It sounds as if the people who run Ireland are finally pissed off at the church.

Tough new laws to force the disclosure of information on child sexual abuse are to be introduced in response to another damning report on the failure of the Catholic Church to protect child abuse victims.

The withholding of information about serious offences against a child will be made a criminal offence, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter announced yesterday following the publication of the report on the handling of sex abuse claims in the diocese of Cloyne.

Which makes the necessary point that what the church has been doing all this time is a crime.

The report found that the Bishop of Cloyne,

I first learned about Valley Park Middle School via Tarek Fatah at Facebook. Tarek Fatah is a great fella. He posted pictures of himself at the Gay Pride march the other day – in his wheelchair, beaming, in front of a decorative crowd of marchers.

So what is a Toronto public school doing providing a prayer service in the cafeteria? Where

girls are placed in the back, behind the boys, separated by benches used as shields.

And menstruating girls are segregated, off in their own little group, like this paragraph.

Sitting all the way at the back, yards from the other girls and more yards from the all-conquering boys. Separated out because they’re so dirty and filthy. Ewwwwww endometrium. … Read the rest

Did you read the warm pool of sick at the “Tony Blair Faith Foundation”?

It’s such a boneless mess it’s hard to figure out what it’s supposed to do. There’s not a trace of an attempt at an argument in it, no reasons, just a lot of limp saying. It doesn’t even keep track of its own stance.

At a recent forum exploring educational options for the future of Northern Ireland, several influential public figures – including Baroness May Blood – made it clear that the best way forward is for schools to be religion-free zones.

But that, of course, is the thing it’s going to disagree with – duh – so how funny to say “made it clear that.”… Read the rest

Rights? Pshaw. The clerics will tell you what rights you can have, thank you. And the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission will help them out. Yes, you read that correctly.

After supporting several gay equality cases, the EHRC now believes the rights of religious people are not being upheld…

To rectify this supposed shortfall in religious protection, the EHRC will now push for a new legal principle of “reasonable accommodations” so that believers can negotiate the boundaries of their contract with employers.

Which means…? That believers can refuse to do their jobs if their religious beliefs tell them to.

There is the case of Lillian Ladele, the Christian registrar who refused to perform civil partnerships and so

This isn’t going well. It’s going badly. It could and should have been a minor thing that lasted about ten minutes and then ended. Instead it’s still going, and the way it’s going is badly.

Alerted by a comment by someone at Abbie’s post, I listened to about 20 minutes of something called Citizen Radio yesterday because it had a talk with Rebecca Watson about All That. I gave up before they got to the talk because I was bored beyond endurance by the hosts’ dialogue, but at the very beginning one of them (Kilkenny or Kilstein, I don’t know which) gave a quick summary of All That, which included casually calling Richard Dawkins “a rich white man” … Read the rest