Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts

Tuesday 4 February 2014

Something Important


Take a few minutes to watch this video, please. Panti is one of Ireland's best known drag queens (does Brendan O'Carrol count?), and here she is highlighting an important issues, the prevalence and everyday nature of homophobia. Why is it still acceptable to have debates about the suitability of non-heterosexuals to raise children, or enter into a marriage? We all need to question why, in Ireland and most countries, people who identify as gay are legally less entitled to do many of the things that straight people are?

I gave blood last week, and read, on the same page as warnings about HIV, malaria and CJD, that if you had ever had sex with a man who had EVER engaged in any kind of sexual activity with another man, you could not donate blood. What kind of a message does that send? 

This video is important because it serves as a wake up call. A little 'hey, remember us, we're still here, and the discrimination we face hasn't gone away'.  Awareness of the reality of common place homophobia and legislative discrimination is the first step to making our society a better place for everyone.

Friday 19 July 2013

Something Political

I don't want to deviate from the positive, upbeat tone of this blog too much, but I don't want to go without saying something about the past week's 'abortion legislation' talks.


I am very concerned, some would say preoccupied, with issues of reproductive rights and, for want of a better term, sexual sovereignty. I wrote my Masters dissertation on sex education in Ireland, and it is my dearest hope that Ireland will one day be a country that isn't so overwhelmingly conservative, especially when it comes to the policing of womens' bodies. I hope to be able to work to aid this in the future.

For those not familiar with the proposed abortion legislation, the Wikipedia entry will give you all the background you require.That way you won't have to wade through all the careerist rhetoric from the politicians of Ireland.

Ireland has one of the most regressive sexual rights stances in Western Europe. That the Catholic Church is no longer solely responsible for this, but politicians such as Lucinda Creighton, who argued on the radio that her justification for being anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion (terms like pro-choice and pro-life are too narrow so I avoid them, and I have a problem with using the language of my enemy) was intellectual and not spiritual is but a small comfort.

As much as the austerity/recession rhetoric enrages me, it is a mere shadow of how angry I get when I read in the newspapers and hear on the radio the extensive media coverage, and hear hour after hour of bizarre rhetoric from women who might be expected to know better, and men whose opinion is unfounded and biased. This is a country where, last year, an actual female politician said crisis pregnancies were the result of fornication.

I am incredibly disappointed in this little country I was born in (but increasingly fail to identify with). I don't want to say anything too controversial, for in Ireland it is clear that abortion is still taboo. All I will say is that it makes me incredibly angry that the state and key legislators hides behind rhetoric, religious language or pseudo-science, and that politicians and political parties willingly uses womens' bodies to further their political agenda and garner public support.


It's 2013, and this needs to stop.