‘When I lift up this gun and I look down the sights at one of these baby-butchers, I know I am squeezing that trigger for God Almighty. Anyone who raises a weapon against those slaughtering babies is doing God’s work. We need a civil war that will kill a whole lot of people.”
Charming stuff, broadcast last week by M-Net in a tabloid-pitched American documentary called Soldiers in the Army of God. This was a crudely unbalanced look at the protocols and activities of an extremist organisation dedicated to the denunciation,
harassment, violent assault and, ultimately, the vicious murder of doctors and medi-cal staff undertaking abortions in the United States. Since 1973, when abortion was legalised in the US, there have been 2 400 cases of violence against doctors and clinics, 150 murders (that’s five a year), numberless picketings, banner parades and billboards. That M-Net chose to broadcast this documentary was, in itself, an act of overt social irresponsibility; that it chose to do so early in an evening and before the so-called “watershed”, is deserving of official attention.
In the dissemination of material that is likely to have an equivocal influence on its recipients, broadcasters are expected to apply their minds to what effects such material might have on their likely audience. This is not to say that the broadcasters are required to censor their output, edit or otherwise mutilate programmes that might offend or cause distress. Obviously a line has to be drawn when it comes to hardcore pornography, truly exploitative violence, “hate speech” and so on. Other “dodgy” material may be broadcast after specified hours later in evenings and when it’s considered that children are less likely to be among the audience. Current legislation, coupled with the codes of conduct issued by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, make ample provision for the broadcast of controversial or explicit television material. Warnings are required to be made, on-screen warning logos must be shown. M-Net conformed to none of these rules and broadcast this very dubious programme at seven in the evening.
In it the extremist rantings of the anti-abortion activists were given unquestioned sway. A series of pro-life fanatics — to include a brace of looney-tunes priests — gave vent to their thoughts; that’s when they weren’t boasting how they had killed doctors and their staff, bombed their premises, threatened their families and conducted a campaign of concentrated terror against them.
Now and then on-screen scripting revealed the past prison records of a few of these people; ostensibly to acknowledge that the Army of God’s activities was, in fact, often criminal. The trouble was that these prison sentences were held up as being inevitable sacrifices to the greater cause of “God’s will”, the motif which underscored the entire piece. The documentary even visited a man currently on death row for the premeditated murder of a doctor. The condemned man was continually referred to in the programme as some kind of paragon martyr to the pro-life cause.
Here the documentary was at its most pernicious. Every violent or murderous act of the anti-abortionists was justified on the grounds that it was being conducted as an inexorable religious obligation, an extension of divine retributive will. No opposing argument, no dissenting opinion was allowed a whisper. True, a few of the victims were allowed to express the shock of seeing their partners gunned down, the fear in which they lived. Left to itself the programme did nothing in the way of questioning the rabid standpoints of God’s terrifying soldiers. Some of them shared their opinions as to what they believed to be the vacant stupidity of women wanting to make their own choices about their unwanted pregnancies; opinions that belonged in the dark ages.
No doubt it will be argued that the sheer eccentricity, the bizarre aberrations of the anti-abortionists provided their own condemnation: the moment they opened their mouths they self-destructed. The problem is that such a position presupposes both sophistication and critical proficiency in the programme’s viewers. It is not patronising to acknowledge that South Africa’s population hosts a percentage of people who might well be influenced by the freakish tone of the statements and arguments in the programme — notwithstanding that M-Net’s audience is mainly among those able to afford decoders and monthly tariffs. Among those who can are surely the country’s growing band of Christian fundamentalists currently using similar arguments in defence of bombing campaigns. In a society as volatile and violent as South Africa’s has become, it is disdainful of a broad social accountability for M-Net to have broadcast this programme at all. Certainly it had no place early in an evening.
Later in the programme the zealot quoted above described how God helped him personally when he circumcised himself as an impost to his religious persuasions: “God put His hand inside mine, like my hand was a glove that He was wearing, and it was like He took the razor blade Himself and did it for me.”
Pity He didn’t attend to his throat while He was about it.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby