Homophobia - Its simple really

A straight catholic (note I flatly to ever refuse to use a capital letter for that religion) patriarchial society has taken it upon itself to dictate to me whom I can and cannot marry. Famous drag act, Panti (aka Rory Neill) was sent solicitors letters after comments he made recently on the Saturday night show but its very easy to see why Rory felt aggrieved at the comments that are directed at the gay community in Dublin. For too long the gay community has been seen as being freaks, second class citizens and slightly eccentric (perhaps the latter ;) ).

The Iona Institute as has been covered on this blog are a catholic research institute. Numerous commentators and media personalities are members of this institute while others are not. What do they have in common though? The common denominator is a lot of them believe that gay marriage should not be legalised for reasons that its different to other marriages through to it is not the correct environment for a child to be raised in. Im not going to bother posting the links to papers which show the first point on gay marriage being different as utter tosh (read them on google scholar). The research from the catholic right is from faith based institutions in a lot of cases, institutions who if they had even bothered to understand in researching that any faith makes their research impossible as biases must be checked at the door. Secondly, there are a lot of single parent families whom have raised children single handedly to become upstanding citizens of society which puts paid to the myth that a father or a mother are needed. A gay couple will adapt to the role of mother or father with both of these being a social construct anyways. Once a child will be brought into a loving home its what really matters. So that is the research bulldozed what about the belief?

Any belief that a homosexual person is less capable of being a member of society based on their sexuality is inherently a judgement and henceforth homophobic, its really that easy to see. The word homophobe is not being thrown around lightly here, its being used to address what is the last great fundamental civil rights movement in humanity. Apartheid era South Africa banned inter racial marriage under the Afrikaaner government as they viewed black people to be lesser people based on their skin colour, a similar judgement has been passed but note we replace the words South Africa with Ireland, inter racial/black with gay ,Afrikaaner with Irish conservative society and skin colour with sexuality and how does the sentence read? Not much of a difference if I was to be asked . The apartheid government fell and laws were repealed as they did a severe injustice to those whom they affected. Ireland is now at this point.

The belief that I am somehow lesser a person than others and therefore cannot get married is an outdated concept. catholicism is at a crossroads in Ireland and its going to cross and get ploughed out of it by a massive artic rigid truck and go splat hopefully…