1/ I think about the gender debate more than I'd like. But I know why I keep coming back to it.
I grew up surrounded by a religion. Almost everyone I knew was supposed to believe in it. It affected our laws. It led people to make bad decisions. The bulk of the harm this religion

2/ did, was to women and children. Symphisiotomies, the Magdalen laundries, the Eighth amendment.
I didn't know about them when I started questioning it.
But I remember being made to say things I didn't believe, and I remember how people didn't like it if you asked questions.

3/ Often, if you asked questions you got a sneer. After a while I realised this was because there were no answers.
It felt humiliating to be forced to say things that I did not believe.

Years later, my husband & I would sometimes talk about religion. If you could, would you

4/ wipe it from the world? Like in the John Lennon song? My husband would say yes. I used to say no, because I figured that it would just come back again, that it's something humans will always create.
But I never really knew just how true that was. I'm just so shocked.

5/ Shocked that a belief system has sprung up so quickly. Like the last one, its faithful are often good people & believe they're doing good. Like the last one, its harms fall mainly on women & children. Like the last one, we are demanded to profess things that aren't true.

6/ Like the last one, it's affecting our laws.
And all the checks and balances I thought we now had in place to stop this happening again, don't seem to count for anything.

So that's why I can't stop thinking about this. We finally disentangled ourselves from one theocracy,

7/ and now the very same people who knew full well the damage it did, and were cheerleaders of secularism, have turned into zealots. It's like some horrible joke.