Secular Café: Ireland needs to secularise

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Ireland needs to secularise Mar 24th 2013, 10:55 I just saw this. Sorry it's over a week late. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...s-dei-catholic Quote: There is no conspiracy here. It's no secret that US pro-life groups, with support from Irish American Catholic communities, need the myth of an abortion-free Ireland and financially support the denial of abortion rights to Irish women (rights to which, it is important to remember, their sisters, daughters and wives have safe, legal access). And it is no secret that Roman Catholic doctrine grants equal personhood to a pregnant woman and a zygote (with room for manoeuvre if its hospital funding may be cut or if it's being sued). And it's no secret that almost 90% of Irish people still identify as Catholic. Knowing about industrial schools, the Magdalene laundries, and the systematic and illegal cover up of child sex abuse, we continue to affiliate ourselves with this institution. Without wanting to insult Dr Crown, whose comparatively progressive voice I very much welcome, I must argue that the struggle is not to unmask the masons, the Illuminati, or the Opus Dei clandestinely influencing Ireland's socio-political structures. The struggle is to secularise the republic. Crown is brave enough to look for bad Opus Dei apples, but not to upset the whole rotten apple cart. Even as he warns against the influence of fanatics, he seeks to differentiate himself from those advocating "abortion on demand". This is a phrase parroted time and again in the Irish abortion debate, conjuring up images of precocious teenagers yelling "I want another abortion Daddy! I want one now!". As Lisa McInerney convincingly writes, this kind of language obscures and trivialises the myriad valid, often tragic, reasons that more than 4,000 Irish women travel to Britain to use abortion services each year. Further, the use of this language denies the capacity of women to make their own informed moral decisions about when human life begins and when pregnancies can and should be terminated. The phrase "abortion on demand" is itself fanatical. To what "higher authority" as regards the complex philosophical and moral problem of abortion is it indebted? And is there any "conflict of interest" here that Crown, as a senator, would like to tell us about?

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