Left-wing newspapers certainly aren’t the defenders of free expression they used to be. Canada-based journalist Tracey Linderman filed a fear-mongering report for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper Tuesday, “Activists condemn Canadian cinema chain for screening anti-abortion film: Cineplex Entertainment criticized for screening Unplanned, which is said to promote falsehoods about reproductive health.”
Previously, the movie's producers said the pro-life film had been effectively “banned” in Canada due to several prominent Canadian distributors, including Cineplex, refusing to pick up the film because of its pro-life content. Cineplex has evidently changed its mind and will now run the film. Now the left-wing U.K. paper is furious at the cinema chain’s audacity to actually screen a movie with a premise liberals find to be suffused with wrongthink (the few liberals that have actually bothered to watch it, anyway, rather than condemning it sight unseen).
It's bizarre to see a journalist denigrating "freedom of expression laws," but there it is, in paragraph one:
Abortion rights defenders in Canada have accused the country’s largest cinema chain of hiding behind freedom of expression laws in order to screen a controversial US anti-choice film which has been described as “anti-abortion propaganda”.
The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) said Cineplex Entertainment has “made a decision based on money, not freedom of speech” by choosing to screen Unplanned.
ARCC executive director Joyce Arthur said: “The movie theatres who are agreeing to show this film under the guise of free speech are publicly legitimizing anti-choice views.
She told the Guardian: “Why does much of civil society seem to think it’s still OK to allow public challenges of women’s rights in the name of free speech? That would never be tolerated if it, for example, were a white supremacist movie.”
Linderman didn’t bother with balance, just forwarded insults from Planned Parenthood, which has an obvious bias, and a couple of pans from liberal film critics.
Planned Parenthood has said the movie includes “many falsehoods”. Guardian film critic Jordan Hoffman called the film “a gory mess” before its March release in the US, while Variety described it as an “alarmist horror movie”.
All this speech-squelching drama against a movie scheduled for a one-week run in 14 theatres in Canada!
However, anti-abortion sentiment is growing in Canada. Last year, Maclean’s magazine writer Anne Kingston profiled the resurgence of the anti-abortion movement in Canada, noting that many of the country’s anti-abortion political groups have close ties to their US counterparts.
The Guardian story really went off the rails at the end.
ARCC’s Arthur said she feared the screening of Unplanned could incite hatred and violence against Canadian abortion providers. “I know the clinics and sexual health centres in Canada are pretty worried about the movie. Basically they’re bracing for a wave of hate,” she said.
