Katherine Zappone (Independent) | Oireachtas source

This is a Bill about my life. This is a Bill that will profoundly impact on my life, one way or the other. As a married woman, I share much in common with my Seanad colleagues who are married. Those of us who are married, possibly the majority, signed a civil law document with our spouse in the presence of specially chosen witnesses to declare and to register our legal married status. Once signed, we bound ourselves in law, as well as in love, to cherish and support each other, regardless of poverty or riches, of sickness or health, of failure or achievement, and to love with fidelity and trust until death.

As a married woman, however, I am also in the minority of one in this Chamber. My marriage, while legally valid in Canada where it was contracted and legally valid throughout 18 countries and 37 states in the USA, is denied recognition in Irish law because I am married to another woman.At present in Ireland those who, like me, belong to a minority social group because of our sexual identity are banned from accessing the institution of civil marriage purely because of who we are and our difference in sexual identity from the hetrosexual majority. Lesbian women and gay men cannot marry the person they choose to love. Heterosexual women and men can marry, divorce and remarry the person they choose to love, even though the intense involuntary emotional attraction and desire of forever love are no different for opposite or same-sex couples. That is why I say this Bill is about my life and the lives of others who share a minority status with me. We only want what the majority already has - the freedom, the right and the choice to marry the person we love. The fact that our freedom, our right and our choice are denied and the civil institution of marriage is banned for us means that there is no equality between heterosexual and lesbian and gay people.

Once enacted, a question will be put to the people and it will be on marriage equality. The people will have the power to cast off a wounding oppression experienced by many Irish citizens for decades. They will have the power to affirm, once and for all, in our foundation legal document that homosexual identity is normal in being human. The people will have the power to affirm that lesbian and gay people reside within the norms of humanity, not outside it and, as such, we should be free to marry the person of our choosing, just like the majority. The people will have the power to banish inequality between the majority and a minority. That does not happen very often; perhaps once in a lifetime. When the people - our people, my people - go to polling stations on 22 May, they will have an opportunity to decide on our core values. It is not often that we, the people, get to make such decisions and the process tells us a lot about who we are and what we aspire to be. In a republic it is the people and their will that are sovereign and at no time is this more visible than at key constitutional moments when our core values and institutions are revisited. Jefferson said this should be done every generation and now it is the turn of this generation in Ireland to decide whether we should perpetuate a legacy of the past, which foreclosed human possibilities, or whether we should open our hearts and minds to a more positive future which will value love as a bedrock of civilised society. The question, the text as we have it in the Bill, is not about a narrow sectional interest; rather, it goes to the heart of who we are as a people, who we aspire to be and what we owe to one another. By adding this text and saying "Yes" the people will not be altering radically the family or its relationship with the State. The family which is protected by Article 41 of the Constitution will still be the family based on marriage subsequent to the referendum, although this is something which also needs to be changed. However, by voting "Yes" the people will be saying they value the family as a place, a setting and a relational context in which human beings who love one another can grow and nourish each other or, as Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, stated: "We become ourselves in relation." Becoming who we are in relation - this is the prime point - is not something that is sex or gender-specific. Love has no regard for sex or gender. If we are faithful to this positive image of the family as a relational context in which we grow and nourish each other and, as such, an institution protected by the Constitution as the fundamental unit group of society, it follows that there ought to be no sex or gender-specific barrier to entry to the family or marriage on which it is based. Love should be the only ticket to entry.

My argument for a "Yes" vote is rooted in valuing the family as such. As Gráinne Healy, chair of Marriage Equality, said recently, "Yes is pro-family." The time is right to open our restrictive laws on marriage in order that all citizens will be treated equally with respect to marriage. The Constitution upholds equality in Article 40.1 when it states all citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law. Amartya Sen, the great contemporary political philosopher and economist, argues that a society characterised as equal must provide people with economic and social freedoms "to lead the lives we have reason to value." A society filled with substantive equality for all means that each one of us is free to choose the life we wish to live and, in my case and those of all others whose identity resides within a sexual minority, that we ought to be free to live with our sexual identity with integrity and without unwarranted interference by the majority.

What about children? Saying "Yes" to equality in the referendum will mean that the Irish children of lesbian and gay couples will be recognised and protected as family by the Constitution. Saying "Yes" to equality will mean that the Irish children of lesbian and gay couples will have equal status, like the Irish children of heterosexual couples. No one has a right to a child. The best interests of children can only be supported by parents who love and nourish them. It is love which is at the heart of the matter and the protection of the rights and best interests of all children which the Constitution should uphold.

Do children have a right to a mother and a father? I had an extraordinary mother and father. I cannot imagine growing up in my life without a mother and a father because I had them. As I often say, I was so blessed that by the time of their passing four long years ago I had no unfinished business with them. However, when I remember them as extraordinary parents, is it because I am remembering their gender? It is not. I have memories of my mother standing on the sidelines at my baseball games and of saying I had a proud Irish heritage and of my father being present at my speech tournaments and telling me to believe in myself. I remember that they were always there. I remember when, at the age of 33 years, I finally told them about my sexual identity and that Ann Louise Gilligan was my beloved life partner in a letter which travelled from Dublin to Seattle, their response was a letter back which began with the words "Dear daughters". I had parents who loved and nurtured me to be the woman I am today and it had little, if anything, to do with their gender. Furthermore, when some people argue that children have a right to a mother and a father, are they talking about lesbian and gay children, too? Are they saying lesbian and gay children at five, ten or 15 years of age have the right to a mother and a father, but, by the way, this necessarily means that they do not have a right to marry the person they choose to love? Furthermore, these lesbian and gay children grow up. Can we really split apart the natural cycle of life? If every child absolutely has the right to be raised by a mother and a father, as an adult lesbian woman, I am precluded from having children all around me as I grow older. Is it natural that only heterosexuals should have the gift of adult children in their older years, especially in the later older years when there are additional vulnerablilities? It seems to be the most natural thing in the world to look to your children for companionship and care. These are some of what one could call the unintended consequences of insisting on the absolute right of a child to be raised by a mother and a father. In saying "Yes" on 22 May it will be a time to embrace all adult and child citizens of the Irish nation equally. As the Minister said, the horizon leans forward.