Some recent statements on gay marriage from Ireland:

"This is really a kind of a satire on marriage that is being conducted by the gay lobby. It is not that they want to get married; it is that they want to destroy the institution of marriage because they are envious of it … "

"You warp language, you manipulate words, you say 'Oh, there's an inequality.' 'There's no inequality,' I say to them. 'You know there's no inequality.' 'Yeah there is: we can't get married,' 'Oh yeah, you can get married. Of course, you're a man. You can get married, but you must marry a woman. That's what marriage is.'"

Is the person quoted above homophobic? Is the Iona Institute, the Irish organisation that made this video, homophobic?

For Irish drag artist Miss Panti Bliss (aka Rory O'Neill), the answer to both questions is yes. As she said on RTÉ's Saturday Night Show, anyone who actively campaigns against civil rights for gay people is homophobic. After this she was threatened with legal action for defamation by the writer John Waters (whose views on gay marriage are quoted above), by the Iona Institute and by Breda O'Brien, an Irish Times columnist.

For RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, the answer, it would seem, is no. It has paid Waters €40,000 (£33,275) in damages, while O'Brien and members of Iona received €45,000 between them. RTÉ also broadcast an apology for Panti's comments.

How would you feel if your TV licence fee had gone into the pockets of the man who said those words, or the organisation that made that video?

I am too frightened to answer any of these questions myself. Like Panti and many others, I have been on the receiving end of solicitors' letters from a member of the Iona Institute in the past, giving me a visceral understanding of how a person's wealth and influence can translate into power over the very words we are permitted to say.

RTÉ followed up Panti's appearance and its subsequent payouts to Waters, O'Brien and Iona with a panel discussion on homophobia, explicitly framed in terms of whether the word for anti-homosexual prejudice should be excluded from the Irish debate on same-sex marriage. The logic is that applying the word homophobic to those who oppose gay marriage is defamatory and antithetical to rational debate.

On the same night, Panti took to the stage of The Abbey, Ireland's national theatre, to deliver a stunning piece of oratory on the "neat Orwellian trick" of wresting the word for gay oppression from the hands of gay people. "It turns out," she said, "that gay people are not the victims of homophobia: homophobes are the victims of homophobia."

The word homophobia has long been a powerful tool for gay activists to articulate oppression of their identities and rights. It came into use in the 1970s, at the same time that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders, and it symbolises an important switch in social conceptions: it is not gay people, but those who are afraid of gay people, who are intrinsically disordered. George Weinberg, the psychologist who coined the term, wrote that homophobia is often characterised by religious fear, by fear of reducing the status of the home and family and by fear of contagion.

In Ireland, being still a predominantly Catholic country, homophobia certainly has a religious element, as the Catholic church teaches that homosexual sex is sinful.

When homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993, it was mainly religious fear that characterised opposition to the change. Twenty-one years later, most people agree that it is homophobic to criminalise homosexuality.

In 2014, Ireland has reached the point where a referendum on marriage equality is planned for next year. The church's moral authority has weakened over the last two decades, due, in part, to revelations of systemic child abuse.

This time round, the fear that characterises opposition to equal civil rights for gay people is that of reducing the status of home and family – particularly in relation to the well-being of children, who, it is feared, will suffer without a male and female parent.

This is an irrational fear. While it's true in a biological sense that all children have a male parent and female parent, it is clearly not true in the social sense. Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a report on promoting the wellbeing of children of gay people, which affirmed that children have the same developmental needs and receive the same parenting whether raised by straight or gay couples, and that civil marriage rights for gay people are in the best interest of children. To deny this evidence, and insist that gay parents are likely to harm their kids, is homophobic.

I'm sure it's unpleasant to be accused of homophobia when you'd rather see yourself as traditional but tolerant. But it is much harder to be gay in 21st century Ireland. To experience a denial of marriage rights on the basis of your sexuality is to experience homophobia, and Ireland's LGBTQ communities deserve far better of the state broadcaster.

• This article was amended on 10 February 2014. The second paragraph originally asked whether the person in the video was homophobic. This has been corrected to ask whether the person quoted is homophobic.