Perhaps the most unhelpful, if not damaging, word in Irish political discourse in my lifetime has been "moral", writes John Waters.
Time and again, we have engaged in discussions about whether we should go the "modern" way or the "moral" way, when really we should have been talking about what was useful. Discussions about morality are interesting and important, but they do not address the salient aspects of public issues from the viewpoint of the common good.
The reason we prosecute and punish murderers, for example, is not to make a moral statement but to discourage the wholesale slaughter of human beings by others who find them inconvenient. Similarly with the "moral civil war", fought over the "liberal agenda" of contraception, divorce and abortion, which dominated the last quarter of the last century.
The reason we should have pause for thought about a liberal free-for-all is not because this would amount to encouragement of sinners, but for the same reason we see fit to discourage murder: to protect our society from damage or collapse.
The reason many of the discussions we have had on these issues has been unhelpful - in the sense of failing to anticipate the social consequences of what is termed liberalism - is that defenders of the status quo were almost exclusively intervening on moral and religious grounds.
There are profound arguments, without any reference to religion or morals, to be made against, for example, both abortion and divorce. Contraception is a different matter. There may be rational arguments as to why pieces of rubber are damaging to society, but I have yet to hear them. If the argument is against promiscuity, then the social interest needs to have this separated out from questions rooted in puritanism and piety.
Why this has been such a catastrophic matter relates to the fact that the debates we've had about the "liberal agenda" have been carried, to the extent that they have, not on objective merits but largely on the back of a neurotic reaction against Catholicism. Because the counter arguments originated in Catholic traditionalism, it was easy to present the liberal agenda as representing some more modern, progressive and beneficially liberating option. At issue, we came to believe, was whether we wanted a bunch of dandruffed old men to continue dictating how we should live our lives.
During the divorce referendums, for example, the discussion became embroiled in the "moral" dimensions of marital break-up, when really the focus needed to be on the functionality of a society in which divorce was available. The debate was therefore dominated by false opposites: church teaching versus personal rights and "compassion". A more useful discussion would have been defined by a different set of opposites: personal rights versus a concept of collective rights centred on the idea that, though ostensibly individuated, human beings achieve autonomy in harmony with their society or not at all. This is what Bunreacht na hÉireann seeks to achieve: a society in which the common good is understood, not as the accumulation of several million sets of personal rights, but the vesting of those rights in a broader set.
Marriage is seen primarily not as an arrangement between two individuals but a partnership in which the State has an investment, arising from the fact that the family based on marriage is the crucible in which the next generation of citizens is nurtured.
The primary purpose of Bunreacht na hÉireann is not to impose "moral values", still less the "moral values of one particular faith". What it seeks to do, in this context, is ensure that children have a safe, secure and appropriate structure in which to grow in a healthy way. There is an escalating crisis that requires urgent attention here with regard to the way society has evolved to withhold such protections from large numbers of children, but this requires to be approached again from first principles.
Some religious leaders, perhaps anxious to develop reputations for "progressiveness", have intervened in the current debate about same-sex marriage in a way that implies there are no religious difficulties with such a concept. But even if homosexual marriage is no longer a problem for Jesus, it remains one for Caesar.
It is interesting, too, that the same liberal mouthpieces, who for decades demanded that Catholic clergy remain silent about matters of "private morality", now welcome such interventions when these appear to aid their cause.
There is, contrary to the repetitive assertion of vested interests, no "exclusion" of homosexuals from the institution of marriage and therefore no inappropriate discrimination.
What excludes homosexuals is the simple fact that such partnerships cannot procreate. The State is entitled, indeed obliged, to mount the same degree of opposition to the concept of marriage between, for example, two stamp collectors who do not qualify as an adult heterosexual couple, as between two men or two women who claim to be in a sexual relationship. God has enough to worry about.