The referendum vote held in Ireland last Friday was a canon shot heard around the world at right wing politicians and religionists. Just twenty-one years ago, homosexuality was a punishable crime in Ireland. What a difference a generation makes. As posted here previously Mass attendance in Ireland has dropped from 90% to 18%, and the number of priests have decreased from 4,500 to under 2,000.

There's no use rehashing the horrors that have gone in among both priests and nuns molesting children, but the lesson to be learned is that the Catholic religion of nearly 1500 years had established in Ireland what it deemed an unshakable position as well as an overdose of hubris, which always comes with absolute power. The clergy continued to act a century behind where the people were. This dragging their feet attitude worked well in the Middle Ages when people were almost totally illiterate and always working for their next meal. Desperate people will believe whatever the medicine man, the witch doctor, or the clergyman says.

With the explosion of information in the last years of the 20th Century, new wealth, and the almost overwhelming amount of advances in every field of science, people became too intelligent to believe as truth every word that fell from the lips of priest/preacher/pope. In the Catholic Church old practices like celebrate priests are almost universally considered stupid. A poll shows the Irish people favor allowing priests to marry by 87% and allowing women to be priests by 77%. You can bet your prayer book the nice pope in Rome will have none of that. What options have the Irish believers? They have voted with their feet and walked out of the church.

The same thing is happening in the US. Church attendance is falling everywhere. Preachers and bishops are hiding this loss simple by not reporting them. The difference in the US is that religion has evolved into some mega churches, developed super rich "family" organizations that fight gay civil right and abortions, and jumped naked in bed with a wing of the Republican Party. These organizations spend millions in political causes like opposing same sex marriage in California, which cost them over $20,000,000. (Imagine all that tax free money going to fight fellow gay Americans who have to pay more taxes to cover the loss of tax deductible hate groups. WTF?)

The people in religion, politics, or businesses who want to live in a era of a hundred years ago are pursuing a vain and doomed hope. The world moves on. It will move on in the USA, and it will happen as in Ireland when the younger generation convince their friends and families it was time for a change and start taking an active role in politics.

One of the biggest lessons from the Irish vote was not that the young people voted for marriage equality, but that they went to the polls and voted. In the USA the people who could determine a more sane and democratic government are not showing up at the polls. When they do, the USA will have the seismic shift in government that Ireland just experienced.