David Quinn
Ireland is increasingly a cold house for people who hold values seen as out of step, writes David Quinn
The American Vice-President, Mike Pence, was in Ireland last week and it is fair to say he did not receive a hundred thousand welcomes. Yes, he was met by President Higgins, and Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney but everything was low-key and muted, and the coverage in the media was either gloomy or downright hostile.
At first glance, this seems odd. Mike Pence has deep Irish roots and is proud of them. He has relatives in Doonbeg, Co. Clare to this day. This is partly the reason why he stayed at the Trump golf club and resort at Doonbeg, quite apart from the fact that his boss, Donald Trump owns the place.
But there are three reasons for the muted or frosty reception. The first is precisely that his boss is Donald Trump.
The second is that Mike Pence is a Republican, and Republicans are never as welcome here as Democrats. (When the leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, was here a few months ago, our politicians could not have tugged the forelock harder if they tried).
Awfulness
The third is that Pence is a conservative Evangelical Christian who is pro-life and believes in traditional marriage, which is to say, that marriage is the sexual union of a man and a woman. In the eyes of our media, most of our politicians and a large section of the Irish public that means he is next to Hitler in his sheer awfulness.
He is accused of being both homophobic and misogynistic. The second accusation arises because he is pro-life, and for that automatically means you are sexist and possibly even ‘hates’ women in the eyes of his critics. Women who are also pro-life are guilty of ‘discriminating’ against their own sex, apparently.
In addition, he has said he never has dinner with a woman on his own unless she is his wife. For one thing, he thinks this protects him from being accused of improper behaviour. His critics thinks it shows he is either weird or he has a problem with women. I think his rule is excessive, but in the age of Me Too, when many men have (rightly or wrongly) been accused of sexually inappropriate behaviour towards women, if not outright assault, maybe he is simply being prudent.
The accusation of being homophobic arises because of his aforementioned stance on marriage, but also because he stands accused of believing in so-called ‘conversion therapy’, which is to say, of maintaining that gay people who receive ‘treatment’ can change their sexual orientation.
In fact, he appears to believe no such thing. What he does believe is that anyone who wants to reduce their chances of contracting HIV needs to modify their sexual behaviour, by having fewer sexual partners, for example. But this advice applies equally to heterosexuals and homosexuals. So the accusation that be believes in ‘conversion therapy’ amounts to fake news.
Also, he is accused of supporting and indeed sponsoring laws that discriminate against gay people. When he was Governor of Indiana, he signed a law that would protect a baker (say) from having to bake a cake for a gay wedding, or a cake with a pro-gay marriage slogan on it, like Ashers Bakery in the North was asked to do.
Truth
The truth is that the law was a local version of a federal law passed under and with the support of President Bill Clinton called the Religion Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). It won the backing of almost every politician in the Senate and the House of Representatives in 1993 and was sponsored by Democratic politicians, Chuck Schumer and Ted Kennedy. It arose because the Supreme Court had refused to protect the right of some native Americans to use a mind-altering drug called peyote in accordance with their religion.
He has said he never has dinner with a woman on his own unless she is his wife. For one thing, he thinks this protects him from being accused of improper behaviour”
The RFRA was intended to protect the religious practices of Americans unless there is a very good reason to override them.
In the end, the RFRA could only be applied at federal level, so some equivalent laws were passed in 21 States, including the one signed by Mike Pence in Indiana. It does not target gay people, although it does try to ensure that no religious believer should be compelled to facilitate something they disagree with, and that might or might not include gay marriage.
So Pence is accused of bigotry for supporting a law that had the support of all almost all major Democrats until recently. Needless to say, our media did not remind us of this fact.
As various commentators said on social media and elsewhere, Mike Pence arrived in an Ireland that now supports both abortion and gay marriage. He is out of step with the Irish people, say these writers, and should be told as much.
But what does this say to those of us who also told to traditional Christian beliefs on issues like abortion and marriage? There are still hundreds of thousands of us in Ireland, including Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews. Lots more live in Northern Ireland. What should we do with ourselves? Are we supposed to leave? Or failing that, to go completely silent? Or maybe to give up what we believe?
How is this genuinely tolerant? How is it pluralist? The truth is that we are in a very ugly, triumphalistic phase of ‘liberalism’ that has been made even worse by last year’s repeal of the Eighth Amendment.
The attack on Mike Pence for his beliefs was an attack by proxy on Irish people who share some of his orthodox Christian beliefs.
The message appeared to be: you aren’t welcome here either.