Sir, - In order to clarify a few points, may I reply to those correspondents who have been exercised by my letter of August 14th?
There had been considerable outrage a few days earlier at a poignant photograph you published of a tragic drowning on the west coast. In my original letter, I did not express my own personal feelings at the gay photograph. I simply wondered if it would spark off any outcry among your readers.
For myself, I was both amused, bemused and rather saddened by a spectacle of two bald, ageing gays cutting a "wedding cake" topped by a pair of little male dolls, and I voiced what I know would have been my grandmother's bewildered disbelief at what the world was coming to.
And, no, I am not confusing civil and religious marriages.
Marriage, whether solemnised in church or registry office, is still a marriage between a man and a woman of whatever faith or none. But it seems to me that gays and lesbians are becoming aggressive in their campaign to make the abnormal normal, by demanding the legal status of marriage, mainly on the premise of property and ownership rights and the bequeathing of same. I would have thought that anyone of sound mind can leave whatever to whomever, without necessarily being in any sort of legal union.
What is threatened in all of this is the institution of marriage as we know it, which is under severe attack today from many quarters. In the soap Fair City at the moment, a young woman wants a child without benefit of husband or marriage, but rather the sperm-bank, the implications being that in this respect Ireland is in the Dark Ages. We are not sufficiently enlightened or liberal. . .yet?
What message does this give to young people? That the abnormal should be regarded as normal? And does this thinking make for decent living and a healthy society?
I must say I am greatly flattered by the correspondent who quoted from a 1998 letter of mine. Does he keep a file of fan offerings? And full marks to the gentleman (August 30th) who consulted the map to find all those midland towns and villages, with their quota of gays, in order to give local colour to his argument!
To all my critics who went to the bother of expressing their views, may I say: shall we agree to disagree, and leave it at that? - Yours, etc.,
Vera Hughes, Cartronkeel House, Moate, Co Westmeath.