Darren Kennedy: ‘Ireland has the chance to make world history’
My mother always told me I’d make a great father one day. And when I came out to them in my late teens, their biggest fear was that my life was destined to be loveless, lonely and childless.
Thankfully I can say I’m neither loveless nor lonely but for the time being, at least, I’ve no children. Right now, I’m focused on other things but when the time comes I hope to have the full support and rights afforded to my fellow (heterosexual) citizens. Currently as it stands, I don’t have the same rights. As an Irish citizen who is also gay, I have all responsibilities of citizenship but not all the rights.
Gay parenting. What do these two words mean to you? Unfortunately, for a certain section of society, the idea of gay parenting is not only incomprehensible, but also threatening. For some people, the very thought of two people of the same sex raising a child threatens to destabilise the traditional heterosexual image of the family. At this very moment, Ireland is in the throes of a marriage equality debate, which will reach its climax on May 22, when Ireland will become the first country in the world where the public itself votes on marriage equality.
However, enmeshed into this debate is the concept of gay parenting, with a large majority of the ‘No’ campaign’s agenda stemming from Church-taught doctrine.
Seeing marriage as a “fundamental building block of society”, the Catholic Church in Ireland has spoken out against the idea of gay marriage – rather saddeningly and bleakly viewing subsequential gay parenting as a violation of natural order. For me, this stance is particularly short-sighted and obsolete in that its central argument lays in the belief that gay parenting is a dismantling of ‘tradition’ and ‘normality’. In this day and age, what constitutes a traditional family unit is entirely subjective and everyone has different concepts of what normality means to them. To deny someone the opportunity to raise a child in a loving home is a deplorable violation of civil rights.
This is an issue particularly close to my heart, as last year, I presented and co-produced a documentary unambiguously-titled, ‘Gay Daddy’. The documentary was perhaps my biggest learning curve and after exploring the four different available parenting options to gay people in Ireland – surrogacy, fostering, adoption and co-parenting – I came away from the whole experience firmly believing that most important criterion for bringing a child into the world is love – unconditional love.
A child’s welfare has to be the number one priority. Whether it’s a man and a woman, two men, one man, two women or one woman raising a child, the most important considerations are the quality of love, care and opportunity to flourish that a child receives.
In that same vein, the notion that ‘gay parenting’ is in anyway different to ‘straight parenting’ is redundant, because there really is no difference. It is not something to be feared because in truth, there isn’t any such thing as ‘gay parenting’ because it’s simply parenting. When I was a child, my parents’ sexuality played absolutely no part in my childhood and was of no relevance to me – all I remember is growing up in a home filled with love and laughter. Why would this be any different for a child growing up with two Dads or two Mums?
I think – especially in Ireland – a lot of people fear that the children of gay parents will somehow suffer because of their parents’ sexuality. It’s a ludicrous belief, but in the context of May’s Marriage Equality Referendum, this forms a significant part of the ‘No’ campaign’s opposition. I am certainly not trying to sound like an armchair psychologist, but I think it’s fair to say that no child is brought into the world with an inherent sense of fear or hatred for any one thing. It’s the classic nature versus nurture idea – these are things that are taught. Children learn from their parents, including how to fear or to hate, and quite often, that fear is completely misappropriated and stems from a total lack of understanding and education.
I mentioned that there is no difference between gay and straight parenting and while I don’t want to get into issues of semantics, I think this is partly the reason why Dolce and Gabanna recently found themselves in hot water. Claiming that the only acceptable family unit is the ‘traditional’ one of mother and father and commenting on ‘synthetic babies’, their words were not only hurtful to gay couples, but in their sweeping generalisations, the design duo’s remarks were grossly offensive to anyone who has ever had difficulty conceiving and has had to seek alternative measures to complete their family.
Of course D&G are entitled to their opinion like everyone else, but I think their comments were particularly reckless given the large public space they occupy. To say that there is only one acceptable image of the family based upon your own narrow and confined definition of it is not only reckless, but quite simply archaic.
On May 22, Ireland has the chance to make history – not only as a nation, but also on a worldwide scale. No other country has ever had a Marriage Equality Referendum and a ‘Yes’ votes means that Ireland can move forward as a country that accepts that love does not discriminate on the basis of sexuality or gender.
To quote the very fabulous Panti Bliss, the fundamental question being asked is “do you, or do you not, believe that every citizen of this country deserves equal rights?”
If love does not discriminate, why should any one person deny somebody else the chance to marry the one they love? This is at the very heart of Ireland’s Marriage Equality Referendum – it is a plea for the lawful acceptance of love and this is the same love that will hopefully one day form the backbone of a beautiful family.
WORDS BY DARREN KENNEDY