SOMETHING has changed in Northern Ireland when the historically Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)—founded by the late Ian Paisley—goes in to bat for the province’s Catholic bishops. Could it be that sectarian rivals, taking their cue from Catholics and evangelicals in America in the 1990s, now find common cause on moral issues that trump old divisions?

The issue resurfaced on December 4th when the Catholic bishops withdrew support for a church-rooted adoption agency, the Family Care Society, which claims to be the region’s leading finder of homes for hard-to-place children. The decision followed a series of judicial rulings saying the agency, like its counterparts elsewhere in Britain, must consider same-sex couples as adoptive parents on the same basis as heterosexual ones.

That affair was one of the two reasons cited by Paul Givan, a young DUP politician, for proposing to amend Northern Ireland’s equality legislation with a “conscience clause” allowing organisations and firms to refuse services if doing so would offend their religious beliefs. The other trigger was the case of a bakery, called Ashers, on the outskirts of Belfast that is facing legal action from the Equality Commission, a government agency, because its evangelical owners declined an order to make a cake with the words “Support Gay Marriage”.

Mr Givan said that, in seeking to distinguish between selling goods, which should be offered to all, and providing services, which might raise issues of conscience, he was acting as a friend to all religious groups. As with the bakery, he said, “The Catholic church should not have to act in violation of its deeply held beliefs.”

A Belfast gay-rights campaign, the Rainbow Project, expressed horror at the proposal; it could, the group argued, entitle a restaurant to deny a table, or a hotelier to refuse a room to a same-sex couple because they could argue that saying yes would facilitate homosexual relations.

Traditionalist Ulster Catholics are in a dilemma. Sinn Fein, the DUP’s partner in a shaky power-sharing deal and the party for which most Catholics vote, is pro-gay marriage and favours liberalising abortion laws; it has pledged to block Mr Givan’s move. The other nationalist party, the SDLP, is more conservative on abortion but broadly approves same-sex unions. So should Catholic traditionalists vote for the DUP, even though Paisley once called the pope “the scarlet woman of Rome”? Senior DUP leaders, who resist change to a restrictive abortion regime, say their party is a logical choice for faithful Catholics.

Father Tim Bartlett, a Catholic spokesman, insists that the church will never tell people how to vote; but it does urge the faithful to assess the parties’ stance on moral matters. For Catholics, he adds, the issues of abortion and gay marriage might now be “of a higher order” than the old quarrel over flags which has been “parked” by the peace process. At least this much is true: even in devout Northern Ireland, secularism’s advance is driving all sorts of Christians together. Organising an inter-denominational carol service is much easier than it used to be.