Sir, – Fintan O'Toole offers an insight from the history of "structural discrimination" in which "motives and intentions" have not made the "slightest difference to the questions of justice, equality and universal human dignity" (Opinion, February 4th). Thus, in his view, the opponents of his own liberalising movement are wasting their time because the freedom of the oppressed always comes anyway – it's largely a question of time.
But what he overlooks is that his side too has its “motives and intentions” and to attribute to the same-sex marriage movement an inevitable future success similar to the hard-won abolition of slavery in the 19th century is an ill-matched analogy.
William Wilberforce’s long campaign in the British parliament eventually led to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which targeted the British West Indies and similar places, and which later exerted moral pressure on the US-based practice, where there was much obstinate resistance to abolition just as in the UK.
But Wilberforce was motivated by his strong Christian convictions of “universal human dignity”, an expression he would doubtless not have applied to O’Toole’s “motives and intentions” in favour of same-sex marriage. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL AUSTIN,
Hazelwood, Gorey,
Co Wexford.