Quotes of the week

Hatred has been given a mainstream legitimacy.

It's an ecclesiastical protection racket, and the attitude is that anyone who seeks to in any way threaten the reputation of the church as an institution has to be destroyed.

All of us at the time were saying, well, he wasn't raping anybody. There was no penetrative sex. And I think our weakness was actually to put it as the lowest of the low instead of seeing that whatever it is, it's unbecoming of a bishop.

Every time a Muslim or anyone else pops their head above the parapet to try to deal with some of the genuine problems the community faces, this toxic coalition emerges to try to cut it off... No one wins but the extremists.

The education system should be about having children together from all different backgrounds and if religion is important to parents or to a community, it can certainly be done outside of school time or perhaps at the weekend, or the churches themselves could step up to the plate.

For many people, the things I have been talking about today are too sensitive and too difficult for them to want to risk giving offence. They are easy things to skirt, yet the risk of doing so is great. If we leave these topics to the likes of the English Defence League and British National party on the one hand and Islamists on the other, then the mission of integration will fail.

It was part of my culture. It was something that I was told was better for the child, cleaner... but as I've got older [I've realised] my cultural views don't make it different to what it actually is.

I would assume what Mr Cunningham means isn't just that [Catholic schools] accept children from all faiths but they accept their views. If that was really the case you've got to question what the point in Catholic schools is. Surely that would make them nothing more than a comprehensive school.

Dr Singh may be ludicrous but he is also consequential.

I'm telling El Al that if you give in to the terrorism of Haredi-hating groups and remove a passenger who behaved properly and asked nicely to sit next to a man, we will remove hundreds of thousands of your passengers every year. Terror against terror.

If the state's role is to promote integration and equality, it's counter-intuitive to allow schools which are distinguished by religious faith, whether that is Church in Wales, Roman Catholic or Muslim.

The British values and equality policy they [Jewish schools] are expected to promote and protect also secure our freedom of religion and safeguard Jewish people as a minority group.

Education should inspire rational thought and display the pleasures of deep understanding; it should not propagate the social poison of divisive dogma.

Something else that makes a mockery of the system is the fact that we still have clerics legislating – the 26 bishops, or lords spiritual. The only other country that has clerics who legislate is Iran. I shall let it sink in that we are part of that.

By removing this provision from our constitution, we can send a strong message to the world that laws against blasphemy do not reflect Irish values and that we do not believe such laws should exist.

The best we can do for our children is to teach them to think for themselves, not tell them what to think.

I'd like an acknowledgement of the suffering these women have been through. A lot of it is tied up with the churches: it was under their authority that these things happened. Nothing can compensate for the loss, but an acknowledgement is what we need.

It is essential that children of all faiths or none, from a wide mixture of class, cultural and race backgrounds are educated together. Young children are naturally both curious and non-judgmental; when they meet as equals in the classroom they will learn mutual acceptance which will help create a more cohesive and less fearful society.

If, as well as the curtailment on their autonomy which this involves, [women] are carrying a foetus with a fatal abnormality or have been the victims of rape or incest, they are condemned, because legislation enacted in another era has decreed it, to endure untold suffering and desolation. What is that, if it is not humiliation and debasement?

What we've seen is the culmination of a quiet revolution that's taken place in Ireland for the past 10 or twenty years… The people have said we want a modern constitution for a modern country, that we trust women and we respect them to make the right decision, the right choices about their own healthcare.

It's hypocritical, degrading and insulting to Northern Irish women that we are forced to travel for vital healthcare services but cannot access them at home. We cannot be left behind in a corner of the UK and on the island of Ireland as second-class citizens.

If in doubt, better not let them enter.

What I find so disturbing about this debate is the heavy hand of the pious upon it. Behind them stand the serried ranks of a church that has shown itself undeserving of the respect it still expects and demands. From child abuse scandals to the cruel and demeaning treatment of unwed mothers and their vulnerable children, to the hypocrisy of a celibate clergy (who were often anything but) pontificating on how women should think and behave, Catholicism has imposed a legacy of shame and denigration that, in its harshness and misogyny, is worse than medieval.