800 dead children, because of a perverted preoccupation with sex

You remember the stories of the Magdalene Laundries, where women who dared to stray from the sexual rules, or who were simply too pretty, were taken and essentially imprisoned under abusive discipline of nuns?

Yesterday, we learned of a new atrocity in Ireland. We learned of another, related institution, the "mother and baby homes" where unwed mothers had their children , and those children  died at an unbelievable rate.  Outside of the site of one such home, nearly 800 bodies were buried in a mass grave in a septic tank. The "Home" responsible was operating until 1961. Innocent children were known to be emaciated and starving, and were shunned and abused due to their circumstances of birth.  If they made it to 7 or 8, they were sent to abusive "industrial schools" where they were essentially enslaved.

Pro-life? Really?

The CBC report offers more detail including this:

 In keeping with Catholic teaching, such out-of-wedlock children were denied baptism and, if they died at such facilities, Christian burial.

Visiting the "sins" of the mothers onto the little children.  So much for Christ.

Andrew Sullivan reels:

I blame the crippling, toxic, near-insane fixation on sexual sin as the core ideology at work here. A view of sex that is riddled with shame and disgust, in which simple human nature must be so expelled and exterminated it requires a secret mass grave to keep the lie in place.  ... 

Think of the lives ruined for lack of simple mercy; think of the sheer psychic pain and utter desolation so many gay men and women have had to endure for millennia; think of the awful marriages and dreadful sex lives and terrible parenting that emerges from this attempt to deny core facts about human nature; think of the women turned into subhuman pariahs for daring to explore sexual pleasure and intimacy. You can make excuses and excuses, but at some point, given this level of atrocity and evil, you have to say: all of this is a grotesque distortion, a merciless imposition of an abstract ideology completely immune to life as it is actually lived. To give human beings an absolutely impossible goal – and then punish, torment, persecute, dehumanize and destroy them when they fail to live up to it is the definition of insanity.... 

The neurotic suppression of sexual need and pleasure is not a virtue. It is a pathology that leads directly to vice – to the corpses of eight hundred infants in a septic tank and to the shattered souls and violated bodies of two hundred deaf boys in Milwaukee. If that does not prompt a reassessment, what would?

Update:  AP has issued some corrections on their reporting of this story. 

In stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not church teaching. In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926.