The Republic of Ireland has voted to enshrine marriage equality in the country’s constitution, joining 19 other countries and a large majority of American states. It was the first country to use a national public vote to extend such rights to same  sex couples.

The vote was the culmination of years of campaigning. In 2012 the then deputy prime minister, Eamon Gilmore, called same-sex marriage “the civil rights issue of our generation”. At the weekend, Ireland’s Equality Minister, Aodhan O Riordain, declared: “This has really touched a nerve in Ireland . . . It’s a very strong message to every LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] young person in Ireland and every LGBT young person in the world.” We agree.

In Australia, the Marriage Amendment Act 2004 declares that marriage is “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. The Irish constitution does not include such a definition. Indeed, in 2010 the Irish government enacted legislation that provided legal recognition of the partnerships of gay couples. But proponents of Friday’s “Yes” vote pointed out that marriage is protected in the constitution and yet civil partnership is not, and could be removed in the same way it was introduced.

Ireland is a strongly Catholic country. In a survey in 2011, almost 85 per cent of the people of the republic identified themselves as Catholic. And although the influence wielded by the church has been diminished greatly by the kinds of child abuse scandals currently convulsing Australia, pre-vote polling last week found that about 35 per cent of the populace still relied on the church as a source of influence in their vote.

If such a lesson had yet to be learnt, the Irish vote demonstrated that the question of marriage equality is not one of morality or religious dogma, but of human rights. If this can be understood in Catholic Ireland, why not in secular Australia?

Defining marriage in legislation makes it self-evident that it is a statutory matter. Making a legally recognised marriage unobtainable to people based on their sexual orientation is clearly discriminatory, no different to making such institutions off-limits to people of certain religions. Being able to produce a marriage licence provides certainty in many situations, including matters of financial benefit.

More than 70 per cent of Australians are in favour of same-sex marriage, according to a 2014 poll by campaign strategists Crosby Textor. And the lobby group Australian Marriage Equality reports that our Federal Parliament is just four votes shy of being able to pass a marriage equality bill in the House of Representatives, while in the Senate a bill could pass with a majority of one.

Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen recently dropped his opposition to same-sex marriage, and former Labor treasurer  Wayne Swan has also changed sides, conceding he was “wrong” to oppose marriage equality. The momentum on this issue, in Australia and in much of the rest of the world, is in one direction. And the popular view in this country is clear.

The Age has long called for marriage equality, and we have yet to hear a persuasive argument against the proposition. Once again we are left to wonder: when will Australia’s elected representatives reflect the views of the populace and right this wrong?

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On Same-Sex Marriage, Catholics Are Leading the Way

They don ¢â‚¬â„¢t share a continent, obviously. Or a language.

But in all of them, the Roman Catholic Church has more adherents, at least nominally, than any other religious denomination does.

And all of them belong to the vanguard of 20 nations that have decided to make same-sex marriage legal.

In fact, countries with a Catholic majority or plurality make up half of those where two men or two women can now wed or will soon be able to.

Ireland, obviously, is the freshest addition to the list. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s also, in some ways, the most remarkable one. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s the first country to approve same-sex marriage by a popular referendum. The margin wasn ¢â‚¬â„¢t even close. About 62 percent of voters embraced marriage equality.

And they did so despite a past of great fealty to the Catholic Church ¢â‚¬â„¢s official teachings on, for example, contraception, which was outlawed in Ireland until 1980, and abortion, which remains illegal in most circumstances…

Irish voters nonetheless rejected the church ¢â‚¬â„¢s formal opposition to same-sex marriage. This act of defiance was described, accurately, as an illustration of church leaders ¢â‚¬â„¢ loosening grip on the country.

But in falling out of line with the Vatican, Irish people are actually falling in line with their Catholic counterparts in other Western countries, including the United States.

They aren ¢â‚¬â„¢t sloughing off their Catholicism  ¢â‚¬” not exactly, not entirely. An overwhelming majority of them still identify as Catholic. But they ¢â‚¬â„¢re incorporating religion into their lives in a manner less rooted in Rome.

We journalists too often use  ¢â‚¬Å“the Catholic Church ¢â‚¬  as a synonym for the pope, the cardinals and teachings that have the Vatican ¢â‚¬â„¢s stamp of approval.

But in Europe and the Americas in particular, the church is much more fluid than that. It harbors spiritually inclined people paying primary obeisance to their own consciences, their own senses of social justice. That impulse and tradition are as Catholic as any others.

Catholics in the United States appear to be more, not less, progressive about gay rights than Americans in general are. In an especially ambitious survey conducted over the course of 2014 by the Public Religion Research Institute, about 60 percent of Americans who called themselves Catholic said that they approved of same-sex marriage, versus about 30 percent who didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t. The spread among all respondents was 54 to 38, and the group that clearly stood in the way of same-sex marriage wasn ¢â‚¬â„¢t Catholics. It was evangelical Protestants.

And yet, interestingly, the qualms that certain public figures have about same-sex marriage are routinely explained  ¢â‚¬” by the media, and sometimes by those people themselves  ¢â‚¬” as ineluctable consequences of their Catholicism.

That ¢â‚¬â„¢s because  ¢â‚¬Å“Catholics ¢â‚¬  includes not just worshipers who attend Mass weekly and perhaps tilt in a more conservative direction but those who go less frequently and those for whom Catholicism is as much an ethnic as a religious identity.

For this large and diverse group in the United States and other Western countries, same-sex marriage has rapidly gained favor and Catholic leaders ¢â‚¬â„¢ expressions of protest, such as firing employees who marry same-sex partners or speak up for marriage equality, are becoming untenable.

Cognizant of that, Catholic bishops in Germany voted earlier this month to relax morality clauses in contracts with lay workers so that those who remarry after a divorce or enter into same-sex civil unions (same-sex marriage isn ¢â‚¬â„¢t yet legal there) needn ¢â‚¬â„¢t fear losing their jobs.

Is this a sign that in Europe and the Americas, same-sex marriage could become analogous to divorce: something that Catholic leaders technically frown upon but don ¢â‚¬â„¢t bother to inveigh against all that much?

I wonder, especially in light of comments by Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, after the Irish referendum. He noted  ¢â‚¬Å“a growing gap between the culture of Ireland ¢â‚¬  and the church, which, he said,  ¢â‚¬Å“needs to take a reality check. ¢â‚¬ 

He meant that its leaders do, and they can turn not just to Ireland but to many other densely Roman Catholic countries to gauge the hearts and souls of Catholics today.  ¢Ëœ 