Conscience must be made central to partnership Bill (Contribution)

The Civil Partnership Bill – before the Dáil this week – forces citizens to collude in things they believe to be morally wrong

NO CHURCH-STATE controversy in recent times has raised so many difficult political and moral issues compared with those raised by the proposed Civil Partnership Bill.

These include:

• the nature of the family and its status in the Irish Constitution;
• the rights and obligations of citizens arising from the fact that they live together in a mutually supportive and stable partnership, or plan to do so;
• the rights and obligations of legislators when legislating on laws which touch on fundamental constitutional or moral issues;
• the right of citizens to make conscientious objections on the basis of their moral convictions or religious beliefs;
• and, finally, the rights and obligations, if any, of ordained ministers of the Catholic Church either individually (bishops and priests) or as a body (through the bishops’ conference) to express publicly their views on any proposed legislation.

All of these issues touch on the nature of democracy, more specifically on the question of the role of conscience in democracy – and, by implication, the rights of the church with regard to its obligation to form the conscience of its adherents.

When the Irish Bishops’ Conference issued its statement recently on the proposed legislation, there was an outcry from a handful of members of the Oireachtas. A tiny but very vocal minority were outraged at the audacity of the bishops to express any opinion on this or, presumably, on any other matter.

They effectively claimed that the church – in particular, in the wake of the Ferns, the Ryan and the Murphy reports – should remain silent.

This, of course, would leave the way free for that tiny but vocal minority of secularists to impose their views on the whole of society, views that are repugnant to the sincere convictions of most citizens.

These same citizens are being increasingly intimidated by a media that has adopted these “liberal-progressive” views. Is this democracy, Irish style?

Citizens may disagree on the nature of marriage and the morality of sexual relations outside marriage.

But they cannot be indifferent, since, apart from personal moral wellbeing, the wellbeing of society as a whole is at stake. In addition, the Bill touches on the Constitution and its recognition of the privileged role of marriage due to its unique significance for the common good of society.

Even though the Bill avoids the actual term, it fundamentally redefines the well-known legal definition of marriage as the “voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others” (recently cited by Baroness Deech, the chairwoman of the Bar Standards Board, professor of law at Gresham College, London).

This definition seems to be at the basis of the recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (see The Irish Times , June 26th, 2010) rejecting the claims of same-sex couples to a right to marry.

One may disagree with the usual legal definition but this is such a fundamental issue that citizens must be free to make up their own minds in the debate.

And here, I would argue, members of the Oireachtas have the primordial right as citizens and legislators to be free of the Party Whip and to follow their conscience. Conscience is the only bulwark against the totalitarian tendencies of all states.

This finds recognition in the present German Basic Law (or constitution), which, to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism of the Nazi period, when the conscience of citizens was mercilessly crushed, insists those elected to parliament “ . . . shall be representatives of the whole people, not bound by orders or instructions, and responsible only to their conscience” (Art 38.1).

As a result, the German parliament, like Westminster, allows a free vote on contentious moral issues. By asking for a free vote in the Dáil on the proposed Bill, the Irish bishops in their recent statement did nothing less than reiterate this basic democratic principle.

I have elsewhere argued that Irish democracy has been neutered by the inordinately dominant role played by the party whip. Though necessary in many instances in order to expedite business in parliament, the way the party whip is invoked in the Oireachtas effectively eliminates the need for real debate in parliament. It reduces parliament to rubber-stamping decisions which have been taken in secret.

Legislators are thereby deprived of their right to exercise their own responsibility for the common good as legislators acting according to their own conscience. The overuse of the party whip effectively “banishes conscience to the bathroom” (to quote Vaclav Havel in a similar context) and so undermines democracy.

But the proposed Bill goes a step further. It effectively deprives all citizens of their right of conscientious objection to the provisions of the Bill, should it become law.

All appeals – including those from two Church of Ireland bishops – to make provisions in the Bill for citizens to follow their conscience have been rejected.

Should the Bill become law, people such as registrars, photographers or those responsible for parish halls, etc, will be forced to co-operate in acts they consider in good conscience to be morally wrong.

In sum, the refusal to include a conscience clause in the proposed Civil Partnership Bill undermines the primacy of conscience which is the bedrock of democracy.

The imposition of the party whip for the vote on this particular Bill (and on other similar Bills) is contrary to the right and duty of TDs and Senators to act as legislators in the full sense of the term, responsible to their conscience.

SIC: IT