Media favorite author Margaret Atwood melted down in a piece for The Atlantic, saying that the “17th Century” Justice Sam Alito will take us back to a time of witch trials if he successfully overturns Roe v. Wade. Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, a fear-mongering, anti-Christian tale of repressing women, sneered, “If Justice Alito wants you to be governed by the laws of the 17th century, you should take a close look at that century. Is that when you want to live?”
Given how liberals lecture about stirring up violence with incendiary talk, both Atwood and the press should be careful in how they hype pro-abortion propaganda. Just last week, a pro-life center in Madison, Wisconsin was firebombed.
In the May 13 Atlantic piece, Atwood warned that the fictional theocracy the novel has now arrived with the draft Supreme Court ruling:
In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.
Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?
Also, apparently, this will take us back to the Salem witch trials:
The Alito opinion purports to be based on America’s Constitution. But it relies on English jurisprudence from the 17th century, a time when a belief in witchcraft caused the death of many innocent people. The Salem witchcraft trials were trials—they had judges and juries—but they accepted “spectral evidence,” in the belief that a witch could send her double, or specter, out into the world to do mischief. Thus, if you were sound asleep in bed, with many witnesses, but someone reported you supposedly doing sinister things to a cow several miles away, you were guilty of witchcraft. You had no way of proving otherwise.
Similarly, it will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.
Atwood’s apocalyptic tale of the Christian right repressing women in the future is popular with journalists. On June 18, 2019, Nightline reporter Maggie Rulli cheered people who dressed up in Handmaid’s Tale costumes and red capes:
They’ve become a symbol of protest for global women's rights, from reproductive rights in Alabama and Georgia to equal pay and treatment in Hollywood, even protesting in London just two weeks ago during president Trump's state visit.
In 2020, liberal media extremist Keith Olbermann called to remove Supreme Court Justice called for “removing” the “Handmaid” Amy Coney Barrett from society. In 2019, Glamour magazine made her Woman of the Year.
So when Atwood writes unhinged articles smearing conservatives as taking America back to the 17th century, the networks share culpability for the ugliness.
