Unholy Hell

I knew absolutely nothing about the Magdalene laundries until I saw The Magdalene Sisters in 2002. The film is set in Ireland and I thought the horror stopped there.

Magdalene laundries are in the news now because of a report.

Ireland has officially recognised the state's guilt in the "enslavement" of more than 30,000 women, most of whom were sent against their will into church-run institutions where they received no pay, no pension and no social protection.

Labelled the "Maggies", the women were sent to the Magdalene laundries where they worked for nothing, serving in some cases "life sentences" simply for being unmarried mothers or regarded as morally wayward.

Dig this bit.

The inquiry into the Magdalene scandal was finally prompted by a report from the UN committee against torture in June 2011. It called for prosecutions where necessary and compensation to surviving women.

Torture.

Just now, I learned that the racket was imported to the US.

@fernhilldammit @tabathasouthey Canada and Australia also had Magdalene Laundries. The survivors have been silenced! I hope to change that!

— Jerome Elam (@JeromeElam) February 10, 2013

(Here is Jerome Elam's website.)

Canada too?

And then I remembered.

Like most 14-year-olds, I was a handful. I wasn't quite (yet) into drugs and sex but I was getting into trouble in school, mouthing off, skipping out, hanging with friends. I bleached my hair, experimented with makeup. Nothing particularly outrageous.

But Maman, divorced since I was seven, had a new boyfriend. I didn't like him and he didn't like me.

So a plot was hatched. Boyfriend did the research -- I found the list in his handwriting years later -- on 'tough' Catholic boarding schools.

A shortlist of the toughest emerged and appointments were made. My presence was required.

We weren't Catholic, by the way.

I was shocked. My friends were shocked. A counter-plan was hatched.

A friend lent me a 'motorcycle' jacket. (Motorcycles were considered agents of Satan.) Scripts were written and rehearsed.

On the evening we were to drive to the first place (I've repressed the name; it was near Hamilton, Ontario), I rolled the waistband of my already-too-short skirt, slathered on makeup, and donned the jacket. My mother told me to wash my face and change my clothes. I told her that if she were going to force me into this, I was doing it my way. Huge fight, but I stuck to my guns and won that round.

Silence in the car.

We were taken to Head Nun's office. Short meeting with Maman, boyfriend, and me, then they were asked to leave. Head Nun wanted to talk to me alone.

Truth to tell, I was scared shitless, but I put on the performance of my life. Alternately truculent and foul-mouthed, I tried to be the baddest-ass girl of all time.

I told her that I was smart -- she had school records so she knew that -- and that I would use every single IQ point I had to make her life an unholy hell.

There was more of course and I probably wasn't nearly as bad-ass as I thought, but when adults were summoned back, she said she didn't think that Name of School could do anything with me.

She declined my challenge.

Silence in the car going home.

But there was still The List.

It took me a few days to realize that the Remove Fern Hill from the Family Home Project had been quietly abandoned.

And today, I'm wondering exactly what kind of unholy hell I had averted.

As a sad bonus, read what Sinéad O'Connor has to say. It explains much.




ADDED: I've always loved Sinéad O'Connor.

Singer Sinead O'Connor has said she has been excommunicated by the Catholic Church and said she wanted a certificate from the Vatican to prove it.

"Apparently I've been excommunicated but the only place you'll find this is in L'Osservatore Romano, their newspaper which nobody reads," she told the Sunday Independent.

"But I want something to show my grandkids. I've been tweeting Pope Benedict about this but I've heard nothing back yet."

What's hate and/or love got to do with torture?

To absolutely nobody's surprise, a US survey reveals that:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey. More than half of people who attend services at least once a week - 54 percent - said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified.

Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it.

People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

Don't conservative and/or fundamentalist and/or evangelical christians also believe that corporal punishment is required when raising children? "Spare the rod / spoil the child," is the rote maxim, is it not?

There are a range of methods that they recommend for disciplining children. 'Hot saucing' is one form of 'creative correction' that is seemingly supported by Focus on the Family. Michael and Debi Pearl advocate a form of parenting akin to old-fashioned animal training; they live comfortably on the profits generated by the sale of their books and their speaking engagements.

"To Train Up a Child," [was] written in 1994 by Tennessee pastor Michael Pearl with his wife, Debi, who claim to have raised five "whineless" children. At the book's core is the notion that when parents "train" a child to obey early on, even before he or she is able to make conscious, or conscience-based, decisions, home will be a place of peace and harmony. Here, the term "train" is a reference to Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

Neither Pearl has advanced training in child development or a related field. "These truths," the tall, white-beaded Michael Pearl, 60, writes in his book, "are not new, deep insights from the professional world of research, [but] rather, the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules, the same technique God uses to train his children."

The connection between acceptance of torture as legitimate technique for securing information and the use of physical punishment to discipline children is the need for control and authoritarianism. But torturers rarely tell their victims that they are inflicting physical pain for "their own good" or because they love them.

More information regarding spanking and the corporal punishment of children can be found at Religious Tolerance.