"The Home" -- the tip of the iceberg?

By now pretty much everyone who follows such news at all knows the story of "The Home" at Tuam, Ireland.  Women and girls who became pregnant as a result of sexual activity not in line with Catholic taboos, and their small children, were treated with utterly callous cruelty and neglect, starved and worked to death or let die of preventable diseases, despite the fact that the nuns were well subsidized by the Irish government for "taking care" of them, and also made good money from the children they forced into adoption.  The last indignity, and the clue that brought this history to light, was 800 corpses of small children dumped in a septic tank.  And this did not happen in the Dark Ages; "The Home" operated until 1961.

See this report at The Irish Examiner; more news and commentary is here.  Andrew Sullivan, though Catholic himself, has always been one of the most outspoken voices on the Church's crimes against children; his assessment is here, here, here, and here.  As has always been the case when such atrocities come to light, the Church's response has been craven ass-covering, spin, and minimization, throwing out every possible excuse and rationalization to snivel that it the evil it committed wasn't actually all that bad.

There are growing demands in Ireland for a government investigation of other such Catholic institutions, not just the one at Tuam.  There is no reason to think this one place was unique.  Who knows how many more places like this the Church was running in Ireland, or even in other countries where its prestige placed its actions beyond question?  Given what we already know about the utterly criminal nature of the Catholic Church, there is every reason to suspect the worst.

Make no mistake.  This happened because of the barbarism of religious taboo morality which subverts and replaces the natural humane morality we are born with and which would render normal people incapable of such cruelty toward innocents.  This happened because, as Sullivan forcefully points out, the Catholic Church is obsessed with sexual taboos and their enforcement above all else.  This happened because those who violated those sexual taboos, or who were born of violation of those taboos, were utterly dehumanized by the self-righteous.  If you are a "social conservative" or a defender of "traditional morality", then you are part of the problem, you are part of the mentality which causes things like this to happen.  That primitive taboo mentality inevitably brings forth cruelty and horror; it, and the religions of which it is the diseased essence and core, must be eradicated from the minds of our species.