While the news cycle is chewing over Bergdhal, Benghazi, the VA, etc. etc. Charles P. Pierce picks up on a Washington Post report by Terrence McCoy of a true horror story.
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 War on Women doesn't claim them alone as victims; it also falls on children.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
It is a standard talking point from the Republican Party these days, that America is a Christian Nation, that we need to return to the traditional values the Founding Fathers embraced, that the separation of Church and State has no basis in the Constitution, that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion means if you object to someone else imposing their morality on you, you are imperiling THEIR freedom and attacking THEIR faith, and yadda, yadda, yadda.
In this, they are interchangeable with the Taliban, who also believe in faith-based government, albeit a different faith. The union of Church and State into a unified whole is an embrace of authoritarianism and antithetical to democracy. The will of the people is irrelevant when the government's authority is based not on them , but on an irrefutable, unchallegable divine writ.
And here's the thing about authoritarian rule: it falls hardest on those with least power, usually women, children, the poor, minorities. It needs victims, to demonstrate what happens to those who step out of line, and to place itself above them as morally superior. And since such groups are usually dominated by male leaders, it's not surprising that women end up on the victim list.
But it doesn't take a total fusion of Church and State to create horror or abuse. Sometimes all it takes is a ceding of the moral authority of the state to organized sanctimony, a blind eye, and no accountability. Here's Pierce.
The Republic Of Ireland has been doing a very hard job over the past couple of decades of confronting the awful legacy of having its civil government so closely married to the institutional Roman Catholic Church. For years, the Church was given a free hand in running a great deal of what passed for educational and social-welfare policies in Ireland. The results were almost uniformly authoritarian and almost uniformly godawful, in every sense of that word.
Read the whole thing, and follow the links. The
Cloyne Report, the
Magdelene Laundries. A horror all in the name of
a morality that was still going strong up till the 1960s.
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.”
Terrible as the consequences for the women were, what happened to their chldren does not bear thinking about. As the
Washington Post reports:
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 were 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.”
Those who would ridicule the idea of a War on Women, who would treat it as a phantasm created by liberals to impose their agenda or a partisan ploy, need to have their faces rubbed in the fact that it is a war with a body count. It is far from being bloodless. Read
Pierce and the
Washington Post article and dare deny it.
The Philomena Project is trying to get access to Catholic Church files to find out what happened to children forcibly taken from their mothers and supposedly put up for adoption. The WP article suggests what those records might reveal may be far worse than anyone is expecting.
The horrors described above are not so far away when "slut-shaming" is still a popular pastime in some quarters, when an aggrieved young man buys into a delusional Mens Rights agenda with firearms, when a woman and her doctor have to share the examining room with government imposed dictates, when women are kept in poverty by unequal pay and budget cuts to vital programs, when efforts to address their needs are dismissed as Class Warfare...
This is a far from comfortable story to acknowledge, let alone comprehend. The world is all of a piece however. If we can't face up to the horrors in it, especially the ones humans create for themselves, we risk participating in them. We can do better. We must do better.