In a motion earlier this month, the General Synod of the Church of England voted to affirm and welcome transgender people, and declared that being LGBT was “not a sin.” Also earlier this month, Canon Charles Kenny, a 50 year veteran of the Church of Ireland, called for the legalization of same-sex marriage at a Belfast rally alongside Methodist and Presbyterian ministers.

Despite these affirmations by clergy, Northern Ireland remains the last bastion of resistance to same-sex marriage in the UK. However, with the newly negotiated Conservative-DUP agreement, this resistance has been thrown into the spotlight for all U.K. citizens to see and criticize. So, why are the DUP so intransigent on this matter?

In the midst of the Troubles, an oft heard saying was: “In Northern Ireland there are many Catholics, many Protestants, but not many Christians.”

During the Peace Process this expression was intended to point out that these two communities were not so dissimilar. Today this expression might also prove useful for unpacking why the DUP is so unrelentingly against same-sex marriage.

To be Catholic or Protestant in Northern Ireland is, historically and stereotypically, synonymous with being nationalist or unionist ahead of any religious affiliation.

In the case of the DUP this is perhaps truer now than it was when they were founded. For, at its birth, the DUP was institutionally intertwined with the evangelical Free Presbyterian church thanks to their leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley.

It was this religious conservative nationalism that helped shape their worldview on homosexuality, perhaps most infamously in their 1978 “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign, which Paisley championed.

Today, Arlene Foster harps back to the DUP heritage in her claim:

I could not care less what people get up to in terms of their sexuality, that’s not a matter for me – when it becomes a matter for me is when people try to redefine marriage.

However, the Northern Ireland of today, post-Peace process, and within a power-sharing context, we have census figures which likely worry the DUP.

At the time of the 2011 census, parents reported the religion in which their children (aged four or under) were being raised. The figures showed that 49.2% of these children were being raised Catholic, compared to 36.4% being raised Protestant or other Christian.

The steady growth of the Catholic population since the partition of Ireland has been accompanied by a more recent increase in the percentage of seats at Stormont going to Sinn Féin. In this new power-sharing government of parity, Irish nationalist politicians could use the ‘equality agenda’ to redress the historical inequality and exclusion of the Catholic, nationalist population of the province.

Bernadette C. Hayes and John Nagle of the University of Aberdeen have argued that, for the DUP, this power-sharing agreement would have felt like a concession to nationalism, since it meant an overhaul of the former RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] to the present PSNI, with positive discrimination in hiring practices, as well as restrictions on Orange Order parade routes.

Sinn Féin recognized that issues of equality and human rights could erode support for the DUP, and so they have co-opted the activist language of LGBT rights campaigners into their political agenda. They have drawn a correlation between the minority rights of nationalists with the minority rights of LGBT persons, explicitly declaring in their ‘Policy for Lesbian, Gay and Bi-Sexual Equality’, that:

 … [nationalists] are only too well aware of what it means to be treated as second-class citizens. Our politics are the results of decades of resistance to marginalisation and discrimination.

This co-opted support for the LGBT community has made its way into five motions on same-sex marriage, tabled by Sinn Féin at Stormont. The most recent of these motions failed – only because the DUP vetoed it using the Petition of Concern, despite a small majority of MLAs voting in favour of the motion.

The DUP’s resistance to same-sex marriage, while historically embedded in religious conviction, has more to do with tactically opposing Sinn Féin’s erosion of the majority stranglehold that unionists have traditionally held in government, rather than with faith.

Ultimately it is a social issue that has become a convenient tool in an ethno-national battle to out-do the other.

 

Some of the data cited in this article were originally published by Bernadette C. Hayes and John Nagle of the University of Aberdeen. You can access their article on the LSE Blog by clicking here.