Madam, - Fianna Fáil Senator Jim Walsh's motion requiring that the Civil Partnership Bill should not contain anything that might reduce the "special status" of heterosexual marriage seems to have drawn out the conservative and retrograde old guard of the party. Quite a few of them, it would appear. They haven't gone away, you know.
Of course they would be outraged, at least publicly, if one were to suggest that they are really not in favour of allowing gay relationships at all, and had merely found a suitably disguised way to voice this salt-of-the-earth, grassroots, Ireland-of-the-Fifties prejudice.
I had thought that this sort of parochial backwater thing had been leached slowly even from Fianna Fáil with the passing of time; but alas it hasn't. Ireland's gay community fought hard, we should remember, for every right they now possess; they fought political, public and religious prejudice and outright hostility in places of employment.
I have known at least one gay man who lost his job in darker times because he was seen coming out of a certain pub.
Senator Walsh and his colleagues surely do not wish to cast this country back into that sort of moral murkiness. Or at least one would hope so.
Gay couples have a right to register their relationships with the State. To oppose this - whatever Jesuitical word-play one may use - is blatantly to discriminate against gay men and women. - Yours, etc,
FRED JOHNSTON, Carn Ard, Circular Road, Galway.
Madam, - While the proposed legislation regarding the recognition of civil unions between same sex couples is to be welcomed, it does not go far enough in what is designed to achieve. For these couples deserve the same marriage rights as any couple of opposite sexes.
Any law in this area is always destined to fall short of what it is supposed to achieve - that is, an advancement of civil rights for both gays and lesbians. The reason for this is very simple: we in this country will never be ready for the day that homosexuality will even be considered normal, let alone a fact of life in this so-called modern society of ours. - Yours, etc,
RONAN BYRNE, St Alban's Park, Sandymount, Dublin 4.