Conscience and the Civil Partnership Bill
Oireachtas votes on Civil Partnership Bill today
Fr Vincent Twomey (Opinion, The Irish Times, June 29) argues that the absence of a free vote over the Civil Partnership Bill in the Oireachtas is a violation of individual conscience. He goes on to state that, should the Bill become law, it will force citizens to collude in what they believe in good conscience to be morally wrong. He decries the criticism that greeted the statement issued by the Irish Bishops’ Conference which, he claims, “effectively claimed that the church – in particular in the wake of the Ferns, the Ryan and the Murphy reports – should remain silent”. These charges, and the manner in which he presents them, demand a response.
Bemoaning the oppressive forces of the Party Whip and the ‘liberal-progressive media’, Fr Twomey wheels out the tired example of Nazi Germany which ‘crushed the consciences’ of its citizens as being somehow analogous. Resorting to such hyperbolic rhetoric serves little purpose other than to undermine Fr Twomey’s argument.
Politicians, journalists and clergy alike are citizens of this State and members of their communities. Each carry out important social functions in ensuring the health of our democracy and the quality of life of its people. Irish people enjoy the important liberty of being able to decide which politicians to vote for (if any), which media to listen to (if any) and which churches to attend (if any). Images of citizens being ‘intimidated’ by the newspapers they read, as if they were being force-fed brainwashing propaganda, and hyperbolic analogies of TDs being strong-armed by some Gestapo-like party whip are condescending and disingenuous to the point of absurdity. Conspiracy theories of top-down oppression by powerful, faceless ideologues are tempting in their simplicity but inevitably erroneous – and anyway, resistance is easy. Irish politicians, no more so than in recent times, have never been afraid to mobilise where their conscience, their interests or those of their constituents are perceived to be under threat. Witness Richard Bruton and George Lee! Likewise, the mirky idea of some powerful journalistic plot to corral the witless and impressionable Irish public into adopting their agenda must amuse as many journalists as it does patronise Irish citizens. Once we get behind the hyperbole and conspiracy theories, however, there are some serious points to address in Fr Twomey’s article.
The first is the more quickly dismissed. Fr Twomey paints a picture of TDs as effective ‘prisoners of conscience’, supposedly coerced into toeing the party line against their moral will by the decision not to put this Bill to a free vote. He cites with approval the German and English systems, which allow a free vote on ‘contentious moral issues’. The Irish bishops’ request that there be a free vote, he claims, is nothing more than a reiteration of this basic democratic principle.
What Fr Twomey does not advert to is, firstly, that the Civil Partnership Bill enjoys cross-party support. In the combustible climate that currently prevails in the Oireachtas, this is indeed a remarkable show of unanimity. Moral disagreements over issues considered repugnant to natural justice and conscience, such as NAMA, the bank bail-out and the use of Shannon Airport by the US military, have provided scarcely-needed reminders that Irish politicians are more than capable of publicly challenging the party line. That they are not doing so over civil partnership does not, as Fr Twomey alleges, inevitably mean that they are being silenced. To most right-minded people, it means what it says they mean: the politicians are united. That might not be reassuring to the political cynic, but it does remove the question of there being a sizeable contingent of put-open TDs whose consciences are being grievously oppressed by the party voting system.
Indeed it is this party voting system that prevails in the overwhelming majority of issues debated before the Dáil. Calls for free votes only occasionally arise, typically before motions of no confidence where the Opposition are seeking to divide and conquer, but there is no custom or tradition to speak of in Irish parliamentary history. More recently, a free vote was denied on the stag hunting Bill, when a small number of Fianna Fáil backbenchers expressed discontent at having to go along with the party line as had been agreed in the Programme For Government with the Green Party. The default position has always been party voting, and this has been the case over hotter political potatoes than extending civil recognition to same-sex couples, where parties were more fundamentally divided. Here, they are actually in agreement for once. The only motivator for a free vote is not some imagined oppression of backbenchers’ consciences (who have voted on party lines umpteen times and know well the compromises involved in (a) allying themselves to a party, and (b) allying that party to another in coalition), but Church disquiet about the institution of marriage being threatened and wanting to stall the ball as much as they can.
The conscience argument which Fr Twomey makes so much of is, in any event, so basic to our participation in democracy and debate as to be moot. True, the Civil Partnership Bill when enacted may demand civil registrars to go against their own moral standpoint concerning the morality of homosexual unions. Whatever about the substance of this standpoint, which is the subject for another article, it is the principle which concerns Fr Twomey and which falls to be addressed here. Should the law make it an offence, as the Bill does in inserting s69(9A) into the Civil Registration Act 2004, to refuse without reasonable cause to give a civil partnership registration form to one of the parties to an intended civil partnership if they believe it to be morally wrong?
Consider this question in light of another one. Should a pacifist, for example, be excused from paying his/her taxes on account of a moral opposition to the maintenance of the Irish Armed Forces? There is quite a list of possible instances where one’s civic or professional duty will collide with one’s moral positions. The justification, both subjectively and objectively, is that such are the sacrifices one makes in order to live as an individual in society with other individuals and that, as citizens, we owe certain duties to one another in order to make society work. The strong terms in which the legislation is framed reflects the strong view of the legislature that the protections given by the Act are not eroded or subverted by individual prejudice. Co-dependant couples, be they friends, siblings or lovers, are exposed to a multitude of risks and vulnerabilities where they exist outside of marriage. The Act moves to address these and offer protections to these citizens by redressing the shortcomings in the law.
Permitting an opt-out on grounds of conscience places these protections in reliance on the beliefs and views of individual State agent registrars. This, in effect, states that the entitlements enshrined in the Act – such as protections against domestic violence, excessive taxation and disenfranchisement of property – are not in fact civil rights but civil treats, to be dispensed (or not) according to the personal beliefs of each individual registrar. Such a move would not be tolerated on grounds of sex, creed or colour, regardless of how one is minded about women, Zoroastrians or Caucasians. It is likewise correct not to tolerate it on grounds of sexual orientation either.
Fr Twomey decries what he sees as the apparent desire by a ‘tiny but very vocal minority’ in the Oireachtas who, he says, “effectively claimed that the church – in particular in the wake of the Ferns, the Ryan and the Murphy reports – should remain silent”. It is my belief that much of the public criticism that the Church receives when it takes up positions such as its opposition to the Civil Partnership Bill is down to the way that position is framed. In recent times, the Irish Episcopate has discovered the language of human rights and has taken to expounding the merits of freedom of conscience, freedom of choice in education and freedom of religion. The difficulty many people have with this road to Damascus-like conversion to this liberal-progressive language is that it smacks so intensely of self-preservation. In its heyday, the Princes of the Church were extremely loath to invoke these same rights when to do so would have threatened its control over schools, its ecclesiastical hegemony and, indeed, the conscience and autonomy of generations of Irish minds.
Conscience, described in the Catechism as ‘the aboriginal Vicar of Christ’, has been a tortured issue in Irish Catholicism and, with no prospect of change showing from within the Church, it fell to an activist and audacious judiciary to breathe life into the freedoms envisaged by the Constitution. The conscience of those who wished to use contraception (McGhee v AG), to work while cohabiting extramaritally (Flynn v Minister for Education) or to pursue a sexual relationship with a member of the same sex (Norris v Ireland) were given short shrift by a Church which now trumpets conscience as some class of endangered species. The simple reaons, of course, is that the Church maintains in its Catechism that conscience is not a panacea to justify all acts – acts purported to be done in good conscience may, in fact, be the products of ‘erroneous judgment’ (which arises where the moral conscience remains in ignorance due to the individual ‘taking little trouble to find out what is true and good’, for example). Each of the above-mentioned acts were held at the time to be erroneous, corrosive to the public good and morally wrong such as to be immune to the defence of good conscience seeing as they constituted a ‘rejection of the Church’s authority and her teaching’ (Catechism, Article 6 (IV) 1792).
I have no doubt that Fr Twomey is bona fide in his statements and makes his arguments in good conscience. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which this conscience has been informed by charity, justice and a grounding in the affronts to human dignity which the Bill seeks to amend.
Native Mind 
No trackbacks yet.