Good work! Between this and marriage equality, Ireland has become a shining light as of late, and it’s the work of people like you who make me take pride in my Irish heritage!
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I have a hope that the 45-75 cohort are worse than regular Humans because of lead. Aggression, impulsiveness, slightly lower intelligence… Looks around at the world.
The bad news is that they are at their peak political power right now. The good news is that peak starts to receed now, and perhaps the general awfulness of their policies will get the young to vote more than normal pulling it forward.
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Some context please? I find that photo meaningless, even after clicking through to Twitter about it.
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I took it as representing Irish women who had to fly over seas to get an abortion?
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Thanks for these quotes! I always prefer to be able to refer to churchy people when making my pro-choice arguments (not that it comes up all that much in my deep-blue, non-church-going state).
Actually, I seem to remember that in the olden days, ensoulment was said to occur one month post-partum.
Sure, possible. Also that as one accumulates property, one’s interests shift. Also, one gets into habits like voting.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. And it sort of goes the other way.
It’s not like they just suddenly invented an opposition to abortion. Catholic opposition to abortion goes back pretty damn far. Even being a big stumbling block for the early feminism and women’s suffrage movements. Mormons as well. Along with most of your socially conservative protestant groups.
But the thing was. Up until recently American Christianity was very closely associated with the left. Abolition, early feminism, civil rights, the labor movement. All had deep ties to specific religious groups and were often organized early on through churches.
“Christian” wasn’t necessarily considered a single religion or a monolith at the time. Different denominations didn’t really coordinate. The socially conservative ones often stayed out of national level politics. And there was deep antipathy between the sects.
The abortion debate in the 60’s changed that. And especially in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Socially conservative religious groups that opposed abortion and birth control started coordinating with each other and right wing politicians with the explicit goal of preventing the legalization of abortion.
Roe v Wade was a massive defeat for them. And it sort of galvanized that end of American religious movements. Welding together the Catholics, Mormons, southern fundermentalist churches, And a subset of orthodox Jews mostly centered in NYC, into one cooperative block.
Where your correct is that what we now know as the religious right still didn’t exist. At the same time you also had George Wallace and his white supremacist campaign. Which Nixon borrowed for his “southern strategy” proving the racist, formerly Jim crow democrat element in the south could be used for electoral gain.
It wasn’t till the 80s when Reagan combined appeals to the then nacent religious right with Nixon’s Southern strategy to take the presidency that the religious side of it was validated, elevated, And tied completely to a broader far right socially conservative politics.
That same post Roe v Wade fury brought us the Irish 8th Ammendent. Conservative Irish politicians and the Catholic Church became concerned about a Roe v Wade style court ruling in Ireland. Enter American religious leaders and right wing politicians who saw a test case for an ammendent in the US and an opportunity to get a prolife toe hold in Europe by dictating terms to a developing country.
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The “home to vote” tag indicates these are some of those living overseas who flew back home to vote in this referendum. Mail-in voting wasn’t allowed, so many thousands flew back, sometimes at great expense, just to vote.
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A pedophilic patriarchy …I’m not sure what else you could add.
Excellent! Thanks!
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And just to add, it obviously - and deliberately - mirrors all the women who have had to leave the country to access abortion services, which is what makes the photo and a number of others like it so powerful. (It’s making me more than a bit choked up, actually.)
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Sorry, I’m not being ‘that guy’ but this phrase is ironic in multiple ways.
- Québec is mentioned. Where they speak French a bit. So the correct term ‘en masse’ (i.e. a French term) might have been expected.
- As written it could mean ‘they turned away from the Church because of (the subject of) Mass’ - Mass being one of the Catholic church’s main services.
As a lover of puns/plays on words, this unintentional one brought a real smile to my face.
Though I’m not going to go near the potentially offensive/disturbing double entendre (French, again) of
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I thought it was an image of women returning to vote (#hometovote), but it turns out otherwise.
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“Won by a landslide? Yeah, a landslide of DEAD BABIES!!!”
– that person you’ve run into carrying a giant, gruesome poster at what was supposed to be a family friendly event
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Ah yes, the giant assholes who enjoy going through life making everyone else angry with them. Don’t we have a cult for that? Oh, right, Westboro Baptist:
(archive.org version to avoid giving google juice)
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The Northern Irish Protestant Taliban Party are trying to pretend that the referendum result will not affect Northern Ireland.
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The group I’m a member of has one goal - free, safe legal abortion in Ireland. Our short-term objectives are repeal of the 8th amendment in the Republic and extension of the 1967 act to the North.
One down…
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Yes, the evangelical opposition to abortion isn’t very old:
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Begorah, that’s a lot of red hair!
