Hollywood's Plan To Normalize Abortion Through Comedy

It will surprise nobody to learn that I'm not one of those folks who thinks that every subject is fair game for comedy. Not everything is funny, and more importantly, some things should not be mocked. That goes especially for mocking God (blasphemy), which is the norm in entertainment these days, but also includes subjects that are simply inappropriate topics for humor.

Conservatives have gotten far too comfortable with making a joke about everything in response to the fact that progressives have gotten so uptight. Back in the day, after all, it was lefties getting in trouble for being crude or mocking religion. These days, it's comedians daring to blaspheme the LGBT community. It is inevitable that societies end up having blasphemy laws, and those laws tell us who has the power and what we worship.

This brings me to a subject that, for obvious reasons, I find to be no laughing matter: Abortion. For some time now, the entertainment industry has been attempting to make feticide funny. Earlier this fall, for example, HBO released Unpregnant, a slapstick road trip comedy about two girls who head off across the US to a state without parental consent laws to procure an abortion. 

Three head off on a road trip; one is killed, two return, making it a success. In between, much hilarity ensues. If abortion is funny, after all, how can it also be a brutal act of violence that shreds the tiny body of a little human being? The answer, of course, is that it can't. And that's the entire point.

I'm ashamed of the fact that it took me as long as it did to realize the extent to which Hollywood and TV comedies and sitcoms contributed to the mainstreaming of behavior that once, not so very long ago, our culture recognized as "sinful" (a word that is, ironically, now considered something of a "sin" in and of itself--and one of the last ones left, too.) 

The simple fact is that when you make sin funny, you make it impossible to take seriously. If a lovable playboy on a sitcom--think Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Will & Grace, The Big Bang Theory, you name it--gets into various peccadillos while whoring around, then suddenly fornication is no longer a sin that threatens your soul. Instead, it is funny. And it is very difficult to find fornication hilarious on Saturday night around the TV or the laptop and then a deadly serious sin for which Christ died on Sunday morning.

The same has been true for porn use (a ubiquitous punchline in TV sitcoms.) If porn addiction is funny, how can it also be the soul-poisoning participation in the systematic degradation and often assault of women? It can't, of course. The same is true for the normalization of "alternative" lifestyles and conditioning audiences to accept the redefinition of marriage. 

An entire documentary series, Visible: Out on Television, tracked the way the artists of the entertainment industry reshaped the views of the culture with one of the most powerful storytelling tools in the history of humanity. If the entertainment industry can get you laughing at things that God hates, it has, in effect, already won a huge victory. You might still call sin "sin." But because they can make you think it's funny, they know you cannot take it as seriously.

According to Variety, that's what a new film by Sacha Baron Cohen is attempting to do with the abortion debate. A follow-up to his juvenile 2006 mockumentary, it apparently contains a scene in which the Borat character's daughter accidentally swallows a plastic baby on a cupcake. 

They head to a crisis pregnancy center and inform a pastor there that she has a baby inside her that needs to be taken out. Obviously, the pastor believes they are requesting abortion, and tells them that "When you take it out, you end that life. 

It is a living, breathing life that God has created." Of course, it's actually a toy. So it isn't really breathing, and the pastor who cares about babies not getting dismembered is obviously a moron. Get it? Then, Borat informs the pastor that he's the one responsible for the baby in his daughter, because incest is also apparently hilarious. 

Of course, if Borat had tried that in a Planned Parenthood clinic, he'd likely have been offered an abortion, no questions asked. The abortion industry knows the needs of its clientele: A sin to cover up sin while they make a killing.

It's not stodgy or prudish to say that none of that is actually funny. I've seen what babies look like in dumpsters behind abortion clinics, and I promise you that if you saw what I saw, you wouldn't think it was funny, either. Humor is a powerful weapon, and now abortion activists are attempting to utilize it in the same way comedy was used to desensitize us to the sinfulness of a wide range of behaviors. 

If they can make us think that abortion is a bucket of laughs, then perhaps they can distract us from the fact that it is actually a bucket of dead babies. 

Some things are deadly serious, and they are serious because they have the potential to be deadly. Sin is like that. It is poison. And when we chortle about it, we can be assured that laughter is not, in fact, the best medicine.

Originally published at The Bridgehead - reposted with permission.