One horror - two lessons

Today's post is about a particularly disturbing thing that has come to my attention.  Via Ophelia Benson's blog Butterflies and Wheels at FreeThought Blogs, there comes a revelation from Ireland that the Catholic Church, in partnership with the government of Ireland, between the years of  1960 and 1975 as over 25,000 children passed through Irish Catholic orphanages, allowed pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline to proceed with vaccine trials on those children without their knowledge or consent.

Now, this kind of thing is disturbing enough, that a sovereign nation's government could allow any kind of human trials to take place without industry standard consent, but for these trials to take place without public knowledge or proper oversight is astonishing.

This reveals two very disturbing problems.  First is that this is a clear case of the conflation of Church and State producing a situation where the public health and welfare has been not only ignored, but abused.  By BOTH church and state.  This alliance between the two was so taken for granted by the two most powerful organizations in Ireland that nobody saw a requirement to adhere to either law or commercial health or medical standards for patient consent.

If this alone doesn't disturb you, your moral compass isn't just broken, it's shattered.

The next issue is that this illustrates perfectly the fact that religion, as it gains power and influence, allows for such moral outrages as this, creating immense damage and harm to the people it is supposed to care about.  But being both too big for its britches and conflated with the secular power, it allows itself to ignore its responsibilities and to become a law unto itself.

Now, if all this just fine with you, then you won't care that the radical right wing of Christianity in the US is trying to create just such a theocracy for itself.  So, then you can just go on and ignore this.

But if you do care and don't want this to happen in this country, then please pay attention to politics and help vote the Conservatives out of office.  Your children and theirs depend on your actions today to protect their future interests!