Ireland did it!

It's been marvelous to see Ireland, a country that's 87% Catholic, approve gay marriage by public vote. That's tellin' em! I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Vatican -- or hell, even a fly on the wall of St. Patrick's Cathedral in NYC -- to hear the gnashing of teeth up close and personal.

The Roman Catholic church fought this day with their usual psychopathic intensity but it was all for naught. Hahaha. That's the second best thing about this. (The first is that gay men and lesbians can marry in Ireland, of course.)

My favorite rundown was provided by Grania Spingies at Jerry Coyne's blog. Go read it if you want some joy.

Ireland, you did well. Very very well. I loved everything about the campaign and it was great to have Panti Bliss sprinkled on top. What a grand day this is.

(Let's laugh one more time at the Vatican: hahahahahahaha. Fun!)

Catholic bishops try to kill women

DUBLIN — Ireland's Catholic bishops have urged lawmakers to block a government bill that would permit exceptional abortions to protect the lives of women. 

The bishops "argue that the bill is not necessary to protect women". Indeed. And what will protect them? The bishops? Hardly. There is no other course of action. The choice is stark: terminate the pregnancy, or die.

The bishops choose "die". Every day, in every way, the Catholic church shows its hatred for women.

The insanity of Roman Catholic bishops

Ireland's Roman Catholic bishops say the public should lobby lawmakers to reject a bill that would allow abortions to save the life of the mother. 

The bishops in a statement Friday say the bill represents "a dramatic and morally unacceptable change to Irish law." 

Raping children is fine but saving the life of a woman is "morally unacceptable". That's Roman Catholicism for you. The priests speak of morality all the time but have no understanding of what the word means.

Roman Catholicism kills woman in Ireland

You probably know that a Hindu woman died in Ireland because the hospital wouldn't provide an abortion -- even though there was no chance that her fetus could survive. They simply let her die along with the unborn child. The case is now at trial.

DUBLIN (AP) — The husband of a woman who died after being denied an abortion in an Irish hospital accepted an apology Thursday from a midwife who, when explaining why the plea was rejected, said Ireland was "a Catholic country."

(snip)

Halappanavar was 17 weeks pregnant when, hospitalized for pain, doctors informed her that the fetus would die. As her miscarriage pains worsened over the next three days, doctors refused her pleas for a termination because they could still detect a fetal heartbeat. By the time the fetus did die, Halappanavar was suffering from blood poisoning and died of organ failure 3 1/2 days later. 

Roman Catholicism killed this woman as surely as if the pope positioned her head in a guillotine. Religions don't like women. They don't like them at all.

Dark Catholic deeds in Ireland

Ireland has apologized for allowing the systematic abuse of women by Catholic nuns.

DUBLIN (AP) — Ireland ignored the mistreatment of thousands of women who were incarcerated within Catholic nun-operated laundries and must pay the survivors compensation, Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Tuesday in an emotional state apology for the decades of abuses in the so-called Magdalene Laundries. 

"By any standards it was a cruel, pitiless Ireland, distinctly lacking in a quality of mercy," Kenny said, as dozens of former Magdalenes watched tearfully from parliament's public gallery overhead. 

(snip)

A government-commissioned report published two weeks ago found that more than 10,000 women were consigned to the laundries after being branded "fallen" women, a euphemism for prostitutes, even though virtually none of them were — and instead were products of poverty, homelessness and dysfunctional families. More than a quarter were directly referred by public officials, such as judges or truancy officers, and all spent months or years in menial labor without access to education. Most did laundry for local hotels, hospitals and prisons, while others scrubbed floors or made rosary beads for the church's profit. 

Each page of this church's history is riddled with horror. There is no light anywhere. As I told a Roman Catholic friend, "If there was a god at the heart of your church, these things wouldn't happen." But there is no god, and religion is just a fairytale. This fact makes the abuse more nightmarish, leaving only cruelty as the motivating force for depriving so many women of everything that matters in life. Every person involved in the running of this "laundry" should be imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Do you doubt that the Vatican was completely aware of what went on in this laundry? If there was still a living pope from those days, he would belong in a jail cell with the other perpetrators.

Even worse than we imagined

Evil popey guy.

From HuffPo today:

VATICAN CITY (RNS) A new report by the Irish branch of Amnesty International says the sexual abuse of children by Ireland's Roman Catholic priests "included acts that amounted to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment."

The 430-page report, released Monday (Sept. 26), "reminds us that Irish children were subjected to treatment that would be horrifying if it were done to prisoners of war, never mind little boys and girls," said Ireland's Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Frances Fitzgerald, in Dublin.

The Roman Catholic Church is a child-raping, criminal enterprise. Never forget this.

Funny NYT story today about the vatican

The evil popey guy.

Remember how Ireland's prime minister laid out the popey guy last week for encouraging priestly abuse with his shady rules? (I wrote about it here.) Well, there's an even funnier follow-up today. It made me roar with laughter. You really have to read it in full to appreciate it. Here are a few outtakes:

First, and I loved this, the vatican said it will issue a response to Ireland's charges of priestly abuse and vatican-controlled hiding of the abuse: "at the 'opportune time' but has not done so yet." Don't you love these guys? They don't care what anyone on the planet thinks. They've got god on their side, you know.

Today's new episode in the Colorful Adventures of the Popey Guy is that, in response to the dead-honest charges of the Irish Prime Minister, the vatican recalled its ambassador. Ooooh. Rough, huh? (And right off the bat, you have to love the fact that they have an "ambassador". What pompous twits these vatican fellows are.) The article says:

"The Vatican acknowledged that the recall of an ambassador was a measure rarely adopted by the Holy See, underlining the 'seriousness of the situation'." 

Are you rolling on the floor laughing yet? They abuse little kids and then hide it, and they have absolutely no problem with that. No-o. That's fine. But being called on it makes them pull their ambassador to underline "the seriousness of the situation". The "seriousness" is entirely about the vatican's reaction to being called on the carpet, not about the raping of kids. It's all about them, isn't it? They're always in the right. It wouldn't even matter if their priests raped little boys on live TV every night. They would still be in the right. And why? Because they literally can do no wrong.

Then, to cap it all off, a vatican operative named Ciro Benedettini actually expressed "some degree of surprise and disappointment at certain excessive reactions." Okay, I know you're roaring with laughter now.

Since you probably won't go read the whole article, here's a hefty piece of it to remind you what this tiff is all about:

A confidential 1997 Vatican letter — originally published by The Associated Press in January — instructed Irish bishops to handle child-abuse cases strictly under terms of canon law. It warned bishops that their 1996 child-protection policy, particularly its emphasis on the need to start reporting all suspected crimes to police, violated canon law.

Kenny said Catholic canon law had "neither legitimacy nor (a) place in the affairs of this country." He pledged to press ahead with new laws making it a crime to withhold evidence of child abuse — even if the information was attained during a priest's confession. The Catholic Church insists that the contents of confessions must never be revealed.

They will never ever admit the horrible things they've done -- and are apparently still doing. That popey guy's got a violent posse over there in his secret vatican headquarters. I wonder if they use special gang hand symbols when no one else is around. Probably, huh?

Priests continue to pose risks to Catholic children

The New York Times has a story today about child abuse by Irish priests. Here's an excerpt:

DUBLIN (AP) — A new investigation into the Catholic Church's chronic cover-up of child abuse found Wednesday that a rural diocese and its bishop ignored Irish church rules requiring all suspected molestation cases to be reported to police — and the Vatican encouraged this concealment. 

The government, which ordered the probe into 1996-2009 cover-ups in the County Cork diocese of Cloyne, warned its findings suggest that parishes across Ireland could pose a continuing danger to children's welfare today.

I didn't say it; they did. Go here to read the full story.