Dublin Marriage Equality Vote
Posted on June 26, 2015
Vote Tà
When we landed in Dublin on May 25th, we saw signs posted on nearly every street telling people to vote on the marriage referendum. Though we’d known nothing about the referendum before we arrived, the signs were not surprising in the city. In California, we became used to seeing these signs during the campaign over Proposition 8 in 2008.
majority opinion should ever have bearing on legal equality.
My first reaction was actually anger that, once again, a majority vote would be called to determine the legal status of a minority – as though majority opinion should ever have bearing on legal equality. This was in the back of my mind during the next three weeks when we came to realize as we traversed the country, that this was to be a nationwide vote. We spent the next three weeks driving from place to place, mostly traveling between rural towns and villages, and encountered nothing but kindness everywhere we went.
…we never went anywhere without seeing signs for both sides of the issue
What was surprising for us – who are used to progressive causes being championed mainly in larger cities – was that we never went anywhere without seeing signs for both sides of the issue. It seemed to us that the majority of the signs we saw, even in small towns and rural areas, were actually for the “yes” campaign. Teenagers wore buttons that said “Tà” (Irish for “yes”). There were stacks of “vote yes” fliers beside the cash register at the only grocery store in one small village. In a shop window in a another town, a homemade banner had cutouts of the word YES repeated in a chain like paper dolls. My favorite sign was one that said: “Vote yes. We are your friends.”
We went into every shop with a yes sticker on their window, and bought chips and magazines and tomato sauce and other things we didn’t need. Often we’d tell the person behind the counter that if we could vote, we’d vote yes too.
Yesterday, after having circumnavigated the country, we drove back to Dublin, listening to the radio as they tallied the votes. The road was a hundred kilometers of green fields, cows and sheep grazing and nursing their babies, on one of the sunniest days we’ve seen.
the votes came in for yes
The radio newscasters called in, each in turn, to report from all the small towns and villages we’d so recently been in. We listened, not wanting to speak but just turning every so often to look at each other as – in nearly every town – the votes came in for yes. Rural and conservative districts – places that, just twenty years ago, voted against legalizing divorce – were tallying with a ten point margin – 54% for yes, 45% no. Districts in Dublin had majority percentages in the 80s.
We hadn’t listened to the news or followed the campaign on social media and had no expectation of this result. In truth, I don’t think anyone really expected this kind of majority.
My heart swelled, I was so awed, looking out at all that sunshine and green grass, thinking of one thousand moments in the past – my high school in the late nineties, where being gay was a thing only whispered or shouted in slurs; the crushing 2008 vote that had enshrined discrimination in the California State constitution; the redemptive 2013 US Supreme Court decisions that struck down Prop 8 and DOMA, and the story we learned later that day of our dear friend getting down on one knee to propose to her pregnant girlfriend on the day marriage equality came to California. I thought of all these moments from the past, as the radio announcers continued to talk and the sun continued to shine, and I couldn’t help but cry tears of joy.
By 10:30 in the morning, with only 30 percent of the votes counted, the strength of the trend already promised a landmark civil rights victory.
Ireland is still a very Catholic country, but – remarkably – even the church here is changing. In the month before the referendum vote, some priests told their parishes that if they wanted to vote yes, they could do so in good conscious. Despite the church’s official position, at least ten priests announced publicly that they would be voting yes.
Voter turnout, according to the radio announcers, was the highest on a referendum since the 1930s. Young people registered to vote for the first time. The Irish diaspora lined up in airports and to board ferries – people who’d left during the recession flew home from as far as Vancouver and Australia – answering the rallying call to “come home to vote.”
That night in Dublin, crowds gathered in the street to wave flags, hug each other, dance, and cheer. Tour bus drivers trying to get through the crowds showed no frustration, only raised their arms to cheer back at the people in front of them. Celebrants with rainbows painted on their faces stopped cars and the drivers clapped and smiled. One man opened the door of a news van that had been stopped in the jammed traffic, and leaned in toward the driver to hug him. I’m certain these hugging men did not know each other. The driver looked startled, but then simply raised his arms and hugged the stranger back.
I don’t find it amazing, in 2015, for marriage equality to become law in a western European country. But what does seem to me truly incredible is that an overwhelming majority of everyday people – even Catholic priests and grandparents who have spent most of their lives being taught that homosexuality is a sin – a 2 to 1 majority of the population, by the time the votes were counted – believe in the necessity of that equality under the law and demonstrated that belief by voting.
I was overwhelmed with emotion at being in Ireland at that exact moment. After a year of working in politics and learning how painfully difficult it is to make even the smallest impact, how tedious and frustrating to attempt the most incremental change, and in the midst of tragic news that continues to come out of the US – where social inequality has a daily increasing body count – this moment in Ireland was a tremendous motivation, an incredible demonstration of the real possibility for dramatic change.
Editor Note: This post was written in May, 2015. On June 26th, 2015, the Supreme Court brought nationwide marriage equality to the United States.