In a secular country
Protesters have disrupted church services across Poland in the latest show of discontent against a court’s near-total ban on abortion. The protesters staged sit-ins and held pro-abortion banners, interrupting Sunday Mass at some churches.
The protests are considered unusual in a country where the Roman Catholic church has great influence. They follow a ruling by Poland’s top court that ending the life of a deformed foetus is unconstitutional.
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Poland’s abortion laws were already among the strictest in Europe, with an estimated 100,000 women seeking a termination abroad each year to get around the tight restrictions.
The Catholic church as an institution hates women, whatever some nuns and priests may think.
In a park in Krakow, black underwear was hung up on lines between trees, while in Lodz, there was a protest in front of the city’s cathedral, where people called for a separation of church and state. Critics of the Catholic Church argue that it exerts too much political influence over government policy in Poland.
It’s like that here in the US, too. The Catholic church exerts way too much influence, especially over women and their bodies and their rights.
“I’m here today because it annoys me that in a secular country the church decides for me what rights I have, what I can do and what I’m not allowed to do,” one 26-year-old protester, Julia Miotk, told Reuters news agency.
It is indeed annoying.
I recommend reading Fintan O’Toole’s essay on William Barr and his thoroughly unpleasant Catholicism and ideas in the New York Review of Books:
Enabler in Chief
Fintan O’Toole
The attorney general exemplifies the growing influence of right-wing Catholicism under Trump.
And for many more years in the future, thanks to the composition of the Supreme Court.
Some political battles have to be fought over and over again: particularly against those who think they have a God-given right to decide how others shall live their lives.