Labour’s chickening-out will destroy them

Looks like Labour is again splitting on an issue not long after the youth wing voted against the Fine Gael pact. This time on the issue of Gay marriage. From the Sunday Business Post:

Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte faces threats of resignation from members of the party’s Equality Group if the parliamentary party fails to give the green light to same-sex marriage.

At the last Labour Party conference, Liz McManus said this:

I do appreciate by the way that there are sections in the gay and lesbian community who may wish to go further than Senator David Norris does in his Civil Partnership Bill and would wish for full equivalence, both as regards rights and obligations and as regards terminology, between marriages as presently understood and gay unions.

That does not seem to me, however, to be a feasible proposition and it is not one that the Labour party advocates.

Some months ago I asked Liz McManus if she supported gay marriage. I got this reply:

I do actually gay marriage. In fact, I think this needs to be brought to the next Labour Party delegates conference for us to progress further on this issue.

I then asked her to clarify the above statement for the conference. The reply I got was this:

I believe that this issue needs to be debated by the membership of the Party at a delegate conference as this is how significant policy decisions are made. I support gay marriage but, as I have said, at this stage the Norris proposal is, in my view, the one more likely to succeed at Oireachtas level in terms of political parties changing legislation.

So where does this put Liz McManus on this side of the divide? Also, is it just me or is this a supreme cop out? We are only going to support what is going to win, i.e., sod principle, let’s just win. Yet, they don’t take that tactic with most other issues. How many other votes have they disagreed with on principles that they knew they would lose but still supported? No, the fact that they seem willing to only support the minimum that will win in a vote suggests that they do not fully support Gay marriage.

From the SB post again:

Senior Labour sources said the party had a long established reputation of delivering on the liberal agenda. A civil union code would provide the same legal entitlements “as far as one could possibly go without changing the constitution” with immediate and practical effect for same sex couples.

So basically they are chickening out of the debate. If it is something that you believe is right then you should be willing for it to go to a referendum. But it doesn’t look like the Labour Party think it is right. Unlike the Irish People who in a recent survey in the Sunday Tribune, 64% supported the idea of gay marriage, and 37% supported adoption rights, which, let’s remember, is nearly four times the amount of people who polled say they vote Labour. Labour strategy for this election seems to be built on the notion that people will vote for them as they are not Fianna Fail. But what they fail to get is that many people are not anti-Fianna Fail per-se; they are often liberal and socialist, that is why they would vote Labour. But Labour are ceding the liberal territory and the left to the Greens. They haven’t chickened out on principle for political expediency, and with the polls showing them second in Dublin, it is clear they are reaping the benefit. If they can sort out their rural vote, Labour will be in serious danger of becoming irrelevant.