The narrative of the sexual revolution, writes Glyn Harrison, goes something like this:-

For centuries, traditional morality had us – all of us – in its suffocating grip. Year after year the same old rules, chained to the past, heaped shame on ordinary men and women (and boys and girls) whose only crime was being different. Enemies of the human spirit, these bankrupt ideologies befriended bigots and encouraged the spiteful. They nurtured a seedbed of hypocrisy and offered safe havens to perpetrators of abuse.…

Two movies illustrate the sexual revolution that has been taking place since the 1960s:-

The Magdalene Sisters tells the story of four women incarcerated, in the 1960s, in one of Ireland’s ‘laundry asylums’.  For the ‘crime’ have having an illegitimate child, such a woman could be kept out of sight and out of mind for years on end, and her child quietly removed and put up for adoption.

By contrast, in recent years Ireland was, in more recent years, the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage, and over one-third of births now take place outside marriage. …