How vile is the television industry? They won’t just promote toleration of abortion. They won’t just promote abortion itself. They will sanctify abortion, turn it into a sacred rite of passage.
Last night’s Scandal featured main character Olivia Pope (played by far-left Obama acolyte Kerry Washington) undergoing an abortion. As they wheel Pope into the operating room, the soundtrack underneath plays the Christmas song “Silent Night” – a song dedicated to celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. After her abortion, the show cuts to Pope at home, drinking wine and smiling happily while looking at her Christmas tree. Now the show features “Ave Maria.”
Naturally, Washington saw fit to tweet about the episode by plugging abortion factory Planned Parenthood:
The abortion followed character Senator Mellie Grant, a Republican, filibustering her own party to stop defunding of Planned Parenthood – a true television fantasy, if ever there was one, passing former Texas State Senator Wendy Davis off under the guise of Republicanism. Gross.
Planned Parenthood took advantage of the storyline to plug its killing of the unborn:
Tonight the millions of people who tune into Scandal every Thursday night learned that our rights to reproductive health care are under attack. Never one to shy away from critical issues, Shonda Rhimes used her platform to tell the world…We applaud Shonda Rhimes tonight – and every Thursday night – for proving that when women are telling our stories, the world will pause and watch.
Shonda Rhimes, the creator of the show and a television icon, is a major fan of abortion. In 2011, one of her Gray’s Anatomy characters had an abortion; Rhimes justified that decision by saying that the character would have had an abortion, and that it was better for the character to have an abortion rather than resenting her child. Adoption apparently never crossed Rhimes’ mind; better to just off the baby. At the time, she lied in interviews, “I don’t think it’s about the agenda,” although she added that one of the pro-life characters in Private Practice was “viciously” pro-life.
In 2014, Rhimes came out of the closet fully on her agenda. She’s on the board of Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles, and she said:
Most accidentally impregnated characters, even young women who have only lived in a post-Roe v. Wade world, don’t bring up or even briefly consider the option of an abortion. It is as if it doesn’t even exist. And [that’s] weird and not realistic…let’s be serious about what’s really going on.
But of course, it’s not about just being serious that people have abortions. That’s just the great Hollywood lie: “We depict, we don’t push values.” Nonsense. Every creative decision is a choice between portrayals of certain values. If Rhimes had shown an abortion and then Pope devastated afterward, that would be one choice; instead, she chose to turn abortion into a full-on holy affair, complete with Christian odes playing in the background. Never do these shows depict a 3D ultrasound. That would be giving the audience too much information.
This is the new Democratic Party and the new left: freed from the shackles of “safe, legal, and rare,” the feminist left now cheers abortion as an affirmative good, something to smile about over cocoa while comfortably listening to religious music – because hey, you don’t have anything to feel bad about. Abortion is just something people do, rather like removing a kidney stone, only with a generalized feeling of empowerment. FXX’s You’re the Worst now terms abortion “abobo” to make a joke of it; NBC’s Parenthood championed a high school abortion in 2013. Abortion is now a pleasant decision with no moral consequences, a fun thing to do in your off-hours if you were just screwing around and decided not to slap on a condom.
Hollywood creates characters we care about. Hollywood creates friends for us, people with whom we schedule time once a week. Then, after creating those characters, Hollywood has them perform activities we find morally repugnant, but portrays those acts as decent. Being entertained requires not merely a willing suspension of disbelief, but a certain suspension of morality – how else could we stand watching the lies, betrayals, and acts of violence of every sort we routinely watch? Hollywood takes advantage of our entertainment-minded nonjudgmentalism and attempts to extend it to our general moral calculus.
It’s gross, and it is a violation of the unspoken compact between entertainers and their audiences. Decent people ought to tune out of Shonda Rhimes’ leftist tripe.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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