Madam, - Patricia Casey (April 22nd), after weeks of campaigning against same-sex marriage and parenting, has finally said something worth listening to: "Marriage lends stability to a relationship."
This is particularly meaningful for the thousands of gay and lesbian couples in Ireland denied the stability and recognition that marriage brings. Hence their desire to get married, rather than sign some second-class partners' register.
However, in attempting to tell the executive director of Unicef Ireland what that person's own organisation actually thinks, she makes two rather uncharacteristic concessions.
First, she reproduces a lengthy quote from "Unicef Report Card 7" which shows quite clearly that this report makes no mention of, or findings on, same-sex parenting.
Second, she claims that her April 15th article on "family diversity", a real hot-button issue for Prof Casey and other religious conservative activists, "did not argue against gay civil unions per se".
Prof Casey may belatedly be admitting that studies on single-parent families have little relevance to a rational debate on same-sex parenting.
If that is the case, however, she might wish to explain why, in numerous public statements, articles, and letters to these pages, she has repeatedly quoted such studies and immediately followed them with thinly-veiled attacks on gay parents and a call on the Government to deny legal recognition to gay couples. It would help further if she could explain how the rights and wellbeing of the children of gay couples are safeguarded by such a denial.
Otherwise, she runs the risk of appearing to contradict herself. - Yours, etc,
PAUL KENNY,
LGBT Noise,
Capel Street,
Dublin 1.