Sir, – Margaret Hickey (March 17th) is worried that marriage equality will displace the "tender years" principle that custody of young children is usually granted to the mother.
That overstates matters. Ms Justice Catherine McGuinness in DFOS v CA (1999) set down what is now the standard for our family courts, where she did "not entirely accept the old 'tender years' principle; modern views and practices of parenting show the virtues of shared parenting and the older principles too often meant the automatic granting of custody to the mother virtually to the exclusion of the father".
Furthermore, family stability is in the best interests of existing children being raised by loving same-sex couples. Outdated notions that sharply delineate parental responsibilities in a gendered fashion are not a sound basis for forming policy or treating the children of the nation equally. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN DINEEN, LLM
Clontarf, Dublin 3.
Sir, – I see the No campaign repeatedly makes the point that a male/female pairing is superior to a same-sex couple at raising children, due to the different roles that men and women apparently play in raising children. Putting aside, for a moment, the fact that this is an attempt to distract from the actual issue at hand in the referendum, I would dearly love for anyone peddling this argument to outline what specifically a “man’s role” and a “woman’s role” in the child-rearing process entails. I suspect the answer would involve some 1980s Ireland fantasy of strong, disciplinarian, bread-winning daddies and loving, care-giving, apron-clad mammies.
It’s easy for voters to go along with the argument that any parental team besides one mother and one father is automatically inferior – the vast majority of us were, after all, brought up in exactly that kind of family and the idea of any other arrangement can feel like a new and frightening experiment. What would your own childhood have been like without your mother? Or your father? I, like many people, could scarcely imagine how much more difficult my life would have been without either of my parents.
A pair of devoted parents enriches the lives of their children in innumerable ways. However, they do so through their love, patience, determination, selflessness and any number of other admirable qualities – not through the make-up of their genders. When I think back on how fortunate I was to have the parents I had growing up, it’s their acts of kindness, generosity and support that come to mind.
If gender ever dictated any parenting duties beyond breastfeeding, it certainly doesn’t anymore – just ask any new father who has tried to shirk off certain responsibilities as “woman’s work”. The duty of a parent – any parent – is to provide for their children’s physical wellbeing, and to be a source of unconditional love and support in all other matters. I would challenge anyone opposed to same-sex adoption to come face-to-face with any of the couples currently fighting tooth and nail for legislation that would allow them the chance to even get in line for a chance at one day providing a home for a child, and tell them that this is a duty they cannot fulfil. – Yours, etc,
CATHAL COMERFORD
Thurles, Co Tipperary.
Sir, – Much of the discussion under this topic is related to the lack of a clear definition for most people as to what is the “value added” perceived for marriage compared with a civil partnership and also as to what are the necessary conditions for a marriage to exist. It appears to me that marriage is now to be defined as any relationship based on love so that any pair of loving people wishing to live together can get married. That is not a tenable proposition.
If the aim is to claim that all relationships are equal in every respect then this is based on a falsehood, since, based on biological differences alone, clearly they are not. This is not a value judgment, simply a statement of the obvious. It is certainly not to say that long-term, loving, caring relationships between persons of the same gender cannot exist because clearly they do, it is merely to say they are different.
If this could be accepted, and indeed celebrated, rather than demanding uniformity, it would make the integrating of the variety of relationships into a single society a great deal easier and more satisfactory for everyone. – Yours, etc,
PATRICK DAVEY,
Shankill, Dublin 18.