Posted on 07/19/2019 8:45:51 AM PDT by Morgana
In this latest season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the series has been unusually spiteful towards religious people. Of course, the premise of a religious takeover of the United States forcing women into slavery was never going to be flattering, but this year has been much harsher with Christians defacing monuments and priests being called child molesters. This week, we see a retread of the old pro-choice claim that pro-lifers and religious people treat women as “vessels” for growing babies.
The July 17 episode “Heroic” focuses mostly on the hospitalization of the pregnant Handmaid Ofmatthew (Ashleigh LaThrop). Last week, she was shot by an officer after threatening another handmaid with a gun and now lies in critical condition. Our protagonist June (Elizabeth Moss) has been assigned to pray over her for the duration of her stay, so we mostly follow her inner rantings as the stress of constant kneeling and praying drives her insane.
Despite that, however, she remains lucid enough to provide progressive commentary. As June watches doctors work on the handmaid, she notes to herself that Ofmatthew is “just a vessel now, and the baby is all that matters.” In a more sardonic tone, she remarks, “I suppose that it’s all that ever mattered.”
It’s the usual drivel we hear about pro-life defenders, that they treat women as just baby vessels and sending them back to the dark ages. To hammer the point home, she makes a similar comment to a doctor as he stitches her hand. She even manages a reference to her feminist, pro-abortion mother.
[Slightly graphic with hand stitching]
June: Thank you.
Doctor Yates: I took an oath.
June: First do no harm.
Doctor Yates: Am I harming you?
June: You’re torturing her.
Doctor Yates: She’s not my patient, the child is.
June: That’s bullshit. Sir.
Doctor Yates: Hold still.
June: My mother was a doctor. She treated pregnant women. And she always put her patients, the women, first.
Doctor Yates: Oh, things were different when she practiced medicine. Did she get out?
June: No.
Doctor Yates: I’m sure you miss her.
When a woman is pregnant, there are two patients, but the pro-abortion side always wants to pit the mother against her child in a zero sum game.
Because of the context of The Handmaid’s Tale, namely that they’re in the middle of a fertility crisis, it’s not like the show’s going to start advocating abortion. Unfortunately, the characters still seem determined to push the idea that protecting the unborn baby is somehow not protecting women. And this is supposed to make real-life pro-life and religious leaders look bad.
“Do no harm” means doing no harm to all living, human beings, and that includes the unborn.
You could say the Ori clerics were also dressed like Buddhist monks. The chant is just that a chant. Satanists also use chants.
Whatever.
As I said, we all see things differently.
BTW, this is from the composer of the music for the Ori:
Music
Composer Joel Goldsmith’s inspiration for the Ori themes were the “certain parallels to what’s happening today, in modern day”. He admits that the music of the Ori was intentionally given a gothic, Gregorian and Christian feel. He tried to meld a few different styles.[9]
(From the link posted previously)
The risible irony of this premise is that plenty of examples of this exact conduct are extant throughout the Muslim world.
I can't think of a single example in a regional or national Christian paradigm where such rules of forced pregnancy and breeding was allowed, but from the inception of Islam, this has been the norm, reinforced by the Koran and Hadith.
I had to study the book in High School, and it was nowhere *NEAR* as shrill as the TV adaptation is making it out to be.
Reading the book, it was very clear to me that Atwood had meant for it to be a speculative story, and not a piece of shrill propaganda.
The Church sadly is in a cold schism.
That is why I use BIGTIME Biblical commentaries for those two books.
Ditto. It's not Margaret Atwood that is pushing the most extreme "Christian Taliban" nonsense about the current administration. And, of course, the first season of The Handmaid's Tale would have been in development well before Donald Trump announced his candidacy. IMO it would have made a pretty good one-season miniseries, as season 1 was a faithful adaptation of the novel. It's subsequent seasons that get increasingly shrill and preachy.
(Not to mention that if current trends continue, by the time the series ends, episodes will consist exclusively of Elisabeth Moss staring into the camera while 80s hits play on the soundtrack.)
I recall the original story (book) was science fiction — some future where human conception was hugely impaired and it was about some high politician taking advantage of their authority -—
Kinda (but not quite) like Billary and Hillary and Epstein ??? (that will be an interesting future ‘series’ )
Not religious people: Not Hindu people. Not Buddhist people. NOT MUSLIM PEOPLE!
Christian people. Even the so-called right publishes propaganda.
And they beat the Ori in the end by showing a super-technological device to the Pryors that nullifies the irrational religious belief, ending the “insanity” of the religion and the energy feed to the Ori.
The tragic irony is that she was right - about fundamentalist Islam.
ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Shabab have had slavery and sex slavery. ISIS had AUNTS, female enforcers beating women for not adhering to the dress code and women who supervised the sex slaves.
In this regard, she was prescient. Problem is, she was irrationally afraid of Christianity. Plus liberals are so Christophobic. That’s why “The Handmaid’s Tale” is required reading by so many college students, thus creating the large fan base for the show AND public knowledge of it.
Yet liberals are so irrationally protective of Islam that they ignore the actual Taliban killing school girls and ISIS sex slaves ... while smearing Christian neighbors as wanna-be Taliban, just eager to rape their liberal neighbors into submission.
Well, to be at least a little bit fair to Atwood, she made it fairly clear in a few interviews way back then, that Christianity, in and of itself, was not what concerned her. What concerned her were a few of the strains of more cult-like fundamentalism (including prosperity gospel), such as that promulgated by a few of the highly-visible TV evangelists of the seventies and eighties. In those same interviews, she freely admits that Tammy-Faye Bakker’s eighties TV persona was a partial inspiration for the Serena Fox character in the book.
But she also stressed that the book was sci-fi and a speculative story: a ‘what if’ scenario, and not some sort of political screed.
Hmmmmm...Thanks for that info. Since I didn’t follow the series after the second Ori episode, I didn’t know that.
Interesting.
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