David Quinn has written a piece criticising Spun Out, a youth organisation. The piece amounts to nothing more than a whinge, “why don’t they care about the things I care about”. Then it’s topped off with a dollop of slut shaming. Par for the course really.
Anyways, David’s draws some silly conclusions based on searching the website for certain words.
Type in the word “sex” into its search engine, for example, and you will find 130 search results. There are 44 for “condoms”, 50 for “transgender”, 68 for “gay”, and so on.
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As for religion, admittedly this is only a minority pursuit among young people at present but surely it’s worth more than 11 mentions?
Christianity gets no mentions (you read that right), but Buddhism rates two mentions. Islam gets no mentions either despite it being in the news all the time.
Due to these results Quinny concludes,
You should get the picture at this stage. If Spun Out was an organization with an explicit ideological or philosophical viewpoint these blind spots would be excusable, but given that it receives funding from the HSE and its purpose is to promote “holistic wellbeing” how does it explain why it is much more interested in threesomes than in abstinence, in condoms than in divorce, in Buddhism than in Christianity, and in gay marriage rather than in marriage per se?
I’m not expecting an answer, but the questions are worth asking.
So let’s turn this logic on Iona and see what it reveals. Here are the the search results for the same terms.
Sex 1381; condoms 23; transgender 378; gay 1120 (that’s 16 times more than mentioned on Spun Out); marriage 3620; family 3550.
So it seems Iona does care more about family and marriage than it does about LGBT people and sex. This isn’t surprising given the whole purpose of Iona. However, let’s compare it with religion.
Since Iona is a Christian institute whose whole purpose is to promote religion in society, surely Christianity appears more in it’s website?
Nope. Christianity is only mentioned 705. Gay is mentioned a whooping 415 more times!
Let’s expand the search to include Christian, Catholic, Catholicism. It might give a fairer picture. Altogether they appear 3919 times on their site.
However, gay, LGBT, Homosexual and Homosexuality appear on Iona website a total of 4115 times. Yep, that many times. The poor dears are obsessed. And in not one of those instances are they mentioned in a positive manner. That’s 4115 times LGBT people are mentioned negatively on the Iona website.
How did Rory O’Neill refer to Iona again?
So David, why does the Iona Institute focus more of its energy bashing LGBT people than it does promoting religion?
