PaganCentric

[I posted this in 2009, but discovered that it's been getting such a response this year that I thought I'd re-post it. ~ Claire]

Ever one to ruin the fun, I couldn’t let today go by without making a few comments about Saint Patrick and the annual holiday that’s held in his honor. Most of the people I know will be wearing green in some form today, thinking of all things Irish, drinking green beer, and possibly honoring that ancient Irish tradition of getting drunk and fighting. In other words, Saint Patrick’s day is a good excuse for partying, and few people will put any more thought into it than that. That’s fine. It’s a secular holiday in the United States, even if the day is named after a Catholic bishop and missionary, and so it should all be taken with a grain of salt.

If most people know anything about Saint Patrick, it’s that his one claim to fame is that he drove the snakes from Ireland. What most people don’t realize is that the snake is a Pagan symbol, and that the snakes referred to in the Saint Patrick mythos are not meant in the literal sense, but refer to Pagans; i.e., Saint Patrick drove the Pagans (specifically, the Druids) out of Ireland. So what is celebrated on Saint Patrick’s Day with drinking and much cavorting is, ironically, the spread of Christianity throughout Ireland and the subjugation and conversion of the Druids.

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There are a number of good reasons to be outraged by a leaflet that’s being handed out by Christians, but I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about it by reading the article.

The first thing that bothered me is that the leaflet came to light because a young girl in Bristol, Virginia, who was working in the drive-through at a burger joint called Hi-Lo Burger, was handing the leaflet by a customer. She wasn’t standing on a corner or bouncing through the local mall with her goodies half hanging out. One would assume that if she was working in a fast food burger joint, she wasn’t exactly dressed like a skank.

More than anything, though, what bothered me most was the unimaginable contention that a woman who dresses in a manner which the American Taliban believes is “ungodly” is partly at fault if she is raped. Think about that. Isn’t that the old mentality that a lot of women are familiar with from our unrelenting Christian neighbors? If a woman is raped, wasn’t she asking for it in some fashion? Shouldn’t she have taken better precautions? If someone smashes down her front door and rapes her as she tries to flee in the bathroom, shouldn’t she have installed better locks on her house? And if she works in a public place and ever wore anything the least bit suggestive, wasn’t she responsible for that man wanting to come there and rape her in the first place?

All you need to know about this leaflet can be summed up by the following quotes;

“Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin.” It also states. “By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?”

I think all victims of rape who read those words will find a knot twisting up in their stomach. We’ve all put ourselves through that self-recrimination game, wondering what we might have done to deserve such hatred from another human being, that they would do such things to us. Reading such filth as the “Women & Girls” leaflet makes most of us feel like we’ve not only been raped, but we’ve been spit upon by those who we thought might empathize with us.

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