Ireland's Gay Prime Minister Blasts Catholic Church

There are few countries in which the Roman Catholic Church has fallen further than in Ireland.  Once a bastion of Catholicism that exported priests across the globe, attendance at mass has plummeted and scandal after scandal has rocked the nation as crimes and horrible mistreatment of individuals ranging from young altar boys to young unwed mothers and their babies have been revealed.  One has to wonder what possessed Pope Francis to visit Ireland to attend the World Council of Families -  a gathering that is anything but progressive and open to tolerance.  If Francis thought his visit would heal raw wounds, he seemingly was mistaken as Ireland's gay prime minister let loose on the Church's ugly history of abuse and wrong doing.  The Advocate looks at the comments of Ireland's "out" prime minister, Leo Varadkar as Francis stood by.  Here are excerpts::

In a Saturday speech referred to as "blistering" by The Guardian, Ireland's out prime minister, Leo Varadkar, highlighted the numerous scandals and abuses of the Catholic Church, as Pope Francis stood to his side.

The Dublin speech took place during the pontiff's first visit to Ireland in almost 40 years; he was there for the Church's World Meeting of Families. During Varadkar's speech, the prime minister repeatedly brought up the sexual abuse of children perpetuated by Catholic priests and made mention of a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed systemic clerical abuse.

Varadkar also spoke of the Church's forced adoptions of children from unwed mothers, a mass grave of infants recently found near a Catholic mother-and-baby home, and Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, where "fallen women" were housed and often subjected to horrors.

"I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church charged with responsibility for their protection and education," Varadkar said. 

The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others —  adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share those sentiments."

Varadkar described "brutal crimes perpetrated by people within the Catholic church, and then obscured to protect the institution at the expense of innocent victims... stains on our state, our society and also the Catholic church. People kept in dark corners behind closed doors, cries for help that went unheard.”

Varadkar also spoke of a changed Ireland; one where homosexuality and abortion were illegal during the last papal visit. Now, Ireland is led by a gay man and grants women the right to make their own reproductive decisions.

The Irish people understand "that marriages do not always work, that women should make their own decisions, and that families come in many different, wonderful forms, including those headed by a grandparent, lone parent or same-sex parents, or parents who are divorced."

It is a speech that Francis very much needed to hear and which foretells what will happen to the Church if radical changes do not occur. Until bishops and cardinals are punished and removed from office (and not sent into retirement with plush perks) and the Church's stance on sex and sexuality leaves behind 12th century beliefs, the exodus of churchgoers will continue.  The Washington Post also looks at the meeting of Varadkar and Francis and the reality of a vastly changed Ireland:

On Saturday, Varadkar welcomed Pope Francis to Ireland, a nation that has radically changed since the last papal visit, in 1979. At that time, homosexuality was still a crime. Now, the country’s prime minister is gay. 

Varadkar is a distinct example of how what was once an overwhelmingly white, Catholic nation is now increasingly diverse and its laws increasingly secular. Ireland is the first country to have legalized same-sex marriage through a popular vote, and this year, the country repealed its restrictive abortion ban. Many see the country’s new policies and shifting demographics as evidence that the Irish are moving further and further away from the Catholic Church.
 And in his remarks in front of the pope Saturday, the prime minister said the Irish have “voted in our Parliament and by referendum to modernize our laws.” He said new policies reflect the country’s understanding that “marriages don’t always work, that women should make their own decisions, and that families come in many different wonderful forms including those headed by a grandparent, lone parent or same-sex partners or parents who are divorced and remarried.”

Brian Finnegan, editor of Ireland’s Gay Community News, said that the last time a pope visited, 39 years ago, Irish leaders were more likely to have said: “ ‘We wont have any contraception or allow people divorce or even talk of homosexuality,’ just ‘your eminence, you’re here, and we love you, and we love the church.' ”  “There would’ve been no defense at all,” he said.

That makes Varadkar’s meeting with the pope that much more symbolic. For many, an openly gay leader of a predominantly Catholic country meeting the leader of the Catholic Church, an institution that does not recognize same-sex marriage, would have once been unthinkable.

Varadkar had a brief meeting with the pope following his more public remarks Saturday. His spokesman told the Irish Times that he “said to the pope that there are huge numbers of people here who have faith in their heart but who feel excluded and alienated from the church because of what happened.” . . . . campaigners for sex abuse survivors said the pontiff had not gone far enough in taking responsibility for the Vatican’s role in covering up abuse at the hands of the clergy.

I do not envy Francis' situation, but clearly, more inaction and crocodile tears will not save the Church from the consequences of it many wrongdoings. 

Trump Voters and the Fear of Change and Downward Mobility

Try as I might, I cannot get inside the heads of Trump voters, especially evangelical Christians who is the antithesis of the Gospel message that they purportedly respect.  I was at a family funeral yesterday at a church I once attended many years ago and one of the readings struck me since it put in such sharp contrast what Christians should be doing versus the agenda of Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general:

Matthew 25:35-40
³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Unless it impacts them themselves, Trump supporters are all too happy to support the trashing of the social safety net, bear a hatred towards those who are different, and flocked to support a rich man who throughout his life has done none of what the foregoing passages call for.   

A column in the New York Times suggests that the answer to the question of why those who claim to be decent people voted for someone who clearly is not and who appears to be considering admitting guilt of crimes against America by trying to pardon himself and his family:  a fear of downward social mobility and desire to blame anyone else for their predicament except themselves.  I have written about the fear of loss of white privilege that I continue to believe motivated many Trump voters.  But also at play is a refusal to adjust to economic change and modernity and discontent with the consequences of one's own bad choices, e.g., dropping out of high school, refusing to relocate for better jobs, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.   One might call it a mindset of victim-hood even though a good portion of the circumstances they hate stem from their own actions.  Here are some column highlights:

I have written before about the fear of falling down the socioeconomic ladder, the fear of an irremediable loss of status, authority and prestige — and the desperate need to be rescued from this fate. But the topic bears further exploration because it has been such a prime motivation for one slice of the electorate, the swing voters who made President Trump’s unexpected triumph possible.

The question that persists six months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration is why six key states — Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, along with 220 counties nationwide — flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Why did these voters change their minds? These are men and women who are, in the main, still working, still attending church, still members of functioning families, but who often live in communities where neighbors, relatives, friends and children have been caught up in disordered lives. The worry that this disorder has become contagious — that decent working or middle class lives can unravel quickly — stalks many voters, particularly in communities where jobs, industries and a whole way of life have slowly receded, the culminating effect of which can feel like a sudden blow.

One suggestive line of thinking comes from Arlie Hochschild, the author of “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” and professor emerita of sociology at Berkeley. Hochschild has studied Americans whom she calls “the elite of the left-behind.” Her findings shed light, I think, on the concerns of some of the voters who tipped the balance for Trump last year. Hochschild wrote to me that common refrains among these voters were “America’s heading downhill” and “I think our kids are headed for hard times.” In these conversations, she said,

it wouldn’t take long before another topic spontaneously came up, blacks, their problems, their call on government help. At the bottom of the imagined slide was the situation of blacks — teen single moms, kids out in the street at night, slacking off in school, drugs, drink. So, yes, the feeling was, “if we don’t turn this thing around, that could be us.”

Nancy Isenberg, a history professor at Louisiana State University and the author of “White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America,” responded to my inquiry about Americans anxious about losing their place:

Yes, the fear was about rearranging the “pecking order.” But many working-class and middle-class whites without college educations also hate poor whites, who they see as lazy and worthless. Historically, poor whites have shared the same stereotypes applied to poor blacks: lazy, uncouth, living on handouts, and not just having too many children, but practicing “inbreeding.”

The 2016 campaign:

tapped into anxieties of all who resented the government for handing over the country to supposedly less deserving classes: new immigrants, protesting African Americans, lazy welfare freeloaders, and Obamacare recipients asking for handouts. Angry Trump voters were convinced that these classes, the “takers,” were not playing by the rules (i.e., working their way up the ladder) and that government entitlement programs were allowing some to advance past the more deserving (white, native born) Americans. This is how many came to feel “disinherited.”

There is no question that the communities where Trump received crucial backing — rural to small-city America — are, in many ways, on a downward trajectory.

From 1990 to 2009, the percentage of births to single mothers among whites without high school diplomas grew from 21 to 51 percent; among those who completed high school, the percentage rose from 11 to 34 percent.

Along parallel lines, the percentage of intact marriages among white adults 25 to 60 years old without high school degrees fell from 70 percent in the 1970s to 36 percent in the 2000s. For those who finished, the percentage fell from 76 to 46 percent.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2014 that the number of opioid prescriptions outnumbered the number of people in 12 states. All 12 of these states voted for Donald Trump: Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia. . . . . the overdose death rates in 2015 for opioids, including heroin, were far higher for whites, 13.9 per 100,000, than for blacks, 6.6 per 100,000, and Hispanics, 4.6 per 100,000.

While whites without bachelor’s degrees flocked to Trump in the belief that he was their savior, the reality is that the many Americans are caught in a vicious cycle that Trump is in no way equipped to address.

As these processes continue and accelerate, many Trump voters — the neighbors, relatives, friends, parents and children of those who have become mired in this “geography of desperation” — are deeply apprehensive about what might happen if Trump fails to fulfill his promise to make America great again.

Trump will fail to change this cycle because dropping out of school, not marrying, unwed motherhood, and drug use are all things that track back to personal responsibility - something the GOP claims to laud and even demand of individuals.  In addition, globalization and economic and societal change will march on and many Trump voters will face a bleak fate if they do not let go of their fear of modernity and take steps to change their fate, steps that may include moving away from backward and/or economically depressed areas (the two usually go hand in hand).

Catholic Church Crimes: Mass Grave of 700+ Children of Unwed Mothers in Ireland

Thanks to the constant political turmoil in America, media coverage has been diverted from the continuing moral bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Church.  Sex abuse scandals continue to rage in Australia, Guam and other parts of the world with the Church hierarchy fighting tooth and claw to cover up crimes against children and youths and to avoid paying compensation to rape and abuse victims.  Now a new bombshell has come out of Ireland, once a bastion of Catholicism, where a mass grave of 700 to 800 children has been discovered at the Mother and Baby Home operated by the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam, Ireland.   These small victims are but more of the lives destroyed over the centuries by the Church's warped 12th century approach to human sexuality and the obsession of bitter old men, many closeted self-loathing gays, with all things sexual. The hypocrisy and toxicity of the Church is mind numbing and I again ask how anyone moral and decent can continue to attend and financially support the institution.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the gruesome discovery:

Between 1925 and the 1960s, in a tiny town called Tuam in western Ireland’s County Galway, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Mother and Baby Home operated by the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours. After a period of involuntary service and penance, many of the women who came to the home left to resume their lives, as The Post’s Terrence McCoy reported in 2014.

But some of the children did not leave. And what became of them remained a mystery into which few cared to inquire.

But after painstaking research, a local historian named Catherine Corless became convinced in 2014 that the infants and small children — perhaps 700 to 800 of them — died in the home and were buried without markers in mass graves beneath the property, perhaps in an underground structure such as a septic tank.

The story, which attracted worldwide publicity, was met with skepticism and even suggestions that it was a hoax. It wasn’t.

A commission established by the Irish government in response to her research and the ensuing controversy has reportedfinding “significant quantities of human remains” in 17 “underground chambers” inside a buried structure.
 There is no uncertainty about the remains.

A small number of them were recovered for analysis, the commission reported. “These remains,” it said, “involved a number of individuals with age-at-death ranges” from approximately 35 fetal weeks to 2-to-3 years.

“Radiocarbon dating of the samples recovered suggest that the remains date from the time frame relevant to the operation of the Mother and Baby Home,” the commission said. “A number of the samples are likely to date from the 1950s.”

The commission said it was “shocked” by the discovery and “is continuing its investigation into who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way.” “This is very sad and disturbing news,” Katherine Zappone, Ireland’s minister for children and youth affairs, said in a statement. “It was not unexpected, as there were claims about human remains on the site over the last number of years.” In a statement published in the Irish Times, the Bon Secours sisters said they were “fully committed to the work of the commission regarding the mother and baby home in Tuam. … On the closing of the home in 1961, all the records for the home were returned to Galway County Council, who are the owners and occupiers of the lands of the home. We can therefore make no comment on today’s announcement, other than to confirm our continued cooperation with and support for the work of the commission in seeking the truth about the home.” Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home, Corless told The Post in 2014. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.” Corless’s research found that infant mortality at the home in Tuam was particularly high. Records for that home show that babies died at the rate of two per week from malnutrition and neglect, and from diseases such as measles and gastroenteritis, Corless told the Post in 2014.

Her interest in a subject others preferred to forget began when she was doing research for an annual local historical journal. 

The commission is already investigating how unmarried mothers and their babies were treated between 1922 and 1998 at 18 religious institutions used by the state. . . . . the religious [orders] knew it and it was just all nicely covered in and forgotten about.

The truth is the last thing that the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours or the Church hierarchy wants exposed to daylight.  

Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America

Nowhere in America is the embrace of ignorance and anti-intellectualism higher than in the Republican Party base, particularly among the Christofascists and Tea Party elements, which are largely one and the same.  Indeed, the embrace of ignorance and the rejection of science, knowledge and intellectualism is down right celebrated - all as the rest of the world, outside of perhaps Islamic nations and and heavily Christian areas of Africa, is moving forward and embracing modernity and knowledge.  The Founding Fathers embraced knowledge and intellectualism.  Today's GOP abhors these things.  As a piece in Psychology Today notes, the rise of anti-intellectualism is harming America and the nation's future.  Here are article highlights:

The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.

America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance. 

In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell," where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president, it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall. 

Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn't possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.

An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?

What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world.

But it doesn’t. International quality of life rankings place America far from the top, at sixteenth. America’s rates of murder and other violent crime dwarf most of the rest of the developed world, as does its incarceration rate), while its rates of education and scientific literacy are embarrassingly low. American schools, claiming to uphold “traditional values,” avoid fact-based sex education, and thus we have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world.
And those rates are notably highest where so-called “biblical values” are prominent. Go outside the Bible belt, and the rates generally trend downward.

[T]he impact of fundamentalist religion in driving American anti-intellectualism has been, and continues to be, immense.   Interestingly, anti-intellectual fundamentalists are joined in their climate change denial with unusual bedfellows: corporate interests that stand to gain from the rejection of sound science on climate.  . . . these corporate interests encourage anti-intellectualism, conditioning Americans into conformity and passive acceptance of institutional dominance. They are the ones who stand to gain from the excessive fear and nationalism that result in militaristic foreign policy and absurdly high levels of military spending.

At the core of all of this dysfunction is an abandonment of reason. More on this subject in David Niose's latest book, Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

Jeb Bush the Clueless and Single Mothers

Jeb Bush may be trying hard to distance himself from his idiot brother, but he is quickly reminding us that he is just as out of touch with the reality of the lives of most Americans as was/is the Chimperator.  Moreover, he is out of touch with just how poorly America stacks up compared to other developed countries when it comes to child welfare and well being.  Bush brought all of this into focus while traveling in Europe where he condemned single mothers and said that children needed fathers and mothers to thrive where child welfare exceeds that of the America.  Perhaps Bush was pandering to the Christofascists, but the statement was as obtuse as when Mitt Romney praised Israel's health care system without grasping that it was a nationalized health system - something Romney was campaigning against.   Here are highlights from a New York Times column on the issue:

Last week, Jeb Bush was asked to answer for a passage from his book from two decades ago, “Profiles in Character,” in a chapter titled “The Restoration of Shame,” in which he blamed the “irresponsible conduct” of births to unmarried women on a flagging sense of community ridicule and shaming.

Bush responded, according to MSNBC: “My views have evolved over time, but my views about the importance of dads being involved in the lives of children hasn’t changed at all. In fact, since 1995 … this book was a book about cultural indicators [and] the country has moved in the wrong direction. We have a 40-plus percent out-of-wedlock birth rate.”

He continued: “It’s a huge challenge for single moms to raise children in the world that we’re in today and it hurts the prospects, it limits the possibilities of young people being able to live lives of purpose and meaning.”

But, as a 2014 Pew Research Center report points out:

“It’s important to keep in mind that just because a woman has a nonmarital birth, that does not necessarily mean that the mother is ‘going it alone.’ For instance, in the U.S., more than half of births that occur outside of marriage are to women who are cohabiting.”

That same Pew report reported that 17 European countries (Iceland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, France, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Latvia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, Finland and yes, Estonia) have higher birthrates to unmarried women than does the United States.

And according to a 2013 Unicef report, “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries,” all those countries except Latvia (Bulgaria was not included) had higher ratings of overall children’s material well-being (a measure of things like child poverty rates; child deprivation of things like three meals, including some with protein and fresh fruit and vegetables; books; regular leisure activities; some new clothes and properly fitting shoes; and whether the family owned an automobile, traveled for vacations, had a computer and had a separate bedroom for the child).

In addition to material well-being, almost all of them outranked the United States in children’s health and safety, education, behaviors and risks, and housing and environment.

We spend quite a bit of energy blaming births to unmarried women for our woes, but that is only part of the picture. The other part is the way we as a society treat those women and the fathers of their children. Instead of endless efforts to sanctify marriage, the emphasis should be on finding ways to support children and encourage more parental engagement from both parents, regardless of marital status. This includes removing all barriers and penalties for people, especially the poor, to cohabitate.

First, we should seek to reduce the level of unintended pregnancies in this country. As the Guttmacher Institute pointed out in February, about half of pregnancies here are unintended, and “unintended pregnancy rates are highest among poor and low-income women, women aged 18–24, cohabiting women and minority women.”

Second, we have to examine how we have used the law as an instrument to push unwed fathers out of homes, particularly poor ones, rather than encourage them to stay.

Maybe a deficit of shame is not our problem, but rather a deficit of common sense in advancing policy and promoting co-parenting.

Sadly, once a child is born and is no longer a fetus, the concern of the Christofascists and the Republican Party disappears and programs that would aid child well being are slashed, insurance programs cut, and children, especially those of the poor are treated as disposable garbage.  The callousness and hypocrisy is truly breath  taking.  Jeb Bush is another clueless, out of touch plutocrat.  We do not need him holding any public office.

Maggie Gallagher Is a Miserable and Sick Person

I've written before about Maggie Gallagher (pictured above), the former president of the National Organization for Marriage, who made a lucrative career out of marketing anti-gay hatred while also demanding that the nation's civil laws match her fear and self-denigrating religious beliefs.  As noted before, Gallagher found herself as an unwed mother in college and she seems to never have gotten over (i) being dumped by the father of her child or (ii) her apparent need to do penance by harming others who do not adhere to her religious beliefs as much as possible.  Indeed, like so many of the Christofascists, Gallagher truly seems to feel good about herself when preaching hate and discrimination against others, gays being perhaps her favorite target.  Gallagher, who likes to see herself as an uber-Catholic, is in an apparent melt-down over the mere possibility that the Catholic Church might relent on its Inquisition type abuse of LGBT people. The Bilerico Project looks at Gallagher's agnst over the possibility that the Church might tone down its anti-gay jihad.  Here are excerpts:

In a breathtakingly myopic and stunningly self-pitying blog post this morning, former NOM president Maggie Gallagher -- one of America's foremost proponents of marriage discrimination -- hinted that reports of a possible softening in the Vatican's tone towards so-called "non-traditional" families have her seriously thinking about leaving the Catholic Church.

Gallagher writes:

I hope to respond intellectually to the synod report. Tears right now are streaming from my face, and it is not about objections to welcoming gay people. There is something more profoundly at stake for me.
Is this me? In the corner?

Just to make it abundantly clear that she's shedding tears of sorrow and not joy, Gallagher closed her post with the video of the R.E.M. song "Losing My Religion."

Wow, folks. I'm not often stunned, but right now I'm absolutely gobsmacked. Whether or not Maggie's telling the truth about her feelings having nothing to do with gay issues (and I suspect she's not being entirely honest here), her reference to the Vatican synod suggests that she's "losing her religion" because the Catholic Church is maybe -- just maaaaybe -- poised to become marginally less malicious and overtly hostile towards gays, divorced people, and unmarried couples.

What a miserable person.

Gallagher epitomizes the Christofascist mindset that seemingly revels in doing harm to others who hold different beliefs and who might just demonstrate the wrongheadedness and sickness of Christofascist religious belief - beliefs based on myths and fairy tales.

Ireland: A Case Study in the Psychosis of the Catholic Church

Despite its efforts to show case the good deeds it does - Pope Francis' PR push over the last year is a part of this - the Roman Catholic Church has left a wake of broken and ruined lives over the centuries as the bitter old men in dresses in Rome and in bishoprics across the world obsess over all things sexual.  Indeed the Vatican continues its jihad against gays despite Pope Francis' disingenuous seemly conciliatory statements on gays.  In few places was the Church's obsession with sex and its stranglehold on society stronger than in Ireland.  A piece in the Irish Times looks at the Church's history of cruelty and harm in Ireland.  Here are excerpts:

The Irish psychosis whose latest expression is thousands of dead babies in unmarked graves is a compound of four elements: superiority, shame, cruelty and exclusion.

A Catholic priest writing in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in 1922 under the pen-name Sagart, actually objected to the establishment of mother-and-baby homes, not on the grounds that they were horribly oppressive in principle, but that they might let unmarried mothers lose their proper sense of inferiority. 

The institutional church, meanwhile, was a giant factory for the mass production of shame and secrecy. It was the Irish secret service. In an article in The Irish Times in 1964, Michael Viney referred to “the secret-service mother-and-baby homes” run by religious orders in Ireland. 

The metaphor was not strained. Viney quoted the mother superior of a home he visited as telling him that the young women never set foot outside of the grounds: “They’d rather put up with a toothache than risk a visit to the dentist in the town, where they might just meet someone who would recognise them.” 

The church’s genius was that it both generated the shame and controlled the secrets that resulted from it.

The third element was cruelty – conscious and deliberate cruelty, aimed at the creation of fear. Catholic Ireland locked up in mental hospitals, industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother-and- baby homes an astonishing 1 per cent of its entire population. The cruelty of these places was not accidental.

Viney reported that the homes had well-run systems for sending letters from inmates to London – they were then posted back to the young woman’s family with British stamps, as if from an accommodation address in England. 

Cruelty and fear survive: the law of the land still says that a teacher in a Catholic school can be sacked without redress for getting pregnant outside marriage. Contempt for poor children is thriving – one third of our children currently live in deprivation. If you think we don’t treat vulnerable children as “deterrents” any more, have a look at the system for asylum seekers. And of course, we’ve reverted to the use of mass emigration as the solution to our social problems. The past has yet to pass.

 It is long past time that the Church and its hierarchy be held accountable for all of the horrors inflicted on innocents over the years.  Thankfully, the support for the Church in Ireland is in a long overdue free fall.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on Catholicism’s Crimes Against Humanity

As one who was raised Catholic knew would happen, apologists for the Catholic Church have rushed forward to describe those outraged by the news of the bodies of over 800 babies discovered in a septic tank at a former Catholic home for unwed mothers as "anti-Catholicism."   Sadly, there are those within the Church who simply refuse to open their eyes to the horrors that Catholicism and a Church hierarchy have wrought over the centuries.  Amazingly, Andrew Sullivan, who too often closes his eyes to the inherent sickness of the Catholic Church, simply could not take the lies and historical re-constructionists who sought to excuse the Church  for the evils done in Ireland.  Here are money quotes from Sullivan:

In Ireland, there are stirrings for a full investigation into the staggering news that a former home for unmarried mothers and their children was effectively a death camp for infants, and close to 800 were buried in a septic tank.

There are now calls to investigate all the sites once run by this sadistic, wicked order in order to discover how many children were neglected, abused and thrown away like so much trash. I’d say that’s a start. In my view, the entire order should be shut down by the Vatican until we have a much better understanding of these crimes, who knew about them, and when. There should also surely be a thorough attempt to find anyone still connected with this cover-up for investigation and possible prosecution. Like war crimes, these horrifying abuses should know no statute of limitations.

Meanwhile, it simply staggers me to find bloggers deflecting blame away from the church.

These children were treated as sub-human because their births violated a Catholic doctrine that there can be no sex outside of marriage. The young women – denied contraception, of course – were equally subject to horrifying stigmatization, hatred, and inhumane rules that took their children away from them. None of this would have ever taken place without this doctrine, and the insistence that it be enforced without exception and relentlessly. No society has ever lived up to this standard, but in Ireland, where the church was fused with the state, they gave it about as good a try as possible. And in order to enforce it, in order to inculcate shame at the deepest level imaginable to prevent human love, passion and sex breaking out, cruelty was necessary.

[W]hen you look at societies which are still like Ireland once was, where church and state were fused, you see much of the same horror: the dehumanization and subjugation of women, female genital mutilation, male genital mutilation, and the brutal murder of gay people. Does Rod not see a pattern here? And the entire fiction of a more virtuous past is only made possible by literally making its victims as invisible as those infant bodies in a septic tank. The countless gay lives of intense psychic pain, the innumerable heart-breaks, the forced separation of mothers and children, the brutalization of innocents, and the immiseration of people whose only crime was to experience their own bodies in ways unsanctioned by authority: these are all buried in order to retain the lie that this sexual ethic is the only virtuous one.

[T]he absolutist paradigm in which any sex outside marriage is anathema is such an impossible standard for most that it will fail if not enforced with the kind of brutality seen in Ireland in the 1940s or Iran in the 2010s. My contention is that the rigidity of this standard is inextricably tied up with cruelty. And that cruelty is far, far greater a sin, than surrendering to our deepest nature, hurting no one.

 I suspect we will see more disingenuous apologies from the Vatican, but ultimately it will all be lip service. No one and no religious orders will be punished for the evils they wrought.  Thus, members of the Church will be forced to either become complicit in immoral behavior or vote with their feet and walk away from the Catholic Church.  Over a decade ago, I chose the latter option.

Quote of the Day: AndrewSullivan on Catholicism’s Crimes Against Humanity

My first post today looked at the horrors coming out of Ireland involving the discovery of the bodies of at least 800 babies buried in a mass grave in a cesspool of a Catholic home for unwed mothers.  A home that treated the pregnant mothers, many mere girls, horrifically and their children even worse. All because the unwed mothers - a number of whom had been raped - failed to conform to the uptight, sexually obsessed rules laid down by the bitter and sexually frustrated  old men in dress both at the Vatican and in bishoprics across the globe.  Andrew Sullivan, who unlike myself cannot let go of his Catholic upbringing and see the true horror that is the institutional Roman Catholic Church summed the moral bankruptcy of the Church.  Here are excerpts:

A mass grave for eight hundred children, buried with no dignity, no humanity, no trace of decency. And the mass grave may well have been facilitated by rampant, disgusting and callous neglect.

Let us call this what it is: a concentration camp with willful disregard for the survival of its innocent captives, a death camp for a group of people deemed inferior because of the circumstances of their birth. When we talk of mass graves of this kind, we usually refer to Srebrenica or the crimes of Pol Pot. But this was erected in the name of Jesus, and these despicable acts were justified by his alleged teaching. 

To my mind, these foul crimes against women and children, along with the brutal stigmatization of gay people as “objectively disordered”, remain a testament to how the insidious, neurotic and usually misogynist fixation on sex has distorted and destroyed Christianity in ways we are only now beginning to recover from. For what we see here is the consequence of elevating sexual sin above all others, of fixating on human sexuality as the chief source of evil in the world, and of a grotesquely distorted sense of moral priorities, where stigmatization of the sexual sinner vastly outweighs even something as basic as care for an innocent child.

It seems to me that we have to move past the church’s current doctrines on sex if we are to fully seek justice for the victims of this pathology and if we are to ensure that never again is a phrase that actually means something. It is not enough to ask for a change in governance (and even that has been hard); what this evil signifies is the need to root out this pernicious obsession with sexual sin. This pathology – perpetuated by Benedict and the sex-phobic theocons – perpetuates the mindset that led to this barbarism. The nuns – and yes, this was abuse practised by women as well as men – did not ever seem to realize that Jesus himself was conceived, to all intents and purposes, out of wedlock – in a manner that may well have led his contemporaries to stigmatize him as illegitimate as well. They did not for a moment internalize Jesus’ emphatic insistence on the holiness of children as those most likely to enter the kingdom of Heaven. No, these precious images of God were consigned, after years of abuse and neglect, to unmarked early graves in a septic tank.

That is not a sign of a church gone astray. It’s a sign of a church given over to evil. A church that leaves young children to die of malnutrition and then dumps hundreds of them into a mass grave is not a church. It’s an evil institution that robs the word “church” of any meaning, and twists the Gospels into their direct opposite.

Sadly, Andrew finishes by arguing that the root problem is not Christianity itself.  He continues to be plagued, in my opinion, by the brainwashing of his youth.

Bodies of 800 Fabies Found at Former Catholic Home for Unwed Mothers

For readers who have not seen the movie Philomena, you need to do so.  It is based on a true story and it is an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church and what Catholic institutions did to "fallen women," many of them mere girls.  Now an even more gruesome story is out about the Children’s Home, Dublin Road, Tuam, Ireland, run by the Sisters of Bon Secours.  The grounds of the institution have yielded the bodies of some 800 babies, the "illegitimate children" of the girls who were treated little better than prison inmates.   Sadly, I have friends who continue to close their eyes to the horrors the Church - and Christianity in general - has wrought and the mindset that allows individuals to be stripped of their humanity and mistreated in the name of God. The mindset is alive and well today in the Church's treatment of gays.  The Church has much to atone for.  The question is whether anyone will ever force such atonement which will not come voluntarily.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the horrible discovery in Ireland:

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children we not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”

The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”

Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high. “If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”
 
Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age – either adopted or dead.”

a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”

Locals suspect the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. “God knows who else is in the grave,” one anonymous source told the Daily Mail. “It’s been lying there for years and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.”

Bon Secours translates to "good help" or "safe harbor" yet that was the last thing children found in many such homes.  Frighteningly, the Bon Secours operate three hospitals in the Hampton Roads area.  Needless to say, being gay, they are not where I would go if I needed health care. 

Who Is To Blame For America's High Teen Pregnancy Rate?

One of claims the Christofascists put out constantly in their opposition to gay marriage rather than admit that the true motivation is motivated purely by religious based bigotry is to same that children need a mother and a father.  In the straight world, however, America is doing a pretty poor job of seeing that children are born to two parent families where parents are emotionally and financially ready for the responsibilities of parenthood.  As a column in the New York Times points out:

. . . “about half (51 percent) of the 6.6 million pregnancies in the United States each year (3.4 million) are unintended” and “the U.S. unintended pregnancy rate is significantly higher than the rate in many other developed countries.” Among teenagers in high-income countries, those in the United States have the highest rates of pregnancy . .

Who is to blame for this unfortunate and embarrassing reality?  I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Christofascists and their puppets in the Republican Party who (i) oppose reality based sex education in our schools in favor of a fantasy based abstinence only approach, and (ii) seek to close down organizations like Planned Parenthood which provide contraception services and se education counseling, abortion services being only a tiny percentage of their activities.  Most other advanced nations have comprehensive sex education and grasp the reality that teens are going to have sex no matter what the godly folk want to believe in their alternate universe.  One need only look at data that shows that teen pregnancies are the highest in the Bible Belt (and that evangelical Christians have the highest divorce rates).  The Christofascusts' approach to sex education is as nonsensical as the advice the nuns gave my former wife in Catholic school in New York City: "if you have to sit in a boy's lap in a crowded car, put a copy of the New York phone book between you."  The column goes on to offer other solutions to this problem caused by puritanical views and America's sick definition of what it means to be a man:

This, even though young Americans are not necessarily the most sexually active youth of developed countries, according to a previous Guttmacher report. That report pointed out two important issues. First, “less contraceptive use and less use of hormonal methods are the primary reasons U.S. teenagers have the highest rates of pregnancy, childbearing and abortion.” Second, “more sexual partners, a higher prevalence of infection and, probably, less condom use contribute to higher teenage sexually transmitted disease rates in the United States.”

Most want fewer unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. And, most want fewer women to have to face the often wrenching decisions about what to do about such pregnancies.

There are some rather simple ways to move in this direction if we can agree to be less puritanical and more practical. We could, for example, begin teaching young people to value themselves in a way that contextualizes the initiation of sexual activity as a thing fully within their control and not so easily manipulated by peer and societal pressures. 

Furthermore, we must provide thorough and unimpeded sex education — in the home and at school — about how to engage in sex safely and responsibly. And, we must provide a full range of reproductive services — prophylactic and contraceptive as well as post-pregnancy. Here we are moving in the wrong direction. A Guttmacher report released last week found that more abortion restrictions were enacted in the last three years than in the previous decade.

Furthermore, much of the discussion about single-parent families and births outside of marriage is focused too heavily on young women and is simply a form of sex shaming that blames them for not being proper guardians of chastity. The shaming itself is a shame, and often inflames the pathology of patriarchy in our culture. 

We teach boys, overtly and implicitly, that sexual potency is a marker of masculinity and that empathy and emotional depth are purviews of a lesser sex. The ways we force boys to adhere to a perilously narrow reading of masculinity become a form of “oppression all dressed up as awesomeness,” as Lisa Wade, an Occidental College sociology professor, put it last month in Salon.

Boys are not taught to value themselves as fully human, but only as conquerors of everything — women, the workplace, the world. And men who are incapable of valuing their own humanity are incapable of fully valuing the humanity of a love interest.

We can address our societal problems, but to do so we must first address our societal issues. 

Will any of these common sense solutions be implemented?  Not if the Christofascists and their political whores in the GOP have anything to say about it.   Instead we will see more denial of objective reality and modern knowledge as these people cling to a Bronze Age world perpetuated by unthinking acceptance of the Bible.  Another informative article notes this: 

It's no coincidence that the states with the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections are also the same places where young people are taught to simply not have sex.