The Furious Spinner

We watched the movie The Magdalene Sisters(POP UP) tonight. It's about the Magdalene Asylums in Ireland where girls were sent to live with the Magdalene nuns and work in their laundry. If a girl had been raped, gave birth to a baby out of wedlock, or was considered "too" pretty, she could be sent to these houses of horror. I felt angrier and angrier as I watched this film. When I was thinking women were better than men and wouldn't torture others, how could I have forgotten about nuns? The girls in the asylums were beaten, humiliated, molested—and treated as slaves.

I was raised Catholic and had limited exposure to nuns. The experiences I did have were positive. My sister who is four years older than I am had to go to a Catholic elementary school because there was no public school close to us when she started. She is lefthanded (as am I), and the nuns used to hit her hand with a ruler and tell her being lefthanded meant she was on the side of the devil! Fortunately, an elementary school was built and opened the year I started school.

The Catholic Church does not have a good record regarding women. It was the Catholic Church who sent out The Malleus Maleficarum, a manual for the Inquisitors to help them find witches and torture them. It is a hideous book that clearly shows the misogyny that permeated the church. (I wrote about all this fictionally in The Jigsaw Woman.)

I don't understand how women can belong to the Catholic Church—or any other organized religion that I know about. (Disorganized spirituality has a little better track record.) But then I don't need to understand. Just keep it away from me.

And those religions need to keep away from me and their hands off my body—and off my political candidates. The church is now making noise about not giving communion to any politicians who are prochoice. I say to the church, "Go ahead and do it. In fact, refuse to give communion to anyone who is prochoice or believes in or uses birth control. Let's see how many Catholics you have left then? How many pockets remain for you to pick so you can run your church?"

I've probably already told you the story of the last time I went to church. It was with my parents when they were visiting us in Tucson in 1986, I think. We went to this beautiful gory little church in the desert. White on the outside, bloody crucifixes on the inside. The sermon was about how women are the cause of all the problems in the world. If women were better mothers and wives, the world would be a better place. I was so angry. I forced myself to stay, out of respect for my parents. When it was over, I asked my mother how she could allow herself to be chided and blamed for the world's problems by a man who had never been married and who had probably never had sex with a grown woman. She said she hadn't been paying any attention to him. That's how my mother was able to remain as a member of a religion that tried to excommunicate her and declare her first child a bastard because she got a divorce from her first husband. But wait, she was not married in the church the first time, so that was OK, but her child was still a bastard. In the eyes of the church.

Hey, don't look at me. Keep your eyes to yourself!

It's 3:12 a.m. I'm not sure I'm coherent. I'll stop being pissed off and try to sleep. Oh what the hell. I'll just try to sleep. I've spent 40 plus years trying not to be pissed off. Being able to sleep seems like a more possible goal.

Ta!
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