adopt a child.
This can leave the
child of a deceased gay parent less secure than the child of a
heterosexual couple, with the surviving partner having no legal right to
a say in the medical or educational care of a child whom they may have
parented from birth.
Although Irish gay couples recently won legal
recognition for their long-term unions, civil partnership is not the
same as marriage.
It is claimed by campaigners that there are about 150
anomalies between civil partnership and civil marriage.
LGBT
stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. LGBT Noise says: "One
of the most outrageous aspects of the Civil Partnership scheme is the
complete lack of any rights for gay parents and their children."
The
crucial word here is "parents" -- plural. An individual gay who happens
to be a parent has the same rights as any single parent.
But a
gay couple has lesser rights than a married heterosexual couple. If one
gay partner who is a parent dies, then the relationship between his or
her child and the surviving partner has not the same status in law as it
would have if the couple were a married man and wife.
That is
because the Irish Constitution has been interpreted by judges to confer
full family rights only on married couples. It requires a referendum to
change it.
In Ireland, as the Citizens Information Board points
out, unmarried couples may not jointly adopt a child: "A joint adoption
by a couple is only possible where that couple is married and living
together."
This rule prevents an unmarried couple from jointly
adopting a child even where one of the parties is the biological parent
of a test-tube or other baby.
And that is not necessarily a bad
thing, according to the Bishop of Elphin Christopher Jones (75).
He
thinks that conferring on same-sex couples the same status as
heterosexual married couples would "undermine marriage in my view".
As
it is, he believes, many children are "born losers", brought into a
world of broken families and too little love.
Bishop Jones, who is
president of the Catholic marriage advisory group Accord, wrote last
week in the Irish Independent: "When a culture of marriage weakens, an
ever-growing number of children will never experience the inestimable
value of being raised by a loving, married mother and father."
The
celibate bishop added: "This is not to say that children cannot thrive
outside of the marital family, but if we really value childhood, then we
must do what we can to try and ensure that children are raised by the
fathers and mothers who bring them into the world."
Gay activists
point out that many gay couples already provide a stable and loving home
environment for children, adopted by one of the partners or fostered by
both, even if one or both of the child's natural parents are never
there.
Bishop Jones has previously claimed that the media unfairly
single out the Catholic Church when it comes to reporting child abuse.
But just last week, his own church authorities in Rome released
documents that appeared to conflate the distinction between adult
homosexuality and attraction to boys.
Within Ireland, confusion or
prejudice about the difference between the two has not been helped by
the David Norris affair.
It cannot be stated clearly enough that sexual
intercourse between mature adults and underage boys or girls is always
child abuse.
Any ambiguity feeds prejudice.
It also increases the likelihood of opposition to adoption rights for gay couples.
Gay
activists can also be righteous, and driven by a sense of entitlement.
Children become weapons in culture wars between right and left,
conservative and liberal.
Too often, adults want children as some sort of fashion accessory or statement.
It
is a faultline that runs right though all forms of parenting.
Adults
assert the right to have children when those future children have no
guarantee of their own rights to a stable and loving home environment.
Right
now, a collapsed economy, with associated unemployment and
redundancies, is a greater threat to family values than a few gays on
the streets of Dublin demanding the right to be married in Ireland on
the same basis as any heterosexual couple.