Newton Emerson: DUP must offer more than tribalistic flag-waving

Jeffrey Dudgeon, now an Ulster Unionist Party councillor in Belfast, brought the 1981 case to the European Court of Human Rights that forced the British government to decriminalise homosexuality in Northern Ireland.

He fought a seven-year campaign to do so, enduring official hostility and with no political support. His case set the precedent that later brought decriminalisation to the Republic.

In 2009, Dudgeon turned his attention to opposing the Bill of Rights mentioned but not required by the Belfast Agreement.

There was no inconsistency in these positions. The draft Bill had been hijacked by academics and was absurdly prescriptive. Dudgeon wanted the state to leave him alone in 1981 and he still wanted it to leave him alone in 2009.

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He went on to express ambivalence about same-sex marriage, saying marriage was a matter for churches while civil partnerships should suffice for official purposes, “although both would end up being called marriage”.

When you have campaigned to keep the state out of your personal life, demanding a licence from the council to legitimise it must look more like supplication than equality.

The Guardian has called Dudgeon “one of the UK’s most famous gay rights campaigners” but only to marvel at how out of date he now seems. Yet in his principled individualism there is a philosophy unionism has lost and the DUP in particular must reclaim if devolution is to return as anything more than a sullen, unstable humiliation.

What is the DUP’s guiding philosophy, beyond flag-waving and cargo-cult economics?

Clunking hints

The deadlocked Stormont issues of same-sex marriage and abortion reveal a bedrock of Protestant fundamentalism. The critical issue of an Irish language act is classic inter-ethnic animosity, as found the world over. The DUP has approached these and most other issues as pieces on a procedural chessboard, to be moved around for a tribal win.

That is seemingly the extent of its ideology. When Sinn Féin picked up the board and walked out of Stormont the DUP was left with no bigger idea to inform its next move. Its one disastrous leap into modernity has been to buy into the concept of unionists as a community bloc. It is now faced with selling that community a tactical retreat, and shows no capacity to do so.

Listen carefully and you can hear clunky hints of individualism from the DUP. The party is running an openly gay candidate, Alison Bennington, in today's council elections. Bennington says her personal life is her personal business.

The DUP does not have the luxury of time

DUP leader Arlene Foster will occasionally insist that people are of course free to learn and speak Irish but others must not have it forced upon them. The generous draft deal Sinn Féin reached with the DUP last year contained Irish language legislation that could have been presented in a more diplomatic version of these terms.

But the DUP will not yield on same-sex marriage or abortion, effectively enforcing its religious views on the entire population – including the half of its own supporters who tell pollsters they disagree with it.

Individualism should come easily to unionists, with their endlessly dissenting culture and long history of leaving churches and parties to set up little churches and parties of their own. This is not liberal individualism, admittedly. There are few gatherings more judgemental than the congregation of a gospel hall and few organisations more bent on control than a one-man unionist party.

However, this has always been constrained by the expectation that every other person is free to do the same. Even the Orange Order, facing defeat over the Drumcree parade, reverting to pleading for “civil and religious liberty”.

This caused grim amusement after two centuries of almost literally walking over its neighbours but 20 years on much of the Order has genuinely embraced an idea of civil and religious liberty as the key to its acceptance and survival.

The DUP does not have that luxury of time. Last week, the SDLP proposed that Stormont’s petition of concern veto mechanism be suspended, enabling same-sex marriage to pass through the assembly by a simple majority.

This has already been proposed by the Love Equality Coalition, the umbrella group for same-sex marriage campaigners in Northern Ireland. The coalition are astute lobbyists and have paid their own tribute to liberty by saying they will never impose their views on churches. They would be happy with an outcome that left the DUP free to vote with its conscience and still delivered same-sex marriage. Both sides could present this as an example of live and let live.

But the DUP and Sinn Féin do not intend to change the petition of concern, as both still hope to use it for their own purposes. In any case, would that not be another procedural game?

If the DUP wants to get back into government, and to preserve a state with a unionist dimension, it should aspire to a state that just leaves people alone.