Colm Tóibín says church lacks 'moral authority' to oppose gay marriage vote

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/21/colm-toibin-gay-marriage-referendum-vote

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Award-winning Irish author Colm Tóibín believes that Irish society “has had the imagination to change” and will vote yes in Friday’s referendum on legalising gay marriage.

As Ireland’s airwaves imposed a broadcasting embargo on the topic of same sex marriage – and as Ireland’s taoiseach Enda Kenny urged the country to vote yes because “there is nothing to fear for voting for love and equality” – Tóibín told Channel 4 News that he was confident of victory. Polls have suggested that 58% of the electorate will vote yes.

“This time round something has lifted, the society has had the imagination to change, and that’s a great thing,” said the author, who is gay himself and who last week said in a lecture that “we are not talking about sexuality. We are talking about our love, the embrace of love, how our love equals that of our fellow citizens”.

“The issue is: what is the difference between my love if you’re gay and your love if you’re not gay that makes my love lesser than yours?” he told Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow on Wednesday. “And if you think my love is lesser than yours, who have you asked and how do you know? The question is really about degrees of love. And if you’re gay, I think you’re pretty sure in the way you’ve lived your life that actually love – for all of us, we’re human – is the same, and we would like that to be publicly recognised and under our constitution.”

With four Irish Catholic bishops asking their parishioners in letters to vote no tomorrow, Tóibín said the church “has no moral authority to speak on civil matters, because of the abuse, and I don’t notice them speaking much on spiritual matters, so that they’re sort of neutered”.

A yes vote, he said, would enable parents of gay teenagers to tell their children that: “Look, you’re embraced by the people of Ireland in a referendum. There is now nothing to stop you being happy. The society has changed in your favour. I think that will be a wonderful day for Ireland.”

The author of internationally acclaimed novels including The Master – one of three of his books to have been shortlisted for the Booker prize – and Brooklyn, Tóibín said he had occupied an “odd position” in Ireland, where he has represented the country as an artist, but has been unable to do “this thing other people in Ireland can do, I can’t get married in the normal way, and have those rights under the constitution”.

“It would be lovely to be not in that position, it would be lovely to have clarity on this,” said the novelist, who admitted his own experience of growing up gay in Ireland had “almost been useful” to him, as a novelist.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody on a personal level but on an artistic level it means you’re working in a funny space where silence reigns, where someone’s thinking one thing and saying another, and that’s quite dramatic if you’re writing a novel, it’s a good way to proceed. And it may be one of the reasons where there are quite a number of gay artists because you do develop a sort of introspection very early in your life, you look inwards, you notice things, you take nothing for granted, you watch things, and that may be a very good training,” he said. “What WH Auden said was as much neurosis as a child can take. But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”