What if it was only Meath that wanted gay marriage?

Wednesday was a bad day for Dubya. Alan Greenspan spoke the truth about the tax-cuts (they'll be deducted from Americans' future social security cheques), and his proposal for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage has gone down like a lead balloon even within the home team. And it has contributed to one of the more pathetic spectacles in Blogistan -- prominent gay conservative, Andrew Sullivan, finally realising that he's as expendable as yesterday's fishwrap when it comes to his once beloved Dubya's electoral calculations. Sullywatch gets in a particularly cruel cut:

It would, come to think of it, be really, really hilarious if Sullivan went down as the Neville Chamberlain of gay history.

And Sullivan's blog has become basically an open thread of mostly negative ruminations on the perceived stab in the back. One of the reader e-mails is of Irish interest, noting accurately the counterproductive history of the attempt to play moral politics with the constitution in the Republic; the country had perfectly good (if you're anti-abortion) legislation left over from the days in the UK completely outlawing abortion, but pro-life groups wanted it "copper-fastened" with a constitutional amendment. As the reader explains, the final outcome is a legal grey area that may actually have created a limited right to get an abortion in the Republic (there is a de facto option to get one in Britain anyway).

Of course we Irish are always flattered when it seems that we have useful lessons for the rest of the world, so if Sullivan wants to use this lesson, fine. Now, there are differences between the cases. Most notably, the US always has its federal structure as a fallback option -- let the states decide how they want to handle such issues. As a unitary state, the Republic can't do that. There's not much of a "county rights" agenda in the Republic, although with the abysmal way the central government is being run these days, maybe there needs to be one. We'll spend a little while thinking about which county in such a world would the first to allow gay marriage.