Marriage referendum – countdown to polling day
Thu, May 21, 2015, 01:05
Sir, – Over recent weeks Bruce Arnold has been in print and on broadcast media opposing the marriage equality referendum. This appeared to spring initially from his birth outside marriage into an unhappy family in Croydon in the 1930s. Moreover, despite not having a drop of Irish blood, not a word of Irish and no legal training, he publicly challenged the Irish wording of the referendum. I decided to ignore his contributions.
However I was astonished yesterday morning to hear him say on radio that the grim picture painted of the living conditions of gay people was a fiction. He indicated that gay people in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s were happy, well-adjusted people without a bother in the world, celebrated and loved like the English theatricals Michael Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards. (Indeed I remember RTÉ broadcasting a moving appeal by Mac Liammóir for a change in the law shortly before his death). That law incidentally was an import to Ireland from Bruce Arnold’s home country England.
As someone who lived through that period and founded the first gay organisations I would like to comment. Gay people of my vintage woke up in their early teens to the appalling prospect of prison, church condemnation and social ostracism for something over which they had no control. I personally was a witness to gay people being harassed, sacked, beaten, imprisoned and subject to forced ECT as well as confinement in mental hospitals. I can assure Mr Arnold that these people were far from happy citizens. Naturally I will be voting Yes. – Yours, etc,
Senator DAVID NORRIS,
Leinster House,
Dublin 2.
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/marriage-referendum-countdown-to-polling-day-1.2220003