More abuse, but not on little boys.

I've got two news reports for you, both on the same subject.  This should horrify and shame all of us as members of the human race, that in the 20th century, a supposedly modern state could do this to a supposedly free people.

I refer to the country of Ireland.  The country of green fields, little people and the overbearing and (once) powerful Catholic Church, and the so called Magdalene Laundries four orders of that church ran from 1922 to 1996 in which over ten thousand young women were enslaved, working six days a week for no pay.  It is a story of humiliation, more than likely sexual abuse and certainly mental abuse, as these women were publicly called "Maggies", a term which brought them shame as "fallen women", even though many of them were sentenced there by the courts for petty crimes. It turns out that almost a third of them were there at the behest of the government of Ireland!

The Magdalene Laundries were a network of 10 institutions run by four religious orders — the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. They were used in certain cases to detain women considered deviant in what was a deeply conservative Roman Catholic country. Women who had children outside marriage, girls deemed flirtatious (so-called preventive cases), those with mental disabilities and even victims of sexual abuse were sent to the laundries, often turned in by family, where they simply disappeared from society.

A nice place to make that very inconvenient, flirtatious and disobedient daughter disappear!  With no questions asked, either, they must have been glad to get another free worker.

If there is any question over how dangerous it is to get the State and religious institutions mixed up with each other, this has got to be in the top five of perfect examples and illustrations to prove the point!

I hope this example helps many of you to understand, again, how many people, not just atheists and agnostics, simply cannot bring themselves to support institutions of religion.   This has nothing to do with belief.  It has everything to do with refusing to support an institution with an 1800+ year history of violence, repression, and horrible abuse, which is increasingly being shown today to have not only not stopped the abusive practices, but still advocates its repressive tendencies, as it fights for the right to force its misogynistic and patriarchal belief system on the rest of the US in the fight over contraception under "Obamacare".

It is time for these old institutions to just die.  They are harmful and do little to justify the money people give them.