Link to the full-text Free Republic thread.
.
Posted on 08/20/2014 2:02:05 PM PDT by NYer
Professor Jerry A. Coyne, professor of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, wrote one of the nastiest anti-Catholic diatribes I've read in a while; painting the Church as barbaric, sexist, and medieval and accusing it for torturing women. And then because he was still feeling it, he compared the Church to the most evilest of organizations in his estimation - The National Rifle Association.
Insert gasp here.
And The New Republic saw nothing wrong with this and decided to publish it.
The issue at hand has to do with a woman in Ireland (but not a citizen there) who wanted to abort her child but was refused even after she threatened suicide. She even went on a hunger strike and in order to protect her and the child she was forcibly hydrated. At 25 weeks, she ultimately consented to delivering the child.
Coyne wrote:
This whole scenario conjures up images of the Catholic Inquisition: women tied to boards and tortured. This poor victim, after having been raped and forced from her native land, was then strapped down, intubated, and forced to serve as an incubator for a fetus that nobody wants—save the Catholic Church. And of course the Church had no problems with the previous law preventing all abortions, nor apparently with the present law that won’t allow abortion if a woman harbors a deformed fetus, or one produced by rape or incest. Even if the woman is suicidal or her life otherwise endangered by the pregnancy, the law's “preserve-unborn-life” clause always offers a loophole.No surprise that Coyne is an avowed atheist. So when Coyne says "reason and public opinion" I'm pretty sure he means "you do what I say."
Official Catholicism has long been left in the dust by society’s opinions about women’s rights. This case has made palpably clear the Church’s barbarity and lack of concern for the well-being of pregnant women at the expense of Church doctrine. The people of Ireland want a liberalization of Ireland’s abortion laws, as does the United Nations, which claims that Irish law treats women like “vessels.” Only the Church, clinging to its antiquated view of “unborn human life,” objects.
How long can an institution continue to force a medieval morality on a country that doesn’t want it? Apparently, for many years. But it’s time for the people of Ireland to reject the retrograde and sexist mentality of Catholicism. Given the power of the Church in Ireland—similar to the power of the National Rifle Association in the U.S., which overrides the will of the people by threatening legislators with defeat—abortion reform will be slow. But even the Church must eventually bow to reason and public opinion.
Baby gets adopted by loving parents. Grows up and spends a 30 years in a boring factory job.
Baby gets adopted by loving parents. Grows up to be a career criminal, and winds up in prison.
IOW, Baby gets adopted and HAS A CHANCE TO SUCCEED OR FAIL IN LIFE. As opposed to being slaughtered in utero and having no chance at all.
Luther of course, Calvin, Knox, John Wesley (yes, really, and quite vicious). Lots and lots of eminent Britons of the “Age of Reason”, and hordes of Frenchmen. And the usual political suspects, including nearly every European leftist and liberal and avant-gardist of the 19th-20th century. Everyone from Garibaldi to Luis Bunuel.
It wasn't about God at all or politics. It was about MONEY and LAND.
Those institutions wanted and GOT the oodles of land that the Catholic Church owned. It was all about GREED.
No, it wasn’t all greed, or at least not simple Henry VIII type greed. This sort of thing went on long after both the English and French states had sequestered the bulk of Church lands and given them away to their favorites.
It certainly was politics, to a degree, but even that was marginal. There was no political basis for British intellectuals and politicians to be anti-Catholic to the degree so many of them were, as the remnant English Catholics weren’t even a plausible threat to the established order after @1750. A great deal was ideology, and religion, all this being inextricable.
In continental Europe in large part it was clearly politics., as there was a Catholic-Protestant split among the European powers and factions within them. Bismark for instance (a purely political animal like no other) objected to any institution he couldn’t control, and said so, quite frankly. He stopped persecuting the Church when he figured he needed them and could make deals.
Marx (and hordes of both his predecessors and followers) on the other hand had both an ideological and practical objection to Catholicism. Others like Victor Hugo had a purely ideological-philosophical cause.
Its complicated.
Yes, it is.
And this guy’s rhetorical flourishes, getting back to my point, are quite like what all those other people were saying, with a modern flavor of course. His complaints about the Church are driven by complicated mixed motives as they have always been.
I get it and I agree.
ROFLOL!
Thsnks for the correction. I went to Wikipedia in repose to your post. He also had a poisonous article about Anne Coulter. I have never met her but I knew her brother John well as he was finishing high school. I don’t always agree with Anne especially in her choice of POTUS candidates. I was brought up in gritty industrial New Haven and she in ultrawealthy New Canaan. I do feel a protective attitude toward Anne on other issues.
Just another anti-christian professor. They’re a dime a dozen.
Link to the full-text Free Republic thread.
.
Dohrn is at Northwestern Law. Ayers used to be at the U. of Illinois / Chicago.
Yes you are correct. I thought they both taught at the same University.
I’d be curious to know what he thinks about Islam.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.