Wednesday, May 17, 2017

So Joss Whedon Made a Planned Parenthood Propaganda Film... [Clinton Wilcox]

There's no doubt Joss Whedon is a great director. I have the entire Firefly series on DVD and I'm a huge fan of the Avengers movies (and I have friends who sing the praises of his other shows, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse). However, in a bizarre turnaround, Whedon has set his sights on promoting Planned Parenthood by filming a three-minute short film called Unlocked. The film, of course, is well-made, but it doesn't make any sense.

The film essentially opens displaying three situations, a woman suffering with cancer, a couple who contracted an STD, and a girl who finds herself pregnant but was recently accepted to college. These three people were unable to go into Planned Parenthood because it was closed. The film essentially plays in reverse, so you see the outcomes of these three situations before you see them start. It's a creative way to film the project, but again, the project, itself, is divorced from reality. Then the video starts playing forward and these people can suddenly enter Planned Parenthood because it opens, where smiling clinic workers give information, cancer screenings, and birth control pills to anyone who wants it. Of course what the film doesn't show is that even if Planned Parenthood is closed, there are other health centers that serve low-income women who can pick up the slack. As of 2015, there are 20 community health clinics for every Planned Parenthood in the United States.

Of course, the film doesn't focus on the abortions, the film just focuses on the other services that they provide. No one likes to focus on the abortions, despite the fact that abortions are more important to Planned Parenthood than providing health to women. When Trump offered Planned Parenthood an ultimatum, they opted to continue providing abortions, even if it meant losing federal funding. Not to mention that whenever the government has threatened to stop funds going to Planned Parenthood in their bills, they redirect that funding to other health centers. No woman would need to stop being seen if Planned Parenthood were to close up its doors.

On the page where you can view the video (and sign a petition to stand with Planned Parenthood), their words are apt: "...it's our responsibility to use our superpowers to slay." Of course, Planned Parenthood's "superpower" is for stronger people to exercise power over weaker people and slay them because those weaker people are in the way of something they want, namely unrestricted sex, financial freedom, etc.

In Whedon's own words, "UNLOCKED is about what a world without Planned Parenthood would look like, which is truly dire." All it does is show how duped he is by Planned Parenthood's talking points. It doesn't make any sort of argument, it just assumes that without them no one is going to be able to find the healthcare that they need, never mind the fact that our government has now given us socialized healthcare, so what excuse is there now for not having healthcare? It also assumes that people will never be able to get sex education, despite the fact that all public schools have a sex education program.

This is an abortion-choice propaganda piece, nothing more. Unfortunately neither Joss Whedon, nor Planned Parenthood, believe women are capable of succeeding without killing their children. How degrading to women to be told that you can't succeed if you are doing exactly what sets women apart from men, getting pregnant and bearing a child. It's disguised misogyny. The question posed at the end is "what world do you want?" My answer is I want the world where Planned Parenthood isn't killing hundreds of thousands of unborn babies every year.

7 comments:

  1. It only takes the intellectual capacity of a hedgehog and the attention span of a chimp with ADD to recognize that Planned Parenthood is not what they say they are. So why are so many of the glitterati so infatuated with them?

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  2. "Planned Parenthood. . . . why are so many of the glitterati so infatuated with them?"

    That deserves careful research presented in a paper, but in outline, could it be like this? – Celebrities like to burnish their overpaid and self-indulgent images with progressive causes. There is a small selection of the most progressive causes, of which women's rights is one. Basically, there is no nobler cause than women's rights, but around 1970 feminists took a disastrous wrong turn and made abortion rights their centerpiece. (Recently Frederica Mathewes-Green rued, "How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism?") And iconically speaking, the spearhead of abortion rights is Planned Parenthood.

    And what is the explanation for that disastrous wrong turn? The idea that abortion rights are key to women's equality has a superficial appeal to it, as exemplified by the pregnant girl in Whedon's video. But abortion is "a means by which women conform to a society designed for men," to quote a Secular Pro-Life bumper sticker. Do abortion rights, in reality, undermine or help shore up a patriarchal society? I once tried to do the math in "A Pro-Life Feminist Balance Sheet" (can be Googled, WITH quote marks).

    Let's note that the message of the pregnant girl in Whedon's video is not only pro-choice, it is pro-abortion: get rid of your baby and get ahead in life.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "abortion-choice propaganda piece"

    A propaganda piece for ... choice. So you can have an abortion, if you need. Or you don't have to have an abortion, if you don't want.

    Uh, I don't think you need propaganda for that. Its basically "do what's right for you". Not like "you'll do exactly what what a bunch of religious freaks want you to do", which is you guys.

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  4. You down-play abortion to a mere matter of "choice", which is a fundamental misrepresentation of what abortion actually is.

    Follow this simple syllogism:
    P1) Killing an innocent human being is morally wrong.
    P2) Abortion takes the life of an innocent human being.
    C) Abortion is morally wrong.

    Judging by your response of "do what's right for you", I am going to conclude that you're a moral relativist.
    If that is the case, you have no grounds for objecting to our objections of abortion; you're merely stating your own subjective opinion.

    Moreover, you label us as "religious freaks". Thank you for the ad hominem, are you finished with your logical fallacies? Would you like to have a rational discussion on the matter?

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  5. Whedon is just a product and a prisoner of his education (son of a feminist mother). It's a shame because Dollhouse addresses humans owning and trafficking other humans in such a pertinent way. It would be great to have more art on pro-life topics: good literature and films. Most of what I've seen written from a pro-life perspective is pathetic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Most of what I've seen written from a pro-life perspective is pathetic."

      Here is an old poem (about a pre-Roe abortion) by Anne Sexton:


      The Abortion

      Somebody who should have been born
      is gone.

      Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
      each bud puffing out from its knot,
      I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

      Up past the Blue Mountains, where
      Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
      wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

      its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
      where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
      a dark socket from which the coal has poured,

      Somebody who should have been born
      is gone.

      the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
      and me wondering when the ground would break,
      and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

      up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
      not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all…
      he took the fullness that love began.

      Returning north, even the sky grew thin
      like a high window looking nowhere.
      The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

      Somebody who should have been born
      is gone.

      Yes, woman, such logic will lead
      to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
      you coward…this baby that I bleed.

      Anne Sexton


      Google for the sculpture "Memorial for Unborn Children" by Slovak artist Martin Hudacek.


      And don't miss a rap-like poem. In YouTube, search for:

      Stand4Life Promo (Shawn Welcome - Civil War)

      Delete
  6. What act, more than supporting an organization that is in the business of butchering babies will cause people to take Firefly, Avenger and other DVDs and throw them in the trash?

    ReplyDelete

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