After a 20-month hiatus, “The Handmaid’s Tale” returned to Hulu this week for yet another round of Christian-bashing. Earlier this week, the show that once featured Christians marrying child brides featured Christians asking God to bless waterboarding torture.
As reported by Newsbusters, the third episode of this season featured Handmaid June (Elizabeth Moss) being interrogated by authorities after helping 86 children and several women escape the fictional world of Gilead (formerly United States) into Canada. During the interrogation, Handmaid June is waterboarded by her captors, who call upon God to bless the moment as they place a clerical cloth over her face.
“Bless us, O Lord, for this holy service we are grateful to perform in Your name. In our search for justice, may You guide this sinner to righteousness and repentance. Amen. It’s alright, shh. All right then,” the lieutenant says before he tortures the heroine.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” has a difficult road ahead, given that it was meant as an anti-Trump battering ram upon its first entry into the streaming world. Margaret Atwood, the author of the book upon which the show is based, said that she garnered her inspiration for the feminist dystopian novel about women being forced to produce babies for infertile wealthy elites after visiting several totalitarian (largely Communist) regimes in Eastern Europe.
“So, there I am in West Berlin surrounded by the wall, and I’m visiting various totalitarian regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Poland. So, for instance, Ceaușescu in Romania made a law that women had to have four babies, and they had to have a pregnancy test every month. And if they weren’t pregnant, why not? … It’s not me who made this stuff up; the human race made it up, unfortunately,” she added.
“It is a warning,” Atwood said of her book. “I have never believed it can’t happen here. I’ve never believed that. And more and more people are joining me in that lack of belief.”
Handmaid costumes have almost become a staple of the pro-abortion movement and are regularly present at Planned Parenthood rallies. The show’s stars have also openly advocated for abortion and made ridiculous claims about how pro-life states are just like the fictional world of Gilead. Actress Ann Dowd, who plays Aunt Lydia, told the Daily Beast in 2018 that the show mirrors what happens to women in this country.
“I can tell you that it’s not the writers’ intent to mirror what is going on, sadly, in the world and this country. But it is to wake people up, keep the dialogue going, talk. Don’t let the small things go by,” Dowd said. “You know, the line that I find so haunting from the first season is when Offred says, ‘When we finally put our phones down it was too late.’ Just pay attention! I’m sure there’s a fair amount of hyperbole in terms of we could turn into Gilead. I don’t see that happening. Having said that, the permission people seem to have now to step out of the shadows in terms of white supremacy, that shocked me, how organized it was and the degree of it.”
“When you see, also, Roe v. Wade, that’s not a simple question. The lack of awareness of how complicated the idea of abortion is. To all those pro-life individuals who are picketing and doing what they’re doing, I want to ask them how many foster children live in their homes?” she continued. “How many children without family have you taken in and said, ‘I will accept this responsibility’? I find all those things shocking, the degree of ignorance, of racism. With Handmaid’s, what is shocking is in this era that we live in now with this president, things I didn’t think were possible are in fact happening, in much larger numbers than one would have thought.”
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