RITE AND REASON:The ability to bear children is in no way required for a marriage to be either morally or legally valid, writes Gail Grossman Freyne
MY MOTHER lost her womb before I was born. As a young woman, quite incapable of producing children, she married. At the age of 62, having been widowed for many years, she married again. On each occasion the wedding took place in the Catholic Church and was carefully monitored by the religious authorities.
She could only marry her Anglican husband in the sacristy of the church, and her Methodist husband had first to take instruction from a priest in the tenets of her faith. Nobody asked about children, neither the church nor the State.
Marriage is an institution that in no way requires that the ability to bear children is constitutive of its moral and legal validity. You can be too old, be physically challenged or simply be disinclined to have children, but you can still marry with the State's permission and the church's blessing.
Here we are concerned with the civil right to marry within the State. Straight citizens can marry in the registry office, so why can't gay citizens?
Most Irish people agree that children are not central to their understanding of marriage. In a poll conducted in December 2006 by Lansdowne Market Research for the Iona Institute, 57 per cent of respondents agreed that the main reason the State supports marriage is to promote the happiness and well-being of the married couple.
This was twice as many as the 28 per cent who thought the main reason for such State support was to help parents raise children.
If neither State nor church consider marriage to be a fundamentally child-centred institution, then what is it? I would suggest, at least in the West, a good working definition would be the public declaration of a lifelong commitment.
Obviously this commitment is to the partner; two people come together to share their lives, to enable each of them to be their best possible self.
But a true marriage will also be generative. The couple will reach out beyond themselves. A local example of this justice-seeking commitment is found at An Cosáin, the educational project started by Anne Louise Gilligan and Katherine Zappone for the people of Jobstown at Killinarden and west Tallaght. Here we see what a commitment to care and justice can generate.
It is this couple, two women who have cared for each other and their community for over two decades, who are currently seeking to have their Canadian marriage recognised in Ireland.
I only mention this to point out that if we are going to talk about gay marriage then the first thing we have to do is to leave children out of the discussion.
Having children or not having children, whether we are talking about homosexual or heterosexual couples, before or after marriage, has nothing to do with the right to marry. And if children are not essential to any definition of marriage it is no longer necessary to limit this definition to the one of a union of "one man and one woman".
So, what is getting everyone so exercised at the thought that some gay and lesbian couples want to publicly affirm their life-long commitment to each other and say they are "married"? More married love only enhances the institution. We all agree children do better in loving and stable relationships. And the sex of the parenting adult(s) is irrelevant.
My mother (who adopted me) was my only constant parent. For most of my childhood and teenage years there was no man to raise me. My adoptive father died when I was six and I had no step-father until I was 19.
In the intervening 13 years over 20 women, all nuns, nurtured me in boarding school in areas of life that ranged far beyond those of the classroom.
Gay and lesbian people are not second class citizens and their civil rights should be written into our Constitution, and each of us has an obligation to see that this happens. We are guilty of "heterosexism" if we do nothing to assist in the dismantling of a system that still persists in discrimination against gay and lesbian people.
Dr Gail Grossman Freyne is a family therapist and mediator at the Family Therapy & Counselling Centre in Ranelagh, Dublin