The Wearing of the Pink

The Republic of Ireland -- what a country! In the last few years, we've taxed the plastic bag out of existence, cleared the pubs of smoke, and now, earned the fulsome* praise of Andrew Sullivan. Because the government is thinking about civil unions for gay couples:

AND IRELAND: Moves are afoot to provide civil unions for gay couples in this historically Catholic country. I'd favor full marriage rights myself, for all the usual reasons. Not least of which: divorce in Ireland is an extremely tough process.

A couple of comments. First, Sully seems to have come across this issue not quite with his usual one year lag, but nearly a month has passed since Taoiseach Bertie Ahern floated the idea in an interview -- the concession lost in the mockery that followed Bertie's claim that same weekend that he was one of Ireland's few remaining socialists. Second, there seems to have been a strategic element to the timing of his statement, since there's a chance that a court case could require civil unions based on European law anyway.

So Bertie basically wants to hedge his bets and say "bejasus lads I was tinking about dem civil union yokes anyway so it's not dat Brussels is making me do it." There's a tough one for Sully -- his hated European Union advancing one of his causes. Third, it might just be that we're tired, but we don't see the logic in Sully's claim that the Republic's relatively strict divorce laws rationalise nothing less than full marriage rights for gay couples. Because it's difficult to get out, everyone should be allowed in? We'll sleep on it.

[UPDATE -- After we posted, we remembered that there is a usage issue with 'fulsome' above, which we used in the common sense of meaning extravagant, but in fact means something closer to insincere. We should have remembered this at the time because Colin Powell drew attention for bungling this exact issue recently. But since there is some evidence of a hidden agenda behind Sully's enthusiaism for gay marriage, we're leaving the word as it is]