When Normies Get the Chance to Say ‘Enough!’

Thank God for the Irish.  The two overwhelming ‘No’ votes to changing the definition of marriage and the significant role wives and mothers play in the home tell us sanity and reason can prevail against woke overreach.

The Irish Family Amendment to the Constitution sought to change the definition of family from one “founded on marriage” to the more general description of family involving “durable relationships”. Some 67 per cent said ‘No’.

John O’Sullivan: Ireland rejects peak wokeness

The second amendment sought to delete sections in the Constitution stressing the importance of women and mothers in the home instead of the paid workforce. Article 41.2.2. currently states “mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.

Woke activists sought to include a new section replacing reference to women and mothers with the description “members of the family”.  To this, 74 per cent said ‘No’.  As to why the cultural Left is so intent on destroying the nuclear family look no further than the Marxist Wilhelm Reich, who argued the family, instead of being inherently worthwhile or natural, is an essential prerequisite of what he terms the “authoritarian state and authoritarian society”. To overthrow capitalism, therefore, activists must first destroy the family.

While there’s no doubt Western societies such as Australia and others across the Anglo-sphere are infected by the cultural-Marxist’s long march through the institutions, every now and then there is cause for optimism and the renewed belief all is not lost.

Similar to UK Brexit vote and the 60/40 vote against enshrining the Indigenous Voice in our own Constitution, the Irish referendums prove that despite left-leaning elites, governments, media, corporations and academics all pushing the same woke agenda, common sense can yet prevail.

While progressive elites and governments pushing diversity, equity and inclusion and politically correct ideology are intent on destroying the family and enforcing a globalist, self-seeking and cosmopolitan view of the world, most people are grounded in every-day reality. As argued by conservative cultural critic Roger Scruton, despite the success of the Left in infiltrating and dominating society’s institutions, most voters are still down to earth, practical people whose lives are centred on hearth and home, their local community, work and family.

Scruton writes that what progressive governments and woke businesses and academics ignore to their detriment is the majority of citizens are conservative-minded, preferring the local to the global, the proven to the untested and continuity as well as change. For the majority of Irish voters family is “founded on marriage” and not the all-encompassing term “durable relationships”, and if the family as society’s bedrock is to survive and prosper it’s vital the state supports women who prefer to be at home as wives and mothers. Contrary to neo-Marxist inspired transgender theory, where sexuality is a social construct enforced by a heteronormative capitalist society, implicit in the overwhelming Irish vote is also the belief a woman is a female capable of giving birth, breastfeeding and nurturing the young.

While it is true both Ireland and Australia have legislated to allow same-sex marriages, there’s a growing sense of ‘enough is enough’ as the cultural Left has over-stepped what is acceptable in its zealous and destructive long march.

People are fed up with what the American columnist Mary Harrington calls “normophobia”, defined as the desire to frame “everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative” as divisive and instrumental in oppressing so-called victim groups. She writes:

Normophobia frames everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative—whether its origin be physiological or cultural—as arbitrarily and coercively constructed to support vested interests, particularly those of white, Christian, heterosexual men. Radical normophobes describe their aim explicitly as the total eradication of this (they claim) artificially naturalized domain of the “natural,” in favor of untrammeled, free-floating, individual desire.

Targets include: the nuclear family, heterosexuality, religion, especially Christianity, academic studies and meritocracy, Western civilisation, patriotism, classical literature, art and music plus fossil fuels.  Being male, pale and stale is especially bad.

Luckily, Robert Menzies’ “forgotten people” and John Howard’s battlers, unlike the privileged elites of tyhe inner city voting Greens and Teal, are not easily indoctrinated or easily swayed by woke ideology. One of the principal reasons Prime Minister Albanese’s signature project to enshrine an indigenous Voice in the Constitution failed so dismally is because the majority of voters believed it was divisive, divorced from their lives and an a futile exercise in identity politics and exalting victimhood. For those Liberals convinced the way forward for the party is to out-woke the woke and mimic Greens/Teals/ALP policies there is increasing evidence both overseas and here the tide is turning. Think here of Florida’s Ron DeSantis stopping small children being indoctrinated with gender ideology, the success of the Dutch conservative Geert Wilders, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference, the English National Health Service’s decision to restrict prescribing puberty blockers for children.

In darkness, it seems, the light of sanity and traditional values continues to shine.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the Australian Catholic University’s Glynn Institute.