Cast vote for love to make hatred history!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Is your love better than my love? Is it a stronger love, a purer love? I have no idea and what’s more, I have no desire to wonder.

One thing I know with absolute certainty is that the love men feel for other men and women for other women is as wonderful as the love I feel for my wife.

Do you feel threatened by the idea of a man marrying a man? Does the idea of a woman marrying a woman in some way weaken your own marriage? I dare you to ask yourself why? Why does the love of two people you don’t know weaken your love?

I find there are plenty of challenges, of both day-to-day and long-term varieties, involved in a successful marriage, but it never occurred to me that somebody else’s pairing might make my marriage feel worth less.

You might say that I feel the way I do as I am a Godless mutant atheist-pantheist Jew, who has no regard for the deeply-held religious views of others.

Nothing could be further from the truth. When I first arrived in Ireland back in 1992 I wrote carelessly and disrespectfully about abortion and divorce. Born in pluralist multi-ethnic London, I was shocked to my core to discover a country in which it was illegal to telephone certain information help lines. I had never imagined a country might forbid divorce in its constitution.

After being sent used condoms, a dog turd and obscene photos in the mail, I eventually stopped writing about religious matters, until one day I realised that I’d been successfully intimidated.

If your objection to same sex marriage is held on Christian religious grounds, why not ask yourself what Jesus would do?

When I was a young lad attending an English Prep school, my late father would come to attend the End of Term Service in the School Hall. He explained that as Jews, we were allowed to pray aloud with the crowd during the Lord’s Prayer, as it was a fine prayer, but at the end, when everyone else continued: “Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ…” we should remain silent.

Confused, I asked him to explain his choices. Dad felt that 6,000 years ago, society was pretty chaotic, crying out for ten commandments, with five strong moral codes and five simple rules; laws that still inform many modern nations.

A few thousand years later, religious men had written so many new laws that people were misreading them to suit themselves. Society had become corrupted and sophisticated. The ways of the Old Testament God, who took an eye for an eye and demanded to be feared, were no longer apt. The time was right to refine moral matters and to this day, I believe that if we all loved our neighbours and turned the other cheek, just as Jesus suggested, the world might be a peaceful place.

To read Charlie’s full column, see this week’s Galway City Tribune.