The irony of love
Love is love. That's what makes it so ironic. When a person calls another person a "lover" that word is ironic again, because what is implied is often very transactional. For Thorpe and Scott, who knows what love meant, but one thing is for sure, acquittal or no acquittal, murder should be completely off the table for love's purposes, right? So no matter what they felt emotionally, Thorpe's attempt to feel loved ended with him allegedly attempting to murder the person who gave him what he wanted in the first place. Not exactly a hallmark "lover."
The irony of shame
Shame is ironic, because it feels very true but it often isn't trustworthy. Shame is the emotional speculation about what others would think of one's behavior, but that is often not helpful, because what we speculate is merely a reflection of what we observe in our culture, so if our culture is broken, one would have to step outside the boundaries of their own shame in order to fix it. Thorpe had this option the whole time, but instead he was complicit to errors of his own shame, because he doesn't accept his bisexual appetite as authentic and valuable.
The irony of sexual injustice
Sexual injustice is ironic, because nothing is as close to instinct as sexuality. Many gay people expressed their sexual orientation as very natural to them in their own understanding of reality, but since sex is kind of an embarrassing topic, very few voices are taken into consideration. So ironically, the public is given a poor representation of human sexuality in their sense for cultural normalcy. Instead of realizing that his shame was broken, Thorpe believed his shame about homosexuality and became "normal," and in the process, he became mentally strained and fearful.
The irony of power
Power makes some people weak, because if a person feels that they might lose power, suddenly they become slaves of their own fear. They fear being deposed from their authority, they fear the loss of control, and they fear others. Thorpe's story is one of power and success, but at the cost of self-acceptance, and the problem of power expresses itself ironically. In order to seem powerful, Thorpe chose not to do the truly powerful thing of standing up for justice during a time of injustice.
The irony of law
Since people determine the law, and since shame is part of how humans see justice, government and law has ironic limitations. For instance, the government could hypothetically spend its resources in any way, but they are obligated to serve the people, so in law, sometimes the laws are wrong, because people's sense for shame gets confused with their sense for law and justice, and when that happens, the anti-gay legislation of Britain can happen, for example, which did happen just a decade before this controversy made the public reconsider the law.
