In the last week, two senior politicians, Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, and Green party leader, John Gormley, have effectively told both the Church, and by extension, religious believers, to ‘know your place’. In an interview with The Irish Times, Minister Ahern reiterated his view that politicians must leave their religion to one side when legislating...
Last Saturday, Breda O’Brien dealt with the issue of Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR) in her column in the Irish Times. She makes the point that the AHR industry here is completely unregulated here, and that, because children conceived through sperm or egg donation have no right to know who their biological parents are, there is...
Last Thursday night in conjunction with The Irish Catholic we hosted Dr Eric Kaufmann who addressed an audience of about 120 people on the topic of his latest book, ‘Will the Religious Inherit the Earth?’ Kaufmann (himself on the secular (but moderate) side of the religious/secular divide) believes that predictions of the eventual secularisation of...
Yesterday on this blog Tom O’Gorman attacked Mary O’Rourke for smearing any and all critics of the proposed children’s rights referendum without so much as pausing to consider their arguments. (So much for reasoned debate). Today John Waters makes much the same point in his Irish Times column. One passage in his column is particularly...
Fianna Fáil TD Mary O’Rourke, who chaired the Oireachtas committee which produced the proposed wording for the children’s referendum, has slammed possible opponents of the wording as “the forces of old”. It isn’t the first time she has attempted to get her smears in first. Actually, her latest remarks represent a slight dialling down of...
First it was Raquel Welch denouncing the legacy of the Pill. Now Dame Joan Bakewell, a long standing liberal campaigner, has admitted that Mary Whitehouse, a noted campaigner against sexual and violent television programmes, was actually right to worry about the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In an article in The Radio Times, Dame Joan...
The Civil Partnership Bill was back at Committee stage yesterday (Thursday) and the issue of a conscience clause was once again considered and dismissed for the usual spurious reasons. Justice Minister Dermot Ahern told the Committee that “members of the public service (with) issues from their religious beliefs” have to “put those aside on the...
Breda O’Brien’s Irish Times column on sex education last Saturday contained a lot of food for thought and is well worth a read. Perhaps the most interesting point she makes is that, contrary to popular opinion, what parents say about sex has a major influence on teenagers and their sexual behaviour. She writes: “For example,...
In my Irish Independent column of last Friday I write about the upcoming Civil Partnership Bill. If you are a regular visitor to this website you already know that the Bill makes no provision for freedom of conscience. Instead the Bill, by amending the Employment Equality Act and the Equal Status Act will treat belief...
Noted US theologian and religious commentator George Weigel has written a thoughtful piece on the challenges posed to religious freedom in America. Arguing that notwithstanding historic prejudice against Catholics in that country, Weigel argues that Catholics have always thrived there, but he suggests that threats to religious liberty mean that this is “a unique moment,...
