One of my favorite bloggers, Professor Glenn Reynolds, often posts links to his blog site (h/t: Instanpundit) while mentioning that "All they have to do is not be crazy". The idea being, that in a midterm election, where the President's party controls the Executive and Legislative branches, all the opposition has to do in order to win is, well, not be crazy. The link that follows usually includes a high level of crazy. From Russian Collusion to complete unfounded accusations of treason, crazy is the norm from the opposition. Which brings me to the reason for this post.
My lovely daughter posted a video where several people attempted to equate Margaret Atwood's famous dystopian novel with President Donald Trump's America. Dear Daughter asked for my opinion. It's hard to even begin to address this absurdity, never mind in a comment on Facebook. So, here I sit, at 0014 hours, composing a blog.
If you have never read the Handmaid's Tale, I highly recommend it. Especially if you are one of those people who loves dystopian fiction. This book was one of the first, long before the Hunger Games, Divergent, or any of the others. It takes place in the fictional Republic of Gilead, and the Republic of Gilead is one of the worst places I've seen in the world of dystopia. It completely distorts Biblical Truth into something akin to Modern Islamic Nations who practice Sharia Law. Any Christian who bothers to actually read their Bible knows that the practices in this fictional republic have absolutely no connection to the Bible, beyond the word handmaid. In order to explain how bastardize this is, I have to point my few readers to the most well known handmaid, Hagar.
Hagar doesn't get huge billing in the Bible, but she is an intricate part of a very important story, mainly, the birth of the Nation of Israel. Hagar was the handmaid of Abram's (Abraham) wife, Sarai (Sarah). Essentially she was a slave. Think deep south, pre-civil war era, the slave who took care of the lady of the house. God promised Abram a great nation from his children, but neither of these founding members of Israel were spring chickens. Sarai didn't really believe that at their advancing age she and Abram would conceive a child. So she essentially gave Hagar to Abram to conceive this child that God promised them. To make a long story short, it was a terrible idea. Take a look a the geo-political mess that is the Middle East. That's how terrible of an idea it was. Bad things happen when sinful men decide to enact God's plans their own way instead of God's way. However, it's this history from the Bible that provides the backdrop (not really, but go with it) for the Handmaid's tale.
I'm not going to give you the whole book or show. Go read the book. There is a huge back story as to how these crazy men and women (and to be sure, if you read the book or watch the show, women had a BIG PART in creating Gilead), managed to get a bunch of people to buy into their insanity. However, to compare this level of insanity to the United States of America under Trump is in itself insanity.
First of all, the automatic assumption is that if Evangelical Christians had their way, this is what they would do to women. Except it's not. The Bible is full of flawed people who made big mistakes. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, the list goes on. The only perfect Person who has ever walked this earth is Jesus. However, sexual immorality is one of those sins the Bible hammers on. It's bad, really bad. So at no point could any Christian reading his Bible condone the idea of forcing women to have sex with men (RAPE) just so they can get pregnant and have children. (Oops...spoiler alert.) You'd have to throw out 99% of the Bible to get to THAT conclusion.
The second assumption is that the government refusing to force people to pay for your birth control, not funding organizations that kill 300,000 unborn babies a year, and not agreeing that abortion at any time for any reason is perfectly okay and not murder, is somehow on par with the Republic of Gilead. Again, you'd have to read the book to understand how insane this is.
Gilead is not only paying 77 cents on the dollar to women (neither is the US, but that's a discussion for another time), or refusing to give women abortions (although I imagine abortion isn't legal), or refusing to pay for birth control (probably also illegal in Gilead). In Gilead handmaid's are SLAVES, who are are repeatedly raped in order to produce children. In Gilead, by law, men are forced to rape women and commit adultery. In Gilead, the wives of these men are forced to participate in this abomination by actually cradling the handmaid while she's being raped.
Do you get it yet? The level of INSANITY that is involved when people compare America under Trump to the Handmaid's Tale?
There are places in this world where rape is treated as a crime committed by women, but those places are not the United States. There are places where women are required to wear long dresses and ridiculous head coverings or suffer legal ramifications, but those places are not the United States. There are places where being gay is a death sentence, but those places are NOT the United States. And the President of the United States has never advocated for these things. No one in Congress is advocating for these things. No one in the Senate is advocating for these things. No one on the Supreme Court is writing opinions granting the Constitutional right to do these things. It's not happening.
It's a level of crazy that cannot be described in words. All they had to do was NOT be crazy, and they'd have a rousing midterm election victory. Heck, they might still have one. But when the people in the opposition praise Ted Kennedy (who drove a woman into a lake and left her to die) for empowering women, and then accuse the President of being the next leader of a fictional country in a fictional book that bears no resemblance to reality, it's crazy. It's unhinged. It's certifiably insane.
To recap, at no point does the Bible promote the ideas espoused in the Handmaid's Tale, although I am sure there are people out there who could twist it to fit that craziness. Those people won't be in charge of anything any time soon. The United States of America does not have any resemblance to the fictional Republic of Gilead. The Handmaid's Tale is a not a parallel to Donald Trump's America.
You don't have to like him, you don't have to agree with what he's doing. You don't even have to stop inventing garbage like this to smear him (hey, check out that first amendment thingy!!!!). However, you also don't get to be angry when I mention that maybe you should make an appointment with your doctor as soon as possible. Please. Right now. Call the emergency line. I'm worried about you.
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