Religious Schools and Religion Run Public Services: What a Disaster!

Society cannot afford faith baith schools, if we want a cohesive society free from prejudice and ignorance. Religion perpetuates distrust, discrimination and insanity, as it tries to explain that God is alive and well when people are dying around us.

The Labour Party has been brainwashed to support these offensive schools. Where will it end? How about hospitals run by Imans - "No gay people treated here" or how about a Roman Catholic Family Planning Clinic - "Condoms are from the Devil"?

The dangers of allowing religious bodies to run welfare and health services were vividly illustrated this week in Dublin, where a potentially life-saving drug trial was halted because the Catholic ethics committee objected on religious grounds.

The Mater Hospital has a “Catholic ethos” and had wanted to trial a new lung cancer drug. The drug was to be offered to patients for whom all other treatments had failed. But as a condition of the trial, female patients were required to use contraception, as there was a risk of the drug adversely affecting a foetus.

When the hospital’s ethics board which is dominated by priests and nuns heard of this they halted the trial, saying it was against the ethos of the hospital. The subcommittee of the board a priest named Kevin Doran, a nun, Eugene Nolan and John Morgan were delegated the task of examining the conditions attached to testing the drug.

The patients who were hoping to have the drug will now have to wait until October 18th before knowing whether the trial has been approved. It is on that date that the hospital board meets to decide on new wording which will give patients a choice on whether or not they will take contraceptives. Cancer specialists led by Dr John McCaffrey, who is based at the Mater, had already received legal permission to treat the Mater Hospital patients.

Another cancer specialist at the St Vincent’s hospital, Dr John Crown, was critical of the Mater delay, describing it as “sectarian”. He, too, has suffered from the same kind of religious objections and now looks outside his own hospital when he wants to conduct trials. Eighteen months ago, St Vincent’s hospital ethics committee raised objections to one of his trials over the same concerns about the contraceptive clauses.

Tony Blair - listen and learn. Stop allowing religious ignorants to take an ever greater role in society, before we are back in the Dark Ages, with gays, dissidents and women being tortured because God or Allah told them to do it.