So this has been the news of Ireland for the past day. 796 remains of children where discarded and hidden away by the Bon Secours nuns in a septic tank on the grounds of an old “mother and babies” home in Tuam Co. Galway from sometime in the 1920s until the 1960s. These homes were common in Ireland to where unmarried mothers were sent to because they’ve brought shame on their family in the eyes of their religion.
I’d appreciate it if this was spread around on tumblr because many people don’t realise that this was what happened in this country. The General reaction from Irish folk was dismay and disgust and most importantly many were “not surprised” when this report’s findings were released. And The Catholic Church still has a stronghold on the country today.
And in unsurprising news the Irish pro-life groups and infamous spokespeople have been silent so far in condemning the actions and atrocities of the Catholic Church.
I’d add this comment, from a pissed off Irish bloke on fb:
^ these people covered up the deaths of born children in a septic tank but they are the moral authority on whether women can get rid of unwanted pregnancies?
I don’t read the news and I haven’t listened to the radio in the last few days so I’ve no idea if this has been widely reported in the British news, but this is the first I’d heard of it. I’ve done a bit of reading now. My mum grewup in C Cork, near Galway (where the grave was found), and was a teenager in Ireland in the 60s. The thought that getting pregnant, whether consensual or not, could have landed her in one of these places, and my resultant half-sibling in a septic tank grave, is horrifying.
It’s worth noting this is not the first time mass graves have been discovered attatched to former Mothers and Babies Homes and Magdalene Lanudaries. In 1993, 155 corpses were exhumed from a Sisters of Our Lady of Charity home in Dublin. In that case, even as the bodies were exhumed (the Sisters had sold the land to a property developer to recoup losses they’d made on the stock market, yes really) it was not reported. However, as word spread outrage did grow, leading to the enquiries and damning reports into these institutions later in the decade.
In the above more recent case, it was apparently fairly common knowledge locally that the site contained a mass grave since two boys stumbled across it in 1975. It’s horribly safe to assume that these two cases aren’t isolated and that there are many more mass graves in Ireland.
The children died of ‘natural’ causes, but neglect, malnutition and abuse hurried many on their way, or killed otherwise healthy children outright.
And to justify cutting Welfare and defunding food programs, Republicans disingenuously equate having the basic necessities needed to live — like food — to dignity. Following that logic, are we to believe that wealthy people somehow have more dignity than poor people, because they have more access to more resources like housing, food and clean drinking water? Do the mostly white residents of Bismarck North Dakota have more dignity than the Native Americans at Standing Rock? Do Donald Trump’s children somehow have more “dignity” than does Little Miss Flint? Because Trump’s children don’t need to depend on free lunch programs?
Wealth ≠ dignity.
Access to resources ≠ dignity.
People living in or born into poverty do not have less dignity. They have less wealth and less political power.
Providing free school lunches to children living in poverty doesn’t “give kids an empty soul” it simply feeds hungry children. Feeding a hungry child lunch is not “giving them undue comfort” or making them lazy, it’s simply feeding a hungry child. How did feeding hungry children become a controversial act for “Christian” conservatives?
Intentionally starving children to teach them the “dignity” of hunger is inhumane.
Stop stigmatizing poverty. Stop equating poverty with a lack of dignity. Stop reinforcing the notion that poor people have no dignity just because they’re poor. There is no nobility in starvation, and there is no benevolence in allowing children or anyone else to go hungry when you possess the power to prevent it.
Interesting you should bring up the ‘Christanity’ of these people, because there’s something the man himself has to say about that: Matthew 25:34-40 – Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, my Father has blessed you! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. 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 took me into your home. I needed clothes, and you gave me something to wear. I was sick, and you took care of me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’ Then the people who have God’s approval will reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or see you thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you as a stranger and take you into our homes or see you in need of clothes and give you something to wear? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ The king will answer them, ‘I can guarantee this truth: Whatever you did for one of my brothers or sisters, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did for me.’
Okay, new rule: if you regularly consume the blood and flesh of a demigod in a room full of chanting elders you’re not allowed to call other religions primitive and evil
This is oddly specific and leaves some very interesting questions unanswered.
Catholicism sure does sound weird when you put it that way.
And the other things that I am doing, in no small part because the Republicans would HATE IT:
Read a lot of slash
Write a lot of slash
Partly because, yes, it’s a relaxing thing where I can read about love and feel better. And partly because I like doing things that would make James Dobson clutch his pearls.
But also because slash was a huge part of what made me question my conservative Evangelical upbringing, become a liberal, vote for and support progressive causes, and eventually realize that I was bi myself.
How so, Laura? You ask. That’s just silly. They’re only stories.
I am the daughter of an Evangelical minister, raised in the deep South. I went to religious school. All of my activities were either church or school-focused. Everyone in my social circle was from either church or school. I knew a tiny handful of people who weren’t white and nobody at all who was openly LGBTQ. I was told very little about sex and what I was told was steeped in sexist, racist, homophobic rhetoric. (The curriculum my school used for sex “education” was called “Sex Respect.” Look it up; it’shorrifying.) I was literally taught that Christians could only vote for Republicans. (”What about Christians who vote for Democrats?” I asked, and was told, dubiously, that they MIGHT not go to hell, but that they were certainly not following the Lord’s will. I was also raised to view other, more liberal Christians with skepticism.) One of my proudest achievements in 10th grade or so was when I wrote an anti-abortion poem (called, I shudder to recall, something like “the cries of the murdered children”) and it was published in the school newsletter and put up on the main bulletin board, right outside the office.
So I went away to college, a wee Christian Republican, and landed in a dorm with free broadband internet. I met people who weren’t like me, and made friends with them, for the first time in my life! I was still in the South, and still keeping pretty squarely to religious college circles, but I was at least meeting people of other races and religions, and liberal Christians who showed me a different side of my faith. I still didn’t know any out LGBTQ people, but I was scandalized by my RA, who I thought was super cool, being in both Campus Crusade for Christ and Straight But Not Narrow. Eventually, I had a gay computer science TA, and I remember looking at his rainbow jewelry with wide eyes, like I was seeing an alien. (Hopefully, he just thought I was confused by the homework.)
(Note: I was VERY confused by the homework, and he was a FANTASTIC TA, and I would never have passed that class without him. Bless you, gay CS TA.)
Anyway, at the same time, I started devouring fanfic for the shows I loved, X-Files and Star Trek and Star Wars.
And I discovered… so much.
I had been so sheltered that I was rabidly curious for ANY information about sex. Before college, my best sources had been Harlequins and medical dictionaries and old sex manuals from the 70s I snuck peeks at when browsing the used bookstores. I learned at church camp that “fellatio” meant “oral sex”, but I didn’t know what that WAS. I was eighteen years old, and I thought that how sex worked was that the man stuck it in, came immediately, and then pulled back out again. (Somehow I guess the Harlequins had been too purple-prose in their sex scenes to convey the idea of thrusting?) And here was the information superhighway, ready to give me not only information, but lovingly crafted stories of Mulder and Scully (my obsession at the time) falling in love. And falling into bed.
I was scandalized the first time I discovered slash. It was a Mulder/Skinner, and it was super tame – nobody even did anything physical, it was just an acknowledgement of an attraction. But it seemed like the most transgressive thing EVER to me. And we all know about the erotic charge of the taboo, right?
I started reading slash. Lots of slash. X-Files and Star Wars and Star Trek and Highlander and Sentinel and Due South and Pros and Buffy and Starsky and Hutch and anything else that was well written or had characters I even halfway cared about. At first it was because, honestly, it was hot, and I felt guilty every time even though I wasn’t going to stop. I reasoned that it wasn’t real, right? Just stories. No real people were doing anything wrong, and masturbation was only a sin if you fantasized about real people while you did it.
And then, over time, I got more and more uncomfortable with the sorts of things my church said about “homosexuals.” Because even though I still didn’t have any close friends who were gay, I’d spent several years reading gay love stories, and you know what happened? I loved those characters. I identified with them, I felt for them, I wanted them to live happily ever after and get married if they wanted to and have families if they wanted to and they weren’t doing anything wrong by loving each other.
And if Ray and Fraser, or Jim and Blair, or Kirk and Spock, weren’t doing anything wrong and should be protected, then the real live actual LGBTQ people in the real world weren’t doing anything wrong, and they should be protected, and my family and my school and my church had been lying to me all along.
That wasn’t an easy conclusion to reach. It was hard. It hurt. I sat in my room desperately Googling “can Christians support gay rights” and “what does the Bible say about being gay” and sobbing. I was afraid. What if this was what my mother, my teachers, had warned me about, that I would go away to school and lose my way, lose the truth, backslide, lose my salvation? Would my family love me anymore if they knew? I had started drifting a little leftward politically and testing the waters with relatively minor things like opposing the death penalty and my mother had harangued me about it until I cried; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for something like this.
But once my eyes had been opened, there was no going back. I was afraid, but I had to be honest with myself.
I left my church. I went to a more liberal church that some gay people went to, and that used gender-inclusive language and didn’t preach about “homosexuality”. It was still Baptist, though not Southern Baptist, and they had a brick church and a steeple and choir robes, so it passed well enough to get my mom off my back.
I stopped hanging out with only church people and made fandom friends, and many of them were LGBTQ.
Today, I’ve moved churches again, and now I’m happily to go to a social justice-promoting Episcopalian church with a sweet, grandmotherly priest. I have many dearly loved friends who are LGBTQ, and I’ve realized that I myself am bisexual, though I don’t think I’ll ever come out to my family or to anyone who might tell my family. I am solidly progressive in my values and my charitable spending and my letters to Congress and the things I speak up for.
Eighteen-year-old me would have probably voted for Trump, even after all the ugliness, because Trump was the Republican and good Christians vote Republican and I was a good Christian.
Slash was the thin end of the wedge that cracked open my perspective so I could entertain the thought that maybe the things I’d been taught weren’t true. I’m not saying that’s the only way it could have happened, but that’s the way it did happen.
So I’m going to keep voting and speaking up and donating to progressive causes. I’m going to give all the support I can to the marginalized and oppressed in the real world. Of course I am. But also? For all the kids growing up in conservative and Christian families, who have an uneasy sense that some things don’t quite ring true? For the ones who are struggling with questions and doubts, as well as the ones who are smugly sure of themselves? For the ones who know they don’t believe but aren’t safe to say so? For the ones who know they’re different but they’ve never met anyone like them and feel so alone? For all of the kids who are like I was…
Steel Phoenix Studios 