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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I was reading a terrible thing about Irish Catholicism recently. In the 1930s, there was a rise in extreme belief, parallel to the hysteria about the Eucharistic Congress - which is a gathering of believers in the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. The general hysteria about the conference, possibly the biggest even since independence, influenced even Protestants, particularly the young, into a firmly held belief in transubstantiation. Probably this was an old version of social contagion.

A Protestant child at a Protestant school in Mayo asked his teacher if he believed in transubstantiation. The teacher, an evangelical protestant, said he didn’t. The school immediately fired him, but the teacher refused to leave, arguing that his had the right to his religious beliefs which should be accommodated, particularly given the religious nature of the school.

He was jailed numerous times by a judiciary sympathetic to Catholic theology, supposedly for breach of an injunction when he refused to not turn up for work. He wasn’t given any chance to plead his case, even though he argued that the case was a clear example of religious discrimination something the Irish constitution prohibits.

Even worse (and though people know about the Magdalene laundries this isn’t so well known) there was an increasing tendency at the time - something still seen in Islamic countries today - to castrate and bring up as female any post pubescent boy who exhibited homosexual tendencies, and to bring up as male any girl who exhibited lesbian tendencies. Sometimes the latter also involved irreversible medical treatments. Like a mastectomy.

What an ugly and irrational age, and we are lucky to be rid of it.

  • -29

I suspect given the lack of identifying details for this case provided, nor any results showing up for an alleged 1930s incident in Mayo, that you made the whole thing up, and/or filed the serial numbers off a current court case involving trans people and changed the names, entities, location and context in an attempt to create "gotcha" bait.

and/or filed the serial numbers off a current court case involving trans people and changed the names, entities, location and context in an attempt to create "gotcha" bait

It sounds like a reference to the recently controversial Enoch Burke, a Protestant teacher whose objection to the use of 'they' pronouns for a student spiralled into him being suspended from his job on accusations of harassing the principle for an answer, his banning from the school grounds by a court while the suspension was being appealed, his jailing for 3 months for contempt of court when he repeatedly showed up at the school despite the ban, and lately his family members getting forcefully ejected from a court after he finally lost his appeal against the ban.