From Jeff Childers

So far this year, we’ve watched the conservative counter-offensive lighting up South America with a few remarkable new leaders, and powering parts of Europe in the form of farmers’ protests. The newest front opened this week, a Spring Counter-Offensive launched in one of the least likeliest places, and right before Saint Patrick’s Day, too. An appalled New York Times ruefully ran the story outside its paywall headlined, “Ireland Rejects Constitution Changes, Keeping ‘Women in the Home’ Language.”

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How dare they?

The Shamrock State appears to have come a long way in a very short time. Less than ten years ago in 2015, Irish voters celebrated passing the country’s first gay marriage law. As recently as 2018 — right before the pandemic — Irish voters amended the country’s constitution, repealing its abortion ban.

So the elites missed it. They totally did not see this one coming, and it’s fair to say the liberal elites and their corporate media lapdogs were more shocked, stunned, and sickened than if Klaus S. had woken up one morning, donned a red baseball cap, and said he thought the Orange Man made sense about a few things. The Times’ article — desperately flogged in the free section of the papers’s website hoping to mislead more eyeballs — is a knee-jerk effort at post-hoc damage control.

Lockdown-loving Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who successfully campaigned for gay marriage and repealing the constitutional abortion ban, personally led the charge this time around pushing two even more radical constitutional amendments. Both proposed amendments were supported by every single one of the country’s major political parties.

But voters rejected them in a massive electoral tsunami, with over seventy percent of voters rejecting the vomitous changes.

The first proposed amendment would’ve deleted the constitutional definition of a “family.” Wherever used, the outdated word “marriage” would have been broad-mindedly hollowed out with the addition of the much more flexible, permissive, and open-minded term, “or durable relationship.” The archaic, Cro-Magnon concept of “marriage” — a staple of civilization as recently as 2015 when it was critically important for gay folks to get a crack at hitching up — was thought too binding, too constrictive, too discriminatory against people wanting to experiment with all sorts of novel, atypical sexual and cohabitational arrangements.

The second proposed amendment was arguably even worse. Existing Article 41.2 includes references to the offensive, outdated, and old-fashioned concepts of “woman” and “mother,” and so Article 41.2 has squarely squatted in liberals’ crosshairs for years. Here’s what the Article currently says about women and mothers:

The state “recognizes that, by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” and the state will “endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.”
Outrageous! How dare they! So the proposed amendment would’ve deleted women and mothers, replacing them with the progressive, virtuous, open-minded, diverse, inclusive, and gender-neutral term “caregiver:”

“The state recognizes that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”
If they’d had their way, it would’ve been buh-bye, ladies.

But Irish voters were obviously having none of it. Not unfairly, most social media commenters are focused on the successful defeat of two dangerous anti-family, anti-woman “Trojan Horse” amendments disguised as silly woke nonsense. “Woke is dead,” is the immediate take-away.

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But let’s scratch a little deeper. To me, there are two bigger stories here even than that woke just suffered another humiliating defeat. The first is about how much and how fast the Irish public has changed; a public that just within the last ten years binged on every progressive gender issue served up on the electoral plate. To what could we attribute this fascinating ideological change?

The second, less obvious story, which corporate media is studiously avoiding confronting, is the obvious disconnect between Irish voters and literally the entire Irish government. Stories about the failed vote already are filled with shocked and surprised quotes. Professor Laura Cahillane, quoted for the Times’ article, explained “There seemed to be very little interest in the government in listening to the concerns of people on the wording.”

“And maybe,” Professor Cahillane added, “there was a certain amount of arrogance in thinking people might get carried away on a wave of feminism on International Women’s Day and simply pass these two referendums.” (Voting day had been deliberately scheduled for Friday, which was International Women’s Day.)

Elite arrogance is not hard to imagine..

The bill had no organized political opposition; only grassroots groups opposed the bills. All the major political parties in Ireland supported voting “Yes-Yes.” No one in government stuck up for real women whenever Prime Minister Varadkar gassed on about how the existing constitutional language was “very old-fashioned, very sexist language about women.”

Until right before the vote, published polls predicted both amendments would easily pass by wide margins. Uh huh.

What’s most annoying is how these women-erasing amendments were marketing in Ireland as “feminist.” The National Women’s Council of Ireland, a nonprofit supposedly promoting “women’s rights and equality,” campaigned in favor of the proposals, which would have helped men pretending to be women, but would have done nothing for adult human females but make them even less visible.

But Irish voters saw right through it.