To me, Ireland should be a case study for Republicans and their Christofascist base of what eventually happens when a minority tries to force its antiquated and hypocrisy soaked religious beliefs on all of society. With the vote in Ireland official, two-thirds of the citizenry voted to end a near total ban on abortions spearheaded by the Catholic Church in 1983. The Trump/Pence regime would do well to realize that their agenda of appeasing Christofascists will not end well in the long run despite the presence of right wingers like Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. Here in America, the sex abuse scandal of priestly sexual predators continues with almost daily stories somewhere in the country (In Australia a high cleric was recently criminally convicted for his role in covering up abuse). Meanwhile, we see an almost daily stream of evangelical pastors caught up in sexual scandals as evangelicals show themselves to be the most hate-filled and hypocrisy drenched individuals in society as them support an occupant of the White House devoid of any shred of morality or decency. The New York Times looks at the stunning rebuke in Ireland:
DUBLIN — Ireland voted decisively to repeal one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans, sweeping aside generations of conservative patriarchy and dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church.
The surprising landslide, reflected in the results announced on Saturday, cemented the nation’s liberal shift at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise in Europe and the Trump administration is imposing curbs on abortion rights in the United States. In the past three years alone, Ireland has installed a gay man as prime minister and has voted in another referendum to allow same-sex marriage.
The “yes” camp took more than 66 percent of the vote, according to the official tally, and turnout was about 64 percent.
The outcome signaled the end of an era in which thousands of women each year had been forced either to travel abroad or to buy pills illegally online to terminate their pregnancies, risking a 14-year jail sentence. The government has said that general practitioners — doctors who are the first port of call for patients — will be asked to provide abortions, although they will still be allowed to conscientiously object to termination at their clinics.
The vote followed months of soul-searching in a country where the legacy of the Catholic Church remains powerful. It was the latest, and harshest, in a string of rejections of the church’s authority in recent years.
The church lost much of its credibility in the wake of scandals involving pedophile priests and thousands of unwed mothers who were placed into servitude in so-called Magdalene laundries or mental asylums as recently as the mid-1990s.
“This is devastating for the Roman Catholic hierarchy,” said Gail McElroy, professor of politics at Trinity College Dublin. “It is the final nail in the coffin for them. They’re no longer the pillar of society, and their hopes of re-establishing themselves are gone.”
That shift in attitude was driven in part by prominent cases, such as the 2012 death of Savita Halappanavar, who had asked for a termination of her pregnancy but later died of complications from a septic miscarriage. Ms. Halappanavar’s face was printed on placards supporting abortion, and on Saturday morning people placed flowers in front of a mural of her face in Dublin.
Ireland “is taking the proper steps to separate church and state and to move forward as a more progressive country,” said Conor Flynn, a 22-year-old student.
Church and state need to be totally separate and in America, progressives and truly moral people must continue to strive to destroy the power of the Christofascists and their political whores.
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