Only the shadows of their eyes

February 28, 2012 By Fred Clark 19 Comments

“These children have faces, they have names, they have moms and dads, and they were all under five years old.”

“Wait for it. … Wait for it. … Tee-hee!”

“It’s not about your right as a gay person to dignity. It’s about our right to declare that you aren’t worthy of it.”

“Here’s someone whose career was derailed for being blasphemous. Well, as it turns out, she was right.”

“An elderly lifelong bachelor who lives with hundreds of other old, single men in a stylish European capital city has given strict orders to the world’s women and married heterosexual couples on the allowable methods for human impregnation.”

“It’s long past time we started focusing on the solutions that actually keep women healthy, instead of using basic aspects of women’s health as a tool of cultural, moral, and political control.”

“Many Christian laypeople remain confused because the voices arguing that biblical orthodoxy and evolution are mutually exclusive are louder and more prominent than any others.”

“To truly support religious liberty, one must never forget that what one person calls heresy, another simply calls choice.”

“And that’s when I decided I’m going to be totally independent, energy-wise.”

“Oh Lord I want to be in that number, When the Saints go marching in.” (via)

“Nobody could understand, though, what happened next, why the Washington coach, Rob Nugent, bothered to call time out. The fans didn’t know what he told his players there in the huddle: that as quickly as they could, foul No. 3.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized 19 Comments
  • FangsFirst

    I was a kid when O’Connor did that, and I was still very young when I found out about it happening (did not see it when it aired). I understood the context then, as she made it clear. I never understood why the picture was more important to people, young though I was.

    Still not very old, and I still don’t see it.

  • Anonymous

    I love Sinéad. I remember seeing her booed at the Bob Dylan tribute (on video; not like I was there), and I just couldn’t fucking believe that Dylan fans would boo someone for being an iconoclast.

    Some Links: Reason With Me;Nothing Compares 2 U.

  • http://loosviews.livejournal.com BringTheNoise

     Dylan fans booed DYLAN for being an iconoclast, never mind anyone else!

  • Anonymous

    In my defense, I was a mere teenager at the time, and fan new to Dylan; I didn’t know about the whole people hating him for “going electric” until years later.

    Fun fact: My in-laws were at one of his very early electric shows with the Butterfield Blues Band backing him up. At the time, people knew there was something happening on the tour, but they didn’t know what it was (no internet back then to spread the word). When he and his band came out for the second set (first set was acoustic), half the crowd booed through the first song and then started walking out, which was fine with my in-laws because they were able to go down front and dance.

  • http://twitter.com/jclor jclor

    An elderly lifelong bachelor

    Or, as I like to call him, “the creepy old man in the pretty dress.”

  • http://www.aqualgidus.org/ Michael Chui

    Okay, I was completely blindsided by where that last one was going. :P

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=687121933 Carrie Looney

    “They laugh ’cause they know they’re untouchable, not because what I said was wrong.”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFpregq5eJ4

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    Or as I’ve heard it said, “the guy who wears a dildo on his head and may therefore be called a dickhead.”

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    At first I wasn’t sure why they’d foul the player, but then I realized it was so they could let Cory score his goals without risking being harmed in the game.

  • Anonymous

    What was going on in Ireland was worse than the US scandal, if you can believe it.  The Irish church ran reform and industrial schools for the state, and those institutions had endemic and pervasive physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect of the children in their care.  In addition the boys had to deal with the chronic threat of sexual abuse.  The executive summary of the official government report gives a good idea how horrible things were:

    http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/ExecSummary.php 

  • Dan Audy

     Canada has similar issues with the Catholic church (and to a lesser degree the Anglican Church) over the Residential Schools program where not being physically or sexually abused was the exception.  Unfortunately, due to the immense shame Canadians feel over this policy of ‘Aggressive Assimilation’ (which I think is more accurately described as genocide) which effectively destroyed our Native communities, we mostly try to pretend that it never happened or at least if it did it was an abberation that we shouldn’t be held accountable for because we didn’t know what was happening (and tried really hard not to find out).

  • http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke

    In Ireland, both genders seem equally sexually abused. “The Magdalene Sisters” was a relentlessly depressing account of abuse of women over there. 

  • Anonymous

    I was very disturbed “The Magdalene Sisters” and by the idea of the Magdalene houses. That a young woman’s family would hand her over to be imprisoned and enslaved for life without any sort of due process or legal recourse “for her own good” is disturbing enough — but that the practice continued well into the 20th century made me sick. Of course, Ireland wasn’t unique in that regard. In the U.S. it wasn’t uncommon to institutionalize and, in the 20th century, lobotomize ”loose” middle- and upper-class women – especially if they were brazen and unapologetic about it — because having and enjoying sex is obviously a pathology.

  • Anonymous

    The US of course did the same thing to the American Indians under its jurisdiction.  For that matter the same thing happened in Ireland under the British.  ”Souperism” during the Famine was a particularly nasty as it used the offer of food to the starving to coerce them to convert:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souperism 

  • Tricksterson

    I hope Ms O’Connor won’t be offended by the fact that I found both her and that video quite sexy.  Odd, but defintely sexy.

  • Anonymous

    I was terribly disturbed by “The Magdalene Sisters” as well.  What made it even creepier for me is that I had spent my junior year abroad in Ireland in the 1980′s when that enslavement still existed (according to Wikipedia, the last of those places was in Waterford, and it didn’t close until 1996!!!).  I get a little freaked out when I think I was walking around in a country where everything seemed fairly normal  (I mean, a certain type of middle-aged women on the bus would cross herself whenever the bus simply drove past a church, but I was able, as an agnostic, to feel reasonable comfortable there) but women were virtually enslaved, perhaps just a few miles, or even a few city blocks, away.

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    I remember when everybody practically shat all over Sinead O’Connor for zomg daring to disrespect the POPE.

    Seems they sure changed their tune when over ten years later he turned out to be a completely out of touch hidebound reactionary jerk on human sexuality.

  • Alicia

    “turned out”? Don’t most people already recognize that the Pope is out-of-touch, hidebound, and reactionary when it comes to human sexuality? That’s kind of a big deal in the upper levels of Catholic hierarchy!

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    Back in 1992 people were still fawning all over him for being a stalwart anti-Communist – the USSR had just imploded not long before, leaving behind Russia and the remaining republics.