Dear Christians, for 1400 years now, you've been in a position of considerable power in this country. You have schools dedicated to your faith, our national holidays are based around your festivals, you have unelected representatives in our upper house of parliament and even our head of state is also the supreme governor of your largest denomination. It's strange then that you feel like you are persecuted. Ultimately, religion is a free choice. Yes, you may have been born into the culture or you may have had your head turned later in life and feel like it's your calling but you choose to uphold these beliefs. You could quite legitimately decide one day to become a Jew or a Muslim or even an atheist.
Imagine you don't have that choice. Imagine that you were born into Christianity and even if you wanted to, even if you tried and struggled to change, it was impossible. So you accept this. You're happy being a Christian actually. You're proud, maybe, just a little. But there's this huge sector of society who have been in power for around, say, 1400 years and they have a book that was written 2000 years ago in a land far away and, for some inexplicable reason that even they've forgotten, this book says you are evil, unnatural and perverse, that this thing about you that you can't (and don't want to) change was thrust upon you by the devil in order to tempt people away from the truth. The book also says other things like everyone is free to take slaves from neighbouring countries, that people who work on the Sabbath should be put to death, and that you can’t eat shellfish for whatever reason, but they all seem to ignore these rules and only focus on Christians. On top of all this, imagine that these people had colluded together and made it so that you were not free to marry other Christians, that you couldn't be seen in public with other Christians and that it was actually illegal for you to even exist, and that at one point, 200 years ago, you would have been executed for it.
Now imagine that over the last 50 years, the country, bit by bit, started to make Christianity legal. Some areas were more accepting than others. Across the Irish Sea, they only legalised it in 1993. Very slowly, you feel like your rights, the rights you’ve deserved for the last 1400 years and the rights that the people in power have always had, are returned to you. You may still get glares and horrible comments. You may even get attacked in the street by someone you’ve never met before. But at least you’re legitimate. Do you think you would be glad to be alive? Do you think would want to share everything you’ve been thinking and feeling with others? Do you think you would want to meet, date and fall in love with other Christians and maybe even one day, get married? And do you think you would feel that your people had been persecuted for 1400 years?
So how do you think gays in Northern Ireland feel when they can’t have a cake made for them? How do you think gays in the Republic felt when they went to the polls to try and obtain the same rights as the people in power? How do you think gays everywhere feel when not only do colleagues express their bigotry to their faces but are actually vindicated in a tribunal? If you ask me, I’d say “persecuted”.
