Mo Moulton, lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, writing in The Atlantic about the Irish campaign for marriage equality:
But the brand of gay equality that’s developing in Ireland right now deserves broader attention. It takes the traditional social teaching of the 20th-century Catholic Church, with its emphasis on family ties and community cohesion, and reinterprets it for a 21st century in which many don't view sex not aimed at reproduction as a sin. Decades of scandal opened up a unique gap between Church authority and Catholic ideals in Ireland, and it was in this space that new interpretations had room to take root. The Irish version of gay rights isn't a radical queer vision. It upholds, in a way, the central tenet of the 1937 constitution—that the family is the necessary and moral basis of social order. But it insists that the notion of family be expanded to include a much wider range of human experience. In doing so, the Irish gay-rights movement has fashioned a template that, regardless of Friday’s result, may prove highly palatable to other traditionally conservative countries, too.
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