Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has conceded defeat in the vote over two constitutional amendments that would have broadened the definition of family and removed language about a woman's role at home. Vote tallies Saturday showed both referendums failing in a blow to his government.
Varadkar had pushed the vote to enshrine gender equality in the constitution and scheduled the vote on Friday, International Women's Day.
Opponents argued that the wording of the changes was poorly thought out and some voters said they feared changes would lead to unintended consequences.
Varadkar, who pushed the vote to enshrine gender equality in the constitution by removing "very old-fashioned language" and trying to recognize the realities of modern family life, said it was clear the amendments were "defeated comprehensively on a respectable turnout."
...
The election was viewed as part of Ireland's evolution from a conservative, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country in which divorce and abortion were illegal, to an increasingly diverse and socially liberal society.
The proportion of residents who are Catholic fell from 94.9% in 1961 to 69% in 2022, according to the Central Statistics Office.
...
The first question dealt with a part of the constitution that pledges to protect the family as the primary unit of society.
Voters were asked to remove a reference to marriage as the basis "on which the family is founded" and replace it with a clause that said families can be founded "on marriage or on other durable relationships." If passed, it would have been the constitution's 39th amendment.
A proposed 40th amendment would have removed a reference that a woman's place in the home offered a common good that could not be provided by the state and delete a statement that said mothers shouldn't be obligated to work out of economic necessity if it would neglect their duties at home.
It would have added a clause saying the state will strive to support "the provision of care by members of a family to one another."
I would say this rejection is based 50% on the amendments themselves, and 50% based on people finally revolting to this constant "Year Zero" disruption of society.
The term "Year Zero" refers to the idea that after Maoists or communists take power, they declare it "Year Zero" of the New Age, and set about to pulling down all statues, burning all books, denouncing all traditions, and eradicating everything normal and decent in their mad drive to remake all of humanity in the twisted, ugly image of communist malcontent losers.
There was no history before. We decide what history is right now, in Year Zero.
And we've all been living in Year Zero since George Floyd swallowed a huge bolus of drugs and died due to his own poor life choices.
And people have had enough.
Matt Taibbi wrote about Year Zero back on July 4, 2020:
It's the Fourth of July, and revolution is in the air. Only in America would it look like this: an elite-sponsored Maoist revolt, couched as a Black liberation movement whose canonical texts are a corporate consultant's white guilt self-help manual, and a New York Times series rewriting history to explain an election they called wrong.
Much of America has watched in quizzical silence in recent weeks as crowds declared war on an increasingly incoherent succession of historical symbols. Maybe you nodded as Confederate general Albert Pike was toppled or even when Christopher Columbus was beheaded, but it got a little weird when George Washington was emblazoned with "Fuck Cops" and set on fire, or when they went after Ulysses S. Grant, abolitionist Colonel Hans Christian Heg, "Forward," (a seven-foot-tall female figure meant to symbolize progress), the Portland, Oregon "Elk statue," or my personal favorite, the former slave Miguel de Cervantes, whose cheerful creations Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were apparently mistaken for reals and had their eyes lashed red in San Francisco.
Was a What the Fuck? too much to ask? It was! In the space of a few weeks the level of discourse in the news media dropped so low, the fear of being shamed as a deviationist so high, that most of the weirder incidents went uncovered. Leading press organs engaged in real-time Soviet-style airbrushing. Here's how the Washington Post described a movement that targeted Spanish missionary Junipero Serra, Abraham Lincoln (a "single-handed symbol of white supremacy," according to UW-Madison students), an apple cider press sculpture, abolitionist Mathias Baldwin, and the first all-Black volunteer regiment in the Civil War, among others:
Across the country, protesters have toppled statues of figures from America's sordid past -- including Confederate generals -- as part of demonstrations against racism and police violence.
The New York Times, once the dictionary definition of "unprovocative," suddenly reads like Pol Pot's Sayings of Angkar. Heading into the Fourth of July weekend, the morning read for upscale white Manhattanites was denouncing Mount Rushmore, urging Black America to arm itself, and re-positioning America alongside more deserving historical parallels in a feature about caste systems:
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.
It's tragic that this even needs saying, but the sudden reinvention in the press of modern America as a Nazi apartheid state is as phony as the thousands of patriotic campaigns that occupied the news media previously. We're witnessing an obscene malfunction of the elite messaging system.
You primitive screwheads have had your four year tantrum.
Now it's our turn to start throwing a tantrum.
And it's our turn to decide what year it is.