David QuinnAmnesty’s latest celebrity campaign is a crude piece of propaganda, writes David Quinn
A good example of the enormous firepower available to those who want Ireland to liberalise our abortion law was on display last week. Writer Graham Linehan and his wife Helen, revealed that some years back they learnt the baby they were expecting was severely handicapped and would not live past birth. Rather than carry the baby to term, they opted for an abortion.
They are both angry that the law here in Ireland would not permit them to do that. They are now campaigning for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, that is, the pro-life clause of our Constitution.
Graham Linehan is best known as one of the co-creators of Father Ted. He has half a million followers on Twitter. That’s in the big leagues.
The Linehan story was on the front page of the Evening Herald last week. They were interviewed on Channel Four and also on Irish radio. That is influence.
Graham Linehan has joined Amnesty International Ireland in its campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment. He made a short video for them called ‘Chains’. The video is the crudest piece of propaganda to appear in quite some time.
Ruined church
To spooky music, we are shown a ruined church and a graveyard. Mist blows across the graveyard, as in a ghost story. We see crosses. The images are in black and white.
Referring to the Eighth Amendment, the voiceover tells us: “A ghost haunts Ireland. A cruel ghost of the last century, still bound to the land. It blindly brings suffering, even death, to the women whose lives it touches.”
As Eilis O’Hanlon wrote in the Sunday Independent: “It [the video] practically wallows in Gothic horror story tropes, as it peddles familiar stereotypes of Ireland as a dark country under the jackboot of Catholic authoritarianism.”
Over at The Daily Telegraph, Timothy Stanley wrote of the video and its purpose: “This doesn’t look like a campaign against Ireland’s abortion laws. It looks like a campaign to exorcise the Catholic Church from Ireland.”
As the video ends, it cuts away from the haunted Catholic church and graveyard, and invites us to consider an Ireland without the Eighth Amendment. It goes from black and white to colour and to a mountain scene on a beautiful sunny day.
It could hardly belabour its point more. Ireland with the Eighth Amendment is a haunted, bleak, black and white land, oppressed by the Catholic Church. Ireland without the Eighth Amendment is a liberated place of colour and sunshine and peace.
The voiceover, incidentally, is by Liam Neeson, possibly our most famous actor. That is power and it is power lined up on the side wishing to introduce abortion to Ireland in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’.
A famous person, Graham Linehan (by the way, he announced last week that he “hates” the Catholic Church), combines with a more famous person, Liam Neeson, to make a video for a powerful organisation, Amnesty International, aimed at repealing our pro-life law.
Our media then give Linehan an unchallenged platform to further air his views.
Linehan’s video did attract a few critics, chiefly Stanley and O’Hanlon. On Twitter Linehan told Stanley to “F*** off”.
Surely with O’Hanlon’s article in mind, Linehan posted an article on Twitter about a pregnant Irish woman who, though brain-dead, was being kept alive to give her baby some remote chance of living. It was wrongly believed by her medical team that the Eighth Amendment required them to do so.
This was a true example of Gothic horror, claimed Linehan.
The case in question occurred towards the end of last year. In the event, the woman was allowed to die. The Eighth Amendment was no impediment to letting this happen.
But if Linehan wants a few examples of Gothic horror, and more, he need look no further than the ongoing scandal in the US of Planned Parenthood, the country’s biggest abortion provider, selling body parts of aborted foetuses as casually as if they were car parts.
Or the case of Kermit Gosnell, the American doctor who specialised in very late term abortions and whose clinic was more like a scene from extreme torture movies such as Saw than any Gothic horror you or I have ever seen.
Or what about the scandal of UK hospitals using aborted foetuses to help run their heating systems? As the London Independent reported: “The bodies of more than 15,000 unborn foetuses have been incinerated in the UK, an investigation has found, with some treated as ‘clinical waste’ and others burned to heat hospitals.
“The practice was carried out by 27 NHS trusts, with at least 15,500 bodies burned over the last two years alone.
“Ten of those trusts admitted to burning more than 1,000 sets of remains along with other hospital rubbish, while two said they were incinerated in ‘waste-to-energy’ furnaces that generate energy used to power and heat hospitals.”
How many Irish people (or British people) know about the Planned Parenthood scandal, Dr Kermit Gosnell, or the above mentioned incineration scandal? Very few, I’m sure.
And why is this? It is because the pro-life movement does not have powerful and influential people like Graham Linehan or Liam Neeson on its side, who could use their power and influence to tell the public about these cases.
Nor does it have a powerful organisation like Amnesty International on its side.
Nor does it have newspaper editors, or well-known TV and radio presenters or producers on its side.
It could be argued that it has the Catholic Church on its side. But the ironic thing in view of the Linehan video is that most Catholic priests steer well clear of the abortion debate. Most massgoers don’t hear the abortion issue mentioned in church from one end of the year to the other.
Linehan’s video invites us to think that an Ireland with abortion will be far better than an Ireland without abortion. He doesn’t tell us, of course, that Ireland’s maternal death rate is lower than Britain’s.
Above all, it doesn’t seem to occur to him that abortion results in the death of a human being. After all, if a foetus is not human, then what is it?
So the graveyard he shows in his video would fill up with the bodies of aborted babies except, of course, they would never get that far. Some of them end up in the heating systems of hospitals instead. Now that is genuinely horrific.
Is there any well-known person out there who would care to make a video about this?