NO vote wins by less than 10,500 votes.

Biffa Bacon

What today’s opinion piece in the Irish Times shows about Fintan O’Toole:

He is intolerant of the beliefs of others:

Hardline conservatism has been vanquished as never before and the kulturkampf of the right has lost its ability to rouse the mass of the electorate on abortion

Note the demonisation of the beliefs of others. I recall him giving out to John Waters on Prime Time a few months ago for using the phrase “feminazis”. And yet he himself isn’t troubled by equating the pro-life campaign with the persecution of Catholics in Bismarck’s Germany in the 19th century. Hypocrisy.

The battered moderates within the Catholic leadership kept quiet. The so-called liberals within Fianna Fáil melted away like snow in the sun.

Anyone supporting the amendment is thus immoderate and illiberal. I also find it ironic that he has the cheek to call anyone a “so-called liberal”.

More broadly, and even more depressingly for conservatives, there is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of the population simply doesn't want to play the old game of culture wars any more.

Here he dismisses the views of pro-lifers by pretending it is just a “game of culture wars” to them. Obviously this is not true of the pro-choice lobby. Their beliefs are sincere.

…this move from rigid certainty to open-minded ambiguity…

Again, he tries to portray pro-life beliefs as closed-minded and irrational.

Crusading has become a minority taste…On abortion, it (the “conservative movement”) has lost not just the vote but the power to generate the zealotry and emotionalism that frightens politicians into line.

Note how he equates supporting the amendment with crazed religious fundamentalism.

The Catholic culture of consensus is giving way to a Protestant culture of individual belief

More sectarian bigotry here in his description of Catholic and Protestant “culture”. But of course, in Fintan’s world, it’s OK to be prejudiced against Catholics.

Once made, however hesitantly, the choice between the moral complexity of the real world and the absolute certainty of abstract principle cannot be unmade.

i.e. pro-lifers are not living in the real world and are only concerned with “abstract principles”.


He is self-righteous, in that he portrays conservatives as a united, monolithic, malevolent force that has been “vanquished” by the rejection of this amendment:

For the first time on a moral issue, the combined forces of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church have been beaten. Never before has the electorate refused to yield before the full force of Rome and the Republican Party, to the crozier and the ministerial Merc… In the first abortion and divorce referendums of the 1980s, the party and the pulpit were closely allied and swept all before them… The old monolith can no longer stand up to the new diversity of opinion… the old monolith has lost its passion… once-invincible fusion of nationalism and Catholicism.

Of course the point of all this is because it lets him pretend he isn’t an intolerant phony liberal. It’s as if the Catholic Church and Fianna Fáil had power independently of the support of the people.

What all of this means, quite simply, is that the conservative counter-revolution is over.

What conservative counter-revolution is that? What revolution did we have in the first place?

Abortion, let us remember, was the battleground that the conservatives themselves chose for their last stand. They identified it as the symbolic issue on which Ireland would opt out of the liberal, secular trend of the developed world.
They hoped that a victory in this battle would ultimately turn the tide.

When did you make that up Fintan? Just now? When did anyone claim any such thing?

He dishonestly interprets the facts just to suit his cause:

For all the ambiguities which must complicate any interpretation of yesterday's knife-edge vote, at least one thing is clear. For the first time on a moral issue, the combined forces of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church have been beaten.

And yet note the unambiguity of the conclusions he draws throughout the rest of the article!

Just how big becomes obvious when we remember that what characterised Irish identity for perhaps the last 200 years was the fusion of politics and religion.

Is he joking? What about the struggle for independence? Emigration? The Irish language and culture? Of course, the real reason he makes this idiotic claim is because he wants to pretend that the referendum result is the most important thing that’s happened in Ireland for the past 200 years.

This fusion is what has made sectarianism so potent.

Wrong again Fintan. Political affiliation is what is important, i.e. unionist or nationalist, in the politics of the North. Sectarianism is only an issue because political and religious affiliation are so closely aligned, for historical reasons. It’s not a case of your religion determining your politics or vice versa.

It is what made it possible for the church to control the framework of politics in independent Ireland.

The church controlled and maintained the division between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael did it? It controlled the Labour party? Get real.

It is almost a mathematical rule, indeed, that the higher the Yes vote in the constituency, the lower the turnout.
What this suggests is that abortion, which was until recently the great emotive cause of conservative Ireland, has simply lost its ability to rally the troops. Whereas in the past conservatives were full of energy and fervour while liberals tended to live up to their "wishy-washy" stereotype, the roles are now reversed.
The urban No voters were simply more fired up than their conservative rural counterparts.

This is pure speculation. He ignores the possibility that the bad weather on Wednesday would have made it harder for people in rural areas to get out and vote. And the fact that many pro-life people also voted No.

The reality is that a more conservative proposal, outlawing abortion from the moment of conception, would almost certainly have been defeated by a much larger margin.

I have to admit that he provided very convincing statistics to back up this claim. Oh wait, no, now that I think about it, he actually provided no evidence whatsoever.

Easily the biggest category of the electorate is that which couldn't be bothered to express an opinion on the proposal. It doesn't believe that changing the Constitution changes behaviour. It may not like abortion very much, but it's not too pushed either way. It is resigned to the way we are, as a fairly typical western European society, and can't see much to get outraged about.

He now proceeds to read the mind of the 60% or so of the electorate that didn’t vote.

YESTERDAY'S results confirm the complete disintegration of that near-consensus that abortion is never justified.

Yes, I would call a fifty-fifty split a complete disintegration all right.

Almost no one outside the very small Youth Defence tendency now believes that the right answer is "never".

Another unsubstantiated and undefined claim, made solely because it suits his own agenda.

A part of this move from rigid certainty to open-minded ambiguity is the gradual relaxation of the tensions between urban and rural Ireland.
This may seem an odd point to make in the context of a vote which was overwhelmingly shaped by that very division. But a closer look at the individual results suggest that while the urban/rural is still very real, it is slowly being washed away.

No, Fintan, you cannot deduce trends from a data set taken at a single point in time.

What other issue does the conservative movement have to campaign on?
It has completely given up the fight on contraception.
It knows that there is no hope of banning divorce again.

How about abortion Fintan?

If yesterday's vote tells us anything about ourselves, it is that we are no longer ashamed of feeling uncertain and even confused about issues that do not lend themselves to absolute truths.

It doesn’t tell us jack about ourselves. I hate that kind of nonsense, as if the electorate is some kind of single-minded entity.

What really annoys me about this guy is that he wouldn’t have made these lofty claims if the vote had gone half a percent the other way. And he still doesn’t have the balls to spell out and justify what he thinks the law on abortion should be.

Biffa Bacon

Sure I even remember you a few weeks back saying censorship was a good thing...

Yes I did. And I don't recall anyone challenging my points.

JustHalf

Biffa! I want to give you a column.

"<real name here>'s whiny intolerant so-called liberal of the week"

Excellent work, btw.

The Gopher

Has anybody noticed that countries where the gov sees abortion as a civillised practice like UK,France rest of EU etc are the same places that are always complaining about executions in then states?Ah yes it makes sense-its fine to kill babies but its evil to kill vile adult murderers?Isnt society great?

Biffa Bacon

The problem, which you have completely ignored is that there is no consensus on a single reasonable definition for what constitutes human life.

I don't see that that is a problem. If I am satisfied that my definition of what constitutes human life is reasonable and consistent then there is no confusion on my part on when life begins. Other people's definitions don't matter to me.

The classification of what constitutes human life must honestly be based on such a trinary classification, given that there is an area where a consensus cannot be reached scientifically or by any other logical means.

Classifying what constitutes human life is entirely subjective, there is no scientific "truth" to be found. Scientists might be able to discover at what stage does a foetus feel pain, become conscious etc., but it cannot discover what constitutes human life since that is based on a subjective definition. Science cannot "discover" that you or I are human independently of what we define "human" to be. So the trinary classification you speak of is again just a product of definitions, not scientific truth.

Cork

I think our media are always looking at the doom & gloom aspects. We always forget about things like the Good Friday Agreement. What do we focus in on - Postage Stamping by a political Party.

This country had a chance to put abortion off the agenda.

People were said by a coalition of Sinn Fein, FG and Labour (including ex membrs of DL)

Typedef

God, sometimes it is really repetitive to hear self exponenciating 'liberals' brandish anyone who disagrees with their insular and self supermecist views as religious fundamentalists and conservatives. It is in fact cultrually and religously racist and biased for Mr O'Toole to suggest that the 'conservative elements' of society have been vanquished.
I voted yes, I used to be a member of the socialist workers movement, I moderate a forum called 'Green Issues'.
Now this may not sit too pretty with Mr O'Toole's closed world view, but I would contend that the printing of the Irish Times contributes to deforestation and the fact that he writes for that paper and thus sells more papers, consequently contributes to deforestation.
Therefore Mr O'Toole would have 'us' believe that in his self proclaimed Republic of Liberal enlightenment where 'Liberals' voted no, that activities that contribute to massive scale deforestation are intrinsically 'Liberal' and thus that people of an anit-deforestation view and opinion are 'conservative'.
Therefore by the implied reasoning of Mr O'Toole the current American administration who call their system of governance 'Compassionate Conservatism' are in fact Liberals in that is has redrafted bills to do with logging in the US to make it 'easier' for more logging to take place. http://www.citizenworks.org/env-deforestation.html

Now I know Prince Charles is an environmentalist, so does that make all environmentalists royal? Certainly not, therefore does that make all yes voters conservative by the criteria epoused above, nope? Therefore is what Mr O'Toole has said irredemably jaundiced and intellectually self gratifying, I think so.

My point being that a true liberal realises that there can be a diversity of opinions and dissent on a miasma of topics without the puritanical ascription of socio-political tendancy to arbitrarily selected section of society (n), where n equals people who oppose Fintan O'Tooles closed world view on 'what liberalism is'.