Online, Irish Referendum Looks One-Sided, but Conservatives Hope Vote Reveals a Silent Majority
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Version 0 of 1. “I live in a rather special world,” the film critic Pauline Kael observed in 1972, one month after President Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon.” Where, exactly, the majority of American voters who supported Mr. Nixon could be found, Ms. Kael added, “I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.” Anyone following the voting in Ireland on Friday in real time, in a referendum that could make the country the first in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote, might do well to keep that cleareyed understanding of the anecdotal in mind. There has clearly been overwhelming support for the measure expressed on social networks during the closing stages of the campaign, but its opponents hope they will win the day offline on Saturday, when the whirligig of memes stops spinning and the paper ballots are counted. In Ireland, as in the United States and elsewhere, reports from the field suggest that support for same-sex marriage — like a willingness to try sushi — tends to break down along generational lines, with the strongest support coming from young voters, who are also the most addicted to social media, and older voters employing less high-tech means to get their message across. That seems to have been clearly reflected in the trend of tens of thousands of messages tagged #HomeToVote, posted on Twitter by Irish expatriates returning from near and far to cast ballots, and in the hijacking of the #VoteNo thread by those mocking opponents of the measure. The avalanche of gleeful messages shared by supporters of the measure has been so great that Ireland’s popular health minister, Leo Varadkar, who came out in February, posted a Twitter video urging voters to not spoil their ballots by drawing on them — “no smiley faces, no rainbows.” “And remember,” he added, “selfies are not allowed” inside polling places. Self-portraits after voting were, however, permitted and even encouraged by other elected officials, including Joan Burton, the leader of Ireland’s Labour Party, and David Norris, a senator who helped lead the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in Ireland, which was achieved only in 1993. Buoyed by opinion polls that appeared to show support for the measure dwindling in recent weeks, however, religious and social conservatives have been counting on a silent, or at least mostly offline, majority to vote against the referendum. The No campaign has even used social media to highlight opposition to the measure from some gay men and to argue that “the bullying and hysteria on social media has totally crossed the line — the name-calling, the mobs on Twitter, personal abuse, people are even being threatened.” In response, the Yes campaign sought to highlight support for the measure from older voters, like one couple in Dundalk who compared the fight for gay rights to the struggle for civil rights in Northern Ireland. |