Opinion

Newton Emerson: DUP should embrace same-sex marriage

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Campaigners calling for the introduction of same sex marriage in Northern Ireland during a parade and rally in Belfast City centre.  Niall Carson/PA Wire
Campaigners calling for the introduction of same sex marriage in Northern Ireland during a parade and rally in Belfast City centre.  Niall Carson/PA Wire Campaigners calling for the introduction of same sex marriage in Northern Ireland during a parade and rally in Belfast City centre.  Niall Carson/PA Wire

Introducing same-sex marriage should be the easiest fix in next month’s Stormont talks.

The DUP needs to let it through post-haste.

Blocking it has become an extraordinary liability to the party and to unionism overall.

The DUP was shocked by the backlash from Britain and the damage to its Tory deal - it had expected to keep social policy questions contained to Northern Ireland.

Leo Varadkar’s appearance at this weekend’s Belfast Pride, plus his comments to the effect that the DUP can get stuffed, are in their own way the most assertive northern intervention by any Taoiseach since Charles Haughey.

What does the DUP get in return for this gift to its opponents?

Same-sex marriage is still opposed by a narrow majority of unionists - 54 per cent in the last full poll on the subject, conducted nine months ago.

Opposition among DUP voters is presumably higher. However, in the same poll, nearly three quarters of unionists under 24 took the opposite view, so opinion is only heading one way. In the meantime, how many votes would the DUP lose from a change of policy?

Unionist opponents of same-sex marriage have nowhere else to go in this era of two-party politics.

The DUP is as skilled as Sinn Féin at slaughtering sacred cows but it tends to go about it in a very different way.

Look back on classic republican turning points, such as decommissioning or recognition of policing, and a pattern emerges.

Sinn Féin holds fast to some supposedly unyielding principle until the very last moment, theatrically ditches it, then congratulates itself for its bravery and leadership.

‘Here is our sacred cow’, it seems to say. ‘We have sacrificed it for you. Burgers for all.’

The DUP, by contrast, prefers to mask retreat with technical smokescreens.

It opposed the Good Friday Agreement but managed to join the first executive via excuses too elaborate to recount, then later entered government with Sinn Féin by presenting the St Andrews Agreement as a comprehensive replacement of the Good Friday Agreement.

‘We have reclassified this cow as a goat’, the DUP seems to say. ‘Now forget about the cow and never speak of this again.’

All signs point to a similar approach to same-sex marriage.

The DUP has been laying the groundwork for some triangulation via reform of the petition of concern. It could then let a same-sex marriage bill through the assembly while still voting against the bill itself.

This is essentially how Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed same-sex marriage to pass in Germany six weeks ago, while still personally voting against it - although she had the guile to accompany this with a touching tale of how visiting a lesbian couple had been a life-changing experience.

Arlene Foster claims to have met “plenty of people in [the gay] community who don’t want to see marriage redefined” so perhaps a Merkel-like encounter and mini-epiphany is on the cards.

But even this is like sacrificing the cow and throwing away most of the meat. Why not hold a brazen barbecue, Sinn Féin-style?

It is too much to expect the DUP or any other party in Northern Ireland to say it was wrong and show genuine contrition but it can certainly praise itself for showing leadership, thereby owning its change of heart. Ironically, the evangelical strain of Protestantism is ideally suited to such born again posturing - yet it is precisely that tendency within the DUP that makes same-sex marriage so neuralgic.

Look carefully and it seems this is another cow being carefully redefined as a goat. Whatever happened to the Caleb Foundation, for example? The shadowy Christian pressure group came to light in 2012 over creationist meddling at the Giant’s Causeway but it may have been the evangelical engine inside the DUP since the group’s foundation in 1998.

Its leading lights remain in the party, albeit in lesser roles. Foster is Church of Ireland - practically an atheist by Free Presbyterian standards. None of this is ever publicly discussed.

Throughout the peace process, the courage Sinn Féin praised itself for was about leading the IRA towards politics. It managed to get credit for this despite the distinction between Sinn Féin and the IRA being merely a helpful fiction.

The courage the DUP needs to show is against its religious conservatives. Some internal secularisation is clearly happening and more is inevitable, so why not make a virtue of it? It can only be because the secular and religious divide within the DUP remains an unhelpful fact.

newton@irishnews.com