Sir, - Vera Hughes must surely have been aware of the irony when she chose to condemn the photograph of a gay wedding in Germany as "insensitive", but in her letter of August 22nd she explains the basis of her position. Here she defines matrimony as a religious covenant, which goes without saying for members of the church, but not for the minority outside it.
The fact is that marriage, in the form of civil union, exists as an alternative, and there is simply no reason for refusing gay couples access to the rights that it entails. All arguments to the contrary inevitably insist on requiring people to follow a moral code to which they do not subscribe.
In an earlier letter to this newspaper (November 23th, 1998), Vera Hughes quite rightly called for "respect for divergent views" - it is a principle which deserves to be universally applied.- Yours, etc.,
Richard Waghorne, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14 .