The Irish government’s call to vote in favor of redefining the meanings of “marriage” and “woman” in a double referendum failed resoundingly when a large majority of voters on Saturday rejected the new language.
As CatholicVote reported, the government of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar called for the referendum to pass two proposals, the Family Amendment and the Care Amendment. Both aimed to change the text of Article 41 in the Irish constitution, written in 1937.
The Family Amendment would have changed the section of the constitution that reads: “The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society…” The language of the constitution also affirms that the family is founded on marriage.
Varadakar proposed adding “other durable relationships” and striking the clause affirming that marriage is the foundation of the family.
The Care Amendment would have struck all references to motherhood from the constitution in order to “balance gender roles.” The government’s campaign argued that the original amendment was “keeping Irish women in the kitchen” by proclaiming that “the State shall … endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”
According to Reuters, “(the) proposal to expand the definition of family from a relationship founded on marriage to include other durable relationships was rejected by 67.7% to 32.3%.” The second referendum seeking to replace language surrounding the woman’s primary role in the home was rejected by 73.9% to 26.1%.
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The Telegraph reported that Varadkar “admitted Irish voters had given his government ‘two wallops’ on Saturday, after a shock upset led to a resounding defeat of his double referendum on changing the constitution’s language on family issues.”
“Clearly we got it wrong,” said Varadkar. “While the old adage is that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, I think when you lose by this kind of margin, there are a lot of people who got this wrong and I am certainly one of them.”
The same Telegraph article quoted Carol Nolan, an Independent pro-life parliamentarian, describing the result as a “political earthquake” that showed “how far the Irish government is out of touch with ordinary people.”
“Ms Nolan said the referendums were championed by a number of ‘unelected NGOs’,” The Telegraph reported, “including the National Women’s Council of Ireland, and were as much about the ‘dominance that NGOs have in our current political system as about anything else’.”
Nolan added: “People are sick to death of being talked down to by unelected NGO’s such as the National Women’s Council of Ireland, who should now clearly be seen as an ideological poison within the body politic.”
LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
