Former president Mary McAleese has said the forthcoming referendum on gay marriage is about children - "Ireland's gay children".
Speaking to The Right Hook today in an exclusive interview, Ms McAleese has called for a Yes vote in the referendum on same-sex marriage, on May 22nd.
She told George Hook same-sex marriage is a "human rights issue", and she and her husband, Martin, believe that everyone should be able to "love someone for life" and have that love recognised "at the highest level of Irish society".
"It is a debate about children, people have been saying it’s about children - and we believe it to be about Ireland’s gay children and about their future and about the kind of future we want for Ireland. We want, in the words of the proclamation: ‘The children of a nation to be cherished equally’.
“The adult children, the children yet unborn, the gay children yet unborn - we want them to be born into a world where if they fall in love with someone they can express that love fully,” she added.
Ms McAleese is currently a visiting scholar at Notre Dame University in the United States, where she spoke to George today, and said she has been keenly observing the debate in Ireland.
“I’m hoping very much, my husband and I are both hoping very much, that it will be passed,” she said.
“We believe it to be a human rights issue. We’ve been watching with great interest the debate as it’s been evolving in Ireland and the concerns that people have in and around it," she said.
Referring to her own near-40-year marriage, she called for "all of our children - whether they're gay or heterosexual" to be free in Ireland to have their relationship recognised "at the highest level in Irish society".
Catholic Church teachings on homosexuality "will change over time"
In January of 2014 McAleese, who is currently visiting Notre Dame to complete a doctorate in canon law, said the issue of homosexuality for the Catholic Church was, “not so much the elephant in the room but a herd of elephants”.
Describing the words of Pope Benedict – who called homosexuality "intrinsically disordered" - as “rather regrettable”, Ms McAleese predicted that the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality “will change over time.”
“Our thinking, the world’s thinking, about homosexuality is changing. The sheer weight of medical evidence, the sheer weight of psychiatric evidence now is challenging views that were formed, you could say, in ignorance, and I think they will change over time.
Image: Former president Mary McAleese speaking with George Hook on The Right Hook, at Notre Dame University
“They’ve already changed elsewhere and we’ve seen in many, many countries now embracing the idea that homosexuality is a perfectly normal human sexual expression and that it is, as it has been thought in the past, a skewed, or in the words of the church, the rather regrettable words of the church – when I think back to what Benedict has written about it when he described it as ‘intrinsically disordered’.
“Many of us do not believe it to be ‘intrinsically disordered’ but believe it to be a perfectly normal human adaptation,” she added.
