On May 5 I wrote in support of same-sex marriage on the grounds that what the government offers as a civil marriage no longer bears any relationship to what traditionalists and religious people think of as “marriage.” The Irish recently voted to approve same-sex marriage and this represents a clean experiment due to the fact that “religious marriage” or “traditional marriage” in Ireland must mean Roman Catholic marriage.
Civil marriage and Roman Catholic marriage in Ireland were more or less synonymous until 1997 at which point no-fault divorce was introduced in Ireland. As noted in my previous posting, once a country establishes no-fault divorce and the possibility for citizens to make a profit by marrying and divorcing a higher-income or wealthier partner, denying the right to marry is primarily the denial of an economic opportunity. Irish voters, even ones with a strong Catholic faith, apparently realized that it didn’t make sense to keep mixing church and state.
[As a measure of how much social change has occurred in Ireland over the past few decades, note that it seems that Ireland also enables parents to profit from obtaining custody of children following a one-night encounter. This courts.ie page explains that marriage is not a bar to obtaining a potentially unlimited amount of child support (though if you want to get more than $8500/year you have to go to a Circuit Court or High Court rather than a District Court). Not too many years ago having a child out of wedlock would be a source of shame in Irish society; today the child is a source of cash, albeit probably not as much as one could get from a U.S. court (see Real World Divorce).]
It is a good point. Some use the terms “Marriage 1.0” to denote the old version and “Marriage 2.0” to denote the new version.
Ireland had a constitution that made the family the fundamental unit of society. That has now been abolished by the combination of no-fault divorce, making marriage irrelevant to child support, and the recent constitutional amendment. I wonder if Ireland even realizes what it has done to destroy marriage and the family.
I agree that the key shift was the cultural one of making marriage primarily about companionship than about raising children. The logical divide is more between (intact) marriages with non-adult children and between childless marriages, not between opposite sex and same sex couples in childless marriages.
Alot of that shift was due to world overpopulation making children less important, though it seems taboo to discuss this openly.