Posted on 07/09/2014 11:00:59 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Margaret Atwood wrote a gripping novel back in 1985 called The Handmaid’s Tale.
The main character, Offred, is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian and theocratic state that has replaced the United States of America.
Handmaids are walking wombs, child bearers for elite couples. Offred services the Commander and his wife Serena Joy, who is a former gospel singer and advocate for “traditional values.”
Every month in her fertile period, Offred is required to have impersonal, wordless sex with the Commander while Serena sits by, holding her hands. The Republic of Gilead is what America has become after the takeover of our nation by the theocrats. Offred, as a former adulteress and the daughter of a feminist, is consigned to the role of Handmaid in this ugly new world.
The Handmaid’s tale was an obvious allegorical critique of the rising influence of the newly-politicized Christian conservatives of that era. It was aimed, in particular, at the pro life/pro family movement. It was also a powerful work of fiction by a talented writer.
Flash forward 30 years, and it appears that the Handmaid’s tale was not so much allegory as it was prophecy, once removed. Women today are being reduced to their bodily functions and used as breeders and most of our society seems to be in support of it. Babies are created to be sold and then they actually are marketed and sold, on-line and through international outlets.
America, which has been termed the “Wild West” of commercialized reproduction, has become a magnet for baby-buyers the world over.
In addition, women are kept in what amounts to baby farms in certain third world countries and used for breeders. The babies are then sold overseas in what, in India alone, is a $2.3 billion dollar industry.
That’s the prophecy part of The Handmaid’s Tale. Women have indeed been reduced to breeders, their human rights held forfeit to rapacious industrialized medicine that operates without conscience. In addition, babies, as well as women, are reduced to chattel in this market as they are created and then sold and bought like any other manufactured product.
The once-removed part of The Handmaid Tale’s prophetic prescience lies in who is committing and promoting this crime against humanity. It is not, as Margaret Atwood wrote, the evil “traditional values” people and Gospel singers who are designing babies for sale by harvesting women’s ovaries, and then using women as wombs to carry these babies which are then sold for astronomical amounts on the open market.
The culprits here are corporatist medicine, wealthy elites and homosexuals who are willing to destroy the basic human rights of women and children to feed the fantasy that they are not what they happen, in fact, to be. Homosexual couples are two men or two women, or for that matter, several men or several women, whose sexual activity takes place between other people of their own sex. Their sexual activity can not create life.
Anyone who condemns this wholesale degradation of half the human race alongside the bartering and selling of human beings, is immediately labeled a religious fanatic, a homophobe, uncaring, cruel and indifferent to the longing for a family that same sex couples experience. There is a phrase to describe this intellectually dishonest bullying: The phrase is emotional blackmail.
Let’s take the debate about those accusations — at least as far as I’m concerned — off the table right now.
If standing for the human rights of women and children,
if opposing the buying and selling of people,
if the speaking against the creation of human beings for commerce,
if opposing the crass reduction of half the human race to their body parts in a manner that not only degrades them as human beings but endangers their health and lives,
means that I’m a homophobe or a religious fanatic, then so be it. If that’s what religious fanaticism and homophobia stands for, every person with a conscience should be a homophobe and a religious fanatic.
But now that feminists are all for the complete commercial dehumanization of motherhood, it's OK. One more way for post-menopausal career women and homosexual couples to put in a purchase order for newborns. It's the great leap forward.
Class, discuss.
[ The Republic of Gilead is what America has become after the takeover of our nation by the theocrats. ]
They are called Socialists and their Religion is Communism....
[ One interesting thought: in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s tale could use “Christians” as its villains,even though gestational concubinage / surrogacy is considered morally offensive by every Christian commentator or denomination I’ve ever heard of. But it’s dehumanizing, depersonalizing — ghastly -— so a “talented” feminist novelist felt free (back then) to ascribe it to some whacked-out Christian theology. ]
When most all Liberal Control Freak Statists talk about the “Evils of Christianity” they are Projecting their inward wickerdness into their work.
It is a favorite book of mine, and truly chilling, but as a Christian, I never had a problem understanding that Christians do not consider reducing women to the status of breeding mares whose thoroughbred foals are sold to wealthy horse lovers-and that the author was missing the mark. The relegating of humans to the status of producers is something totalitarian states do-like China, or the former USSR. These people give adoption a bad name...
The movie was a libtard's vision of Christian governance, intended as a smear of evangelicals.
The theocracy unfolding in the real world is the religion of Marx/Molech.
Moloch, Mammon and Baal.
There is no evil in Atwood’s novel that doesn’t have a an analogue of greater evil advocated and practiced by today’s “progressives.”
That’s been the general theme of feminism, right? Deploring the supposedly “male” fixation on power and dominance, spurring their own insatiable drive for power and dominance. Abhoring “male” vices, and an unceasing drive to imitate them.
In a sense.
Feminism wants to be "allowed to win" in its own conceited caricature of this "man's world" we live in, but it most definitely does NOT want to be allowed to lose, and that is reflected in the legislation and regulation imposed by its proxies elected by the superior numbers of the female vote.
“Offred, as a former adulteress and the daughter of a feminist, is consigned to the role of Handmaid in this ugly new world.”
Yes, because adultery and feminism are so much more beautiful than totalitarianism. /s
Choosing breeders based on class identification is too stupid even for totalitarians. The Nazis, now, they knew how to pick breeding stock!
Emphasis on 'whacked-out." I don't think even Atwood didn't mean to portray Gilead as the product of mainstream Christianity. Presumably those who think so, miss the number of places in the novel where they are said to be in a civil war with Baptist rebels.
Every month in her fertile period, Offred is required to have impersonal, wordless sex with the Commander while Serena sits by, holding her hands.
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