Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/25/erin-go-bragh.html
…
12 Likes
About fucking time.
25 Likes
I have been working on the repeal campaign for 6 years, I was one of the organisers of the march that the BB article’s photo was taken from. And I’m not going to count any chickens before the result is in, the two polls that were published last night have me incredibly emotional. I have so much faith in my fellow countrypeople, that they stood with us, that the other side’s lies, emotional blackmail and seemingly endless budget couldn’t stand up to a grassroots campaign with the facts on our side.
The day of the marriage equality referendum results, I was in Dublin doing a stall for repeal, and so many people came over to me saying “abortion is next”. I would never have said it would be this quick, or this decisive. Of course, this vote isn’t even the end of the campaign but rather the beginning. The referendum only removes the constitutional ban on abortion, and we’ve got a months-long campaign ahead of us to ensure the proposed legislation passes in the Dáil, and an endless one to ensure it doesn’t get diluted, repealed itself, or fucked with by an Irish equivalent of TRAP laws.
58 Likes
You’ve gone above and beyond in the cause of creating an enlightened society. Well done!!!
13 Likes
I’ll just say good job. I’ve family over there that were pretty active in the marches and supporting your campaign and others for this repeal.
Just a couple days after the marriage equality vote I was on the BBS saying it was unlikely that’d we’d see significant change on this because of the “its more complicated” bits you reference and the way these subjects butt up on the church/state and secularization issues in Ireland. You worked hard and proved me wrong.
And for the Americans who might try to get smug on this I’ll say this:
They beat us to marriage equality.
And noone should forget that a good part of that constitutional Amendment’s existence was solely down to the American Right’s love for shoving their crazy into foreign governments. Far right American politicians all but wrote the damn thing, and damn sure helped whip the major Irish political parties into a fervor over Roe v Wade.
19 Likes
When the current batch of over 65s dies off Ireland will be much improved.
5 Likes
So long as we’re being harsh about it.
I dunno if we can give enough credit to the Catholic Church for covering up all that kiddie diddlin’
Its sad and fucked up. But without the molestation scandal neither this or nor marriage equality would have happened. Popular anger, even among the religious, about that has spurred a rapid move away from The Church in Ireland. The one family member I have who was nominally opposed to repeal. Has resigned herself to quietly facebooking the occasional American pro-life meme. She made it a point of telling everyone she wouldn’t be voting and the dirty priests were why.
This is a woman who used to make us spend all our limited visit time in or around churches and holy sites. And now she spends a hell of a lot of time bitching about “those bishops and what they get up to”. Still religious as hell but she’s very, very, very angry at the church body.
Apparently she’s still “pro-life” but doesn’t have a stance on what the law should say.
17 Likes
My spiteful side is glad the auld ones lived long enough to see results of the marriage and 8th referendums.
2 Likes
It’s kind of a surprise that the ban was put in “only” in the 80s and it was done by referendum.
3 Likes
12 Likes
What has happened in Ireland in the last generation makes me think of what happened in Québec in the 60s during the Quiet Revolution. People just turned away from the church on mass. Everyone was so fed up with them having their hands in everything.
12 Likes
A lot of rural people wanted to vote “NO” but they couldn’t get past the Goat Gangs.
1 Like
First official result is in, 60.2% for yes in Galway East
6 Likes
My wife’s family is Irish (Kellys from Ennis) and they always said, “Ireland is the land of Guiness and guilt”.
3 Likes
9 Likes
And it’s Abortion Referendum in the lead, followed by Glory Be To God.
(deliberate misquote from the New Jack City episode)
The anti-abortion camp would like you to believe that they have always been at war with Eastasia, but in fact the whole anti-abortion plank of the religious right was invented out of whole cloth in the early 80’s. The anti-abortion plank of Catholic doctrine dates from the 1800’s, but the fact that Ireland didn’t enact this constitutional ban until the 1980’s speaks volumes, i think, to how much the ban owes its existence to reaction against feminism, and to American politics and political money jumping across the ocean.
From Christianity Today in 1979:
God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.
From Ethics: Alternatives and Issues (1971), by Norman L. Geisler, a prominent conservative evangelical theologian (quoted from here):
C. When Abortion Is JustifiedAbortion is neither the murder of a human person nor a mere operation on or ejection of an appendage of the female body. It is a sober responsibility to take the life of a would-be human being. The only morally justifiable circumstances for abortion are those in which there is a higher moral principle which can be served.
Abortion for Therapeutic Reasons — When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. Just as the flower has more value than the germinating seed (a potential flower), so the mother is of more value than the embryo. She is a mature, free, autonomous subject, whereas the unborn has only the potential to become such.
[snip]
Hence, the higher intrinsic value of a mother must not be determined by what she does but by what she is. And the mother’s actual humanity is of more value than the unborn’s potential for it.
All of this went down the memory hole when certain members of the religious right, in the process of creating a thing that we can call the religious right, decided to make abortion their stalking horse - a thing to rally the troops around in the process of fighting feminism and selling out to the interests of corporations and the wealthy.
A book I have not read which I am told covers the transformation in detail: Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics by Jonathan Dudley.
18 Likes
As best I can determine, That’s a photo of an performance art piece from last year on the dozen or so women a day who had to leave Ireland in order to get an abortion. Got misattributed and then turned viral because, hey, it’s a powerful image, as you’d expect from well done performance art.
Here’s two articles with actual photos of Irish citizens coming #hometovote:
6 Likes
Well that’s a novel solution, not to mention original and never heard on campus’ around the world.
Let’s be frank, if you truly want >65s to have less influence, the answer is to dismantle modern healthcare. All of it. It’s the only reason we have so many >30s around anyhow. Those no-goodniks.
1 Like
