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She was right to rip up a picture of the pope.
But I think she was wrong to convert to Islam if her priorities were denial of religious tyranny.
Her issue was all the child rape.
Aisha has entered the chat.
Just realizing this now? The church scandals broke wide open 20 years ago.
We were telling dirty jokes about priests and alter boys when I was a kid in the 80s. It was well known and rampant 20 years BEFORE 20 years ago.
Jeff Dunham even did a joke with Achmed the dead terrorist.
"I like to throw a penny between two Jews and watch them fight to the death. I also do the same with Catholic priests but instead I throw a small boy! The winner has to fight Michael Jackson!"
Yeah as a kid in the 70s, it was a known trope. Benny Hill and Monty Python even alluded to it.
Long before the '70s. The British arms manufacturing companies Vickers and Armstrong Whitworth merged in the late 1920s to become Vickers-Armstrongs Limited. Employees of the former Armstrong Whitworth were not happy about the merger and joked about being like choirboys - because they were being buggered by Vickers (i.e. "buggered by vicars").
Somewhere in Rousseau's "Confessions" there's a bunch about him becoming disillusioned by the church as a child because of sexual abuse, and the head priest tells him "that's how it's always been". That was written in 1769!
It had another run in the news following her death last summer.
There's nothing wrong with people TIL today, because she was right then and still is.
Ripping up an image never makes anyone a bad person, religious figure or not.
Sure, I may prefer the tearing sound that images of Mohammed being ripped apart make... But that's just subjective personal preference. Doesn't mean people tearing up an image of the Virgin Mary are bad people. The important thing is neither does anything real to cause harm to anyone at all.
Just a reminder that she didn't actually explain why she was tearing up a picture of the Pope, she just pulled out a picture of him and tore it up without context. Nobody understood wtf was happening.
Yeah, there is a lot of revisionist history about this. This was well before the sex abuse story came out. The idea that that’s what she was protesting was lost on everyone.
John Paul II had an attempted assassination a decade before this (where he literally met with his attempted assassin to offer forgiveness), and was also leading efforts to apologize for past church participation in things like the holocaust, the slave trade, oppressing women, and even executing Galileo.
This is not to defend him. He absolutely ignored sex abuse and deserves hate, but when O’Connor did that, he was immensely popular. Tearing up his picture while singing Bob Marley’s War (a song about racism and inequality) was just a protest of which the purpose of which no viewer could figure out. She merely said “fight the real enemy” and didn’t reveal any additional reasoning until she sat for an interview a month later.
whats the reasoning
Personal negative dealings with the Catholic Church
From a contemporary article:
O'Connor, in a statement Thursday in London, reiterated her objections to the church, which she holds responsible for the child abuse she suffered.
The Vatican uses “marriage, divorce and in particular birth control and abortion to control us through our children and through fear,” she said.
So, even then, it is less specific than us commonly credited todays it was not about covering up child sex abuse.
https://books.google.com/books?id=IalJAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA114#v=onepage&q&f=false
Late to this party, but I was in college and saw it happen when it aired. My reaction to it was, "Whoa!" though it didn't really hit me as anything more since I wasn't Catholic.
I did not see the aftermath coming. It was like she just instantly disappeared.
Thirty years later, she seems like the trailblazer for getting one's life ruined from retribution for daring to call out shitty behavior of powerful people and entities.
Around this time Nirvana drew a lot of attention for mocking Top of the Pops by miming hilariously badly to Smells like teen spirit on air. It was a more innocent time. Ripping up a pic of the pope was wild.
It's taken her dying for a lot of people to realise the absolute gem of a person she really was. RIP Sinead. We've lost 3 Irish musical gems this year.
For me, outrage at tearing an image implies the subject is beyond reproach and that concept itself is extremely concerning / problematic.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuft did a really good episode on her. Her story is so much more interesting than you would think.
Thanks for sharing this. I'd never heard of this program. Good counterbalance to Behind the Bastards
Sophie the producer was so tired of hearing about terrible people that she got Magpie to make this show. It is really good. But it is still pretty depressing because the majority of cool people die horribly.
At the time I judged her harshly, she was crazy but wasn’t wrong about this.
So.. You're still judging her harshly, despite finding out you were wrong (and decades behind everyone else, which takes some intentional avoidance of the topic, and clearly without taking in to consideration the impact people, well, like you, had on her mental health).
Crazy is the wrong word when referring to her mental health issues.
But she did have some crazy takes. Like not mental health related, just crazy/zany/bat shit.
Just some nice numbers here XD
Did it really take you this long to get that?
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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