Status: Verified
Bias Alert: Activist – This story revolves around social/political activism involving members of the Catholic Church and pro-abortion activists. We have done our best to remove any bias towards either side of this issue and present only the facts of the isssue so our intelligent adult readers can draw their own conclusions and opinions.
Users on Reddit appear to be cheering on or at least partially supporting a wave of vandalizm that hit Catholic churches on Mother’s Day. The vandals are protesting a leaked draft from the U.S. Supreme Court that would likely overturn the wildy divisive Roe vs. Wade decision that essentially legalized abortion in the United States.
According to Fox 26 at least 3 Catholic churches in the Houston, TX area were targeted with vandalizm. Those churches were Holy Rosary in Houston and St. Bartholemew and St Elizabeth Anne Seaton in Katy.
We wanted to examine how self-described Texans were discussing these attacks on the social media website Reddit.
Redditors appear to be overwhelmingly in favor of the vandalizm.
/u/Acceptable_Motor1715 said:
“Good. Fuck the church and their hypocrisy. Would love to see the amount of people in that congregation that have cheated on their SO, been arrested, done drugs, gotten drunk.
Promise you all of things are being done at that church.”
/u/Ryan_Greenbar advocated for the destruction of all churches as being a pro-life stance:
“Destroying all churches would actually save lives.”
and /u/ShadowMIB said:
“They should be forced to leave it up for 9 months”
Not all of the comments were in favor of the vandalizm.
/u/Shinie_a is apparently against the vandalizm because it might convince Latino voters to not vote for Democrats:
“Just an FYI, a lot of churches in Houston have a large Mexican population that predominantly vote democrat. My mom works at a church and attends every single event they have: she has never once voted republican and I’m certain a lot of the other attendees don’t either. It would’ve been a different case if we lived in the middle of nowhere Texas; but as a city we have an entirely different demographic than the ones whose want to overturn Roe v Wade.”
and /u/IHACB hates the church but doesn’t understand the end goal of the vandals:
“I understand hating the church and stuff, but what positive does this being to the pro-choice community? What was the end goal?”
Redditors largely downvoted comments against the vandalizm. Here are some of those heavily downvoted comments.
/u/thatconfusedchick -13 votes
“That’s terrible”
/u/Griselda68 -11 votes
“I’m so sorry to know that this happened.”
/u/Front-Catch-9281 -27 votes
“People who defend this type of thing lose all credibility in my opinion.
Defacing a Church of all places destroys your ability to claim the high ground. Shows a ugly side of the pro-choice movement”
/u/PremiumQueso -21 votes
“I’m against vandalism. I’m also against the church’s history of tyranny against women. Religious conservatives are the enemy of progress and dignity for females. They deserve our scorn but don’t spray paint their mythology temples.”
The most level-headed comment on Reddit for this topic goes to /u/Jnewton1018 who said:
“Graffiti on other buildings bothers me. Graffiti in general bothers me.”
There were a lot of other comments and being Reddit a bunch of them were conspiracy theories, weird claims, or demanding churches pay taxes (part of a new anti-christian movement on the website). There was even a claim that the Catholic churches tagged by vandals were actual Nazis and that there are no women in these Catholic churches.
Follow this dicussion on the Houston subreddit:
Holy rosary church vandalized on Mother’s Day with pro choice slogan. from houston
Or, read the comments made before the post was locked on the Texas subreddit:
Holy rosary church in Houston was vandalized on Mother’s Day. from texas
Thanks Y’all:
Our story was partially based on an article by Randy Wallace of Fox 26 Houston. We cited Randy’s interview with a priest from Holy Rosary church about this incident. Read Randy’s full article and watch the video on the Fox 26 website 3 Catholic Churches vandalized apparently by activists
About Reddit:
For our readers who are unaware, Reddit is a social media website where volunteers create communities or groups around central topics. One of the most popular formats is to create a community around a city or state. Members in each community vote posts inside the group up or down and can leave comments. Ostensibly the members in those communities are essentially stating they live in those areas. This is likely untrue however as there are no real ways to ensure everyone posting, commenting, or voting in a group that represents Houston are all somehow related to the Houston metro area. Even if true, the volume of votes and comments is not representative of the Houston population. Same holds true for the Texas subreddit (what they call a specific group). If all of the comments on the above mentioned Houston post were unique and from Houstonians they would represent 0.00001% of Houston’s total population.
We have no connection to the moderators of the Houston or Texas subreddit and have no ability to determine if they are even located in Texas or that they are not working for political / activist groups.
Why do we use Reddit then? Reddit has done a far better job at giving users the tools to discuss happenings in their city or state. Even though we know Reddit has no ability to gauge who lives where, the user demographic skews heavily in one direction, out-of-staters are allowed to post and vote on topics, and the total volume of users participating is incredibly low – they do a better job of attempting to represent a community as opposed to Twitter and Facebook.
Reddit does have a major disadvantage, activists can downvote comments they disagree with to make them less visible, essentially hiding them. When we write an article around a Reddit conversation we will try and show downvoted comments (i.e. comments with a negative total of votes) in order to provide a more well-rounded view of the conversation.
Featured photo a cropped screenshot of the photo distributed by Reddit users as embedded above.
