THIS IS A RESPONSE TO THE CONTROVERSIAL DOCUMENTARY: 180. 

A special review by Documentarystorm contributor Brandie Silva. Write your own reviews! Contact us here.

 

I value life as I value time. It is to be spent seeking happiness and peace and sharing what you find with others – every day, all the time, even when people aren’t noticing. That’s my take.

 

Ray Comfort maybe views life a little differently.

 

He seems to value his life so much that he needs to make films (180 – Movie – The Case Against Murdering the Unborn Child) about his opinions to qualify his existence. And believe he’s entitled to that. I believe he is free to make whatever film he wants, purporting whatever he feels to be true and that websites advocating for freedom of expression should be at liberty to offer a complete spectrum of ideological information.

 

Thankfully I’m free too. I’m free to share, as Comfort does, my opinion of his art* and how it makes me feel.

 

I don’t find Comfort disturbing, but just simply annoying. His 33-minute work is just another extremist rant about something the population and law makers of the western world have decided will make up part of our democratic freedom.

Full stop.

 

Extremists have always existed, will always exist and there is a place for all of us in this world.

Comfort should be thanking his God for that.

 

He should be thankful that people are tolerant of his severe and often ridiculous expression of his beliefs and stranger than science-fiction pairings of history with present day way of life.

 

He should be thankful that he is not being targeted in a hateful way for calling the majority of our population ‘unclear thinkers of low moral standards who make uninformed and unintelligent choices.’

If you watch the video, you will see the reference.

 

Fact is that not only has abortion been sanctioned by governments for a very long time – Roe vs. Wade made a precedent in 1973, but since then, it has been upheld over and over and over – for almost 30 years.  The just over a decade-long Nazi regime was overturned by the world, we all understood that something had gone terribly wrong and eventually,  Germans recognized it and even now, as Comfort points out, continue to recognize it as a mistake.

That says a lot.

Certainly more than Comfort does, and much more directly.

 

It isn’t until almost the seventeenth minute of this film that the audience is given the connection it is scrambling to make: how does Comfort compare the Holocaust and abortion?

 

So Comfort says that Hitler decided the Jews were non-humans and this justified exterminating them and that granting abortion is the consideration of a baby in-utero as non -human, and that is (in his opinion) simply not the case, so we as a society are no better than Hitler.

That’s just too simple a deduction, I’m afraid.

The people killed by Hitler’s regime were independent, living, breathing, working, ambulant, thinking, present and reflective human beings. How does that ‘life’ comparable to the ‘life’ of a fetus?

 

Right, it doesn’t.

 

I was thinking that maybe Comfort was attempting to say we’re all like the German masses who followed a tyrannical leader, adhering to his rules and laws, but that wasn’t what he was doing. I think that might have actually made a better and more reasonable argument.

 

The Roe vs. Wade case was a result that spoke volumes about how North American society was changing. Unlike Hitler’s prescribed change on the public, the abortion issue started with the public asking for change – not the other way around.

 

It must just be my limitation, this inability to logically collocate these two things.

 

I can’t find the correlation between the mass murder justified by a racial superiority complex with that of a person, a woman in this case, exercising her rights over her own body.

 

I just can’t.

 

Comfort goes around microphone in hand asking leading questions and selecting or editing only favorable outcomes. A more interesting and actual real documentary would surely be the outtakes of this production or propaganda, to be most accurate.

 

Here are my answers to Comfort’s questions, if anyone cares.

 

When does it become a life?

When you, as an individual think it does.

And if you choose to not think about it, don’t.

 

What justifies killing a baby in the womb?

If you even consider it a baby, then you may justify its death any way you want.

Especially if it’s your womb.

If you don’t want to think about it, don’t.

 

Who knows when a life begins?

No one has any proof of this answer, to my knowledge. Not yet, anyway.

So I default to my standard response: whenever you think it does.

If you don’t want to think about it, don’t.

Some people even say life begins after 40!

 

But now I’ll just come to my point:

The question is not about abortion, but about individual freedom.

Just as Comfort can ask leading questions and edit his film as he wishes, I am free to also decide not to watch that film.

Accessibility is something that Comfort doesn’t speak about, but should. It is the high value we place on personal freedom that allows Comfort and anyone else with half or full-baked ideas to go around and make expressive material for people to then decide to observe or not, like or not, respond to or not..

These choices are the fruit of the freedom we all enjoy equally.

So, in a sense, I feel that Comfort with this film, has bitten a couple of fingers off the very hand that feeds him.

 

And since Comfort seems to like the 10 commandments so much, I thought I’d express my spirit of collaboration by trying my hand at their interpretation – Comfort shouldn’t be the only one who gets a shot at lateral analysis!

 

This video could be in violation of commandments 2, 6 and 8, as I see it.

 

Comfort’s attempt to convince everyone of what he thinks is true and praising those who  make the 180-degree change of mind to agree with him is a clear example of how he is seeking out people to ‘bow down’ or ‘serve’ him and his ideology.

- Commandment 2 | thou shall not do something almost completely incomprehensible, even after reading it many many times, (I think) make idols out of anything other than the Lord.

 

This film kills/murders people’s freedom of expression, seeing as Comfort edits out any person who would have told him to take a hike during the invasive questioning process (surely there were some/many).

- Commandment 6 | thou shall not kill.

 

This film has stolen 33 minutes of time from my life – which, I have said I like to spend spreading peace and happiness – and there is no way I will ever be able to get that back.

- commandment 8 | thou shall not steal.

 

*art – I used this term in the text to describe Comfort’s work, because it is indeed a form of personal expression.

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