The Catholic lay group Pure in Heart has been attracting criticism lately, some of which actually managed to mention them in the same breath as Holocaust deniers. The chief reason for the criticism is that they promote chastity. In his weekly column in The Irish Independent David Quinn defends Pure in Heart and specifically addresses...
Do dads matter in the lives of their children? The authors of this article from The Atlantic are in no doubt that they do and that children often suffer when they don’t have a father who looks out for them. The authors draw on both evidence and stories to back up their argument. It’s a...
Breda O’Brien was interviewed by Marian Finucane on her programme last Saturday about same-sex marriage and the ‘homophobia’/RTE apology controversy. Breda discusses the implications of same-sex marriage for children’s rights, and the personal impact of some of the hate mail she has received for her stance on the issue. The interview also discusses the work...
A new RTE/Sunday Business Post poll confirms the finding of an Irish Times opinion poll on same-sex marriage from a few months back, namely that support for the proposition stands in or around 75 percent. That’s a very big lead. However, this latest poll confirms what some commentators have suspected all along, namely that much...
The debate about homophobia and same-sex marriage was the subject of an item on BBC World’s Have Your Say programme, available here. Rory O’Neill took part in a discussion with Caroline Farrow of Catholic Voices and Brandon Ambrosino, a gay writer who supports gay marriage but, in his own words, wants to “open up the...
In his latest opinion piece in The Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole takes issue with The Iona Institute’s thesis that marriage in Ireland is in decline. On the contrary, says O’Toole, marriage “has proven to be far more robust than either conservatives or radicals ever imagined.” Unfortunately, Fintan can only make such a broad claim by ignoring...
Breda O’Brien was interviewed by Hugh Linehan today for the Irish Times’ ‘Inside Politics’ podcast. She speaks in a very heartfelt way about the impact the vilification she has been subjected to by some people for disagreeing with same-sex marriage has had on her, as well as giving her thoughts on the whole controversy surrounding...
The Dominican Timothy Radcliffe would be no-one’s idea of a ‘conservative’ in theological terms or any other terms for that matter. In a very interesting blog on the issue of same-sex marriage that he wrote for the Guardian newspaper he welcomed “the wave of support for same-sex marriage”, but at the same time reaffirms marriage...
A few interesting developments in the ongoing debate about the uses and misuses of the word ‘homophobia’: First, Paddy Manning and our director David Quinn were on Prime Time opposite Senator Ivana Bacik and Brian Finnegan. Link here. For what it’s worth, both Bacik and Finnegan agreed that opposition to gay marriage was not automatically...
Tuesday night’s episode of Tonight with Vincent Browne featured Kevin Brophy, the solicitor who represented The Iona Institute in our dispute with RTE, and Paddy Manning, a gay man who opposes gay marriage, discussing the use of the word ‘homophobia’ Paul Murphy MEP and Noeline Blackwell of the Free Legal Advice Centre were also on...
