My youngest child is a huge fan of Barney, the purple dinosaur. One of his politically correct ditties is seared into my consciousness. “Oh, a family is people and a family is love, that’s a family. They come in all different sizes and different kinds and mine’s just right for me.” Precisely. Give that dinosaur a junior ministry.
The committee’s task was to review the constitutional view of the family as the marriage-based, prays-together-stays-together, 7.5-children Irish version. In other words, the kind of family that seems hopelessly outdated in these multicultural, multiracial, multiple choice times. The constitution doesn’t actually define the family, but, through glancing references to old-fashioned conventions such as stay-at-home mothers, the judiciary seems to have got the gist of it over the years. For as long as most people remember, the family has been interpreted by the courts to mean “the family based on marriage”, the indivisible unit that the law vindicates against all comers.
It was this interpretation that the Oireachtas committee was charged with reviewing. At the outset, there was some speculation that the result would be a constitutional referendum for the purpose of declaring that, whatever the modern Irish family was, it certainly wasn’t based on a marriage. Alternatively, if it was based on a marriage, that marriage didn’t necessarily have to be between a man and a woman.
You don’t need to be a psychic or a legal genius to see that this was never a runner. Remember the outcry when the Progressive Democrats mentioned removing God a few years ago? Given that experience, there was little chance of the state’s definition of a family straying too far from what most people still consider traditional.
So any notion of taking the blunt instrument of an amendment referendum to the fine machinery of the constitution’s family provisions has been discounted. Since these delicate referendums have a habit of backfiring, the wrong wording could have ended up being read as a prohibition on marital families in general and ones that pray together in particular. Instead, the Oireachtas report published last week proposes that we legislate to decree that a family is, in Barney terms, lots of different things.
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So those Eamon de Valera-inspired articles that promise mothers they will never be forced to work outside the home will remain with us. Since the legal interpretation of the family based on marriage can’t be changed, nothing can be introduced that may be perceived as undermining it. Which left the committee with a bit of a dilemma. To keep everybody happy, it had to come up with a formula that said all families were equal, but some were more equal than others.
Starting in reverse order, then, we have same-sex families. Since there are only 1,700 people in this category, they were never going to influence a revision of Bunreacht na hEireann. What they will get, under the proposals in the report, is a chance to register their partnerships with the state. This qualifies them for some watered-down rights in matters such as taxation and inheritance.
Predictably, gay and lesbian lobbyists are shouting “discrimination”. We have become very attached to the notion that anything that acknowledges distinction — even obvious ones — has to be illegal. Let it slip that you might have noticed somebody’s age, gender, sexual persuasion or nationality and you will be hauled before an equality tribunal.
Only last week, a Donegal restaurant manager was ordered to compensate a diner she described as a Glasgow bitch. It was the Glasgow bit that was objected to, on the grounds that it was racist. Her complaint was upheld.
Homosexuals think they are being discriminated against because the proposed law will acknowledge their difference. But homosexual unions are different from heterosexual ones. They are not necessarily better or worse, but they are different. If that’s discrimination, then sue me.
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In second place, we have heterosexual families not based on marriage. There are 77,000 of these and tens of thousands more if you include all the single parents and separated people with children. This is the area in most urgent need of joined-up thinking. The number of single mothers is increasing every year. The lone parents allowance scheme has always discouraged them from cohabiting with their partners on pain of losing their benefits.
If the committee’s proposals are adopted, unmarried couples living together with children will be presumed to be a family and will benefit from a version of the privileges extended to marital families, unless they expressly indicate the contrary.
The same-sex lobby are miffed that they don’t benefit from the same presumption, but that could never be a runner. Otherwise, you’d have red-blooded male students arriving to share a flat in Rathmines only to discover that the law assumed they were in love and offered them succession rights and tax breaks.
And finally, still at number one, we have the family based on marriage. If there is to be a constitutional change, the report suggests, it should simply be to acknowledge the equal rights of stay-at-home fathers — even though it is generally agreed that the constitution’s sanctimonious pronouncements about mothers not having to go out to work are hardly worth the paper they’re written on. And the rights of children will be beefed up in any future amendment. At present, they have no defined rights in the constitution, although legislation insists they are a primary concern in a marital breakdown, for example.
So the all-party Oireachtas committee has taken a year to come up with suggestions that any clued-in parliamentary draftsman could have sketched out in an afternoon. You must acknowledge the diversity of groupings in a modern society and accord them the right to bequeath their property, share their tax benefits and make provision for their children.
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But the legal and social fortress of a family based on marriage will retain its position of primacy, just as the architects of the 1937 constitution intended. With all due respect to the alternatives, that family is still a near-ideal unit of cohesion and stability. Despite all our hand-wringing, it is not at all outmoded and maybe we need to be less circumspect about apologising for that fact.
Barney has a point, of course. A family is people and a family is love, and the ideal doesn’t work for everyone. But that doesn’t mean it should be undermined to make everyone feel better.