Kevin Swanson and Commander Fred

As reported on RightWingWatch:

Radical anti-LGBTQ pastor and radio host Kevin Swanson warned last week that the Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a propaganda effort designed to condition Americans to carry out a genocide against conservative Christians.

Yes, really.

“It’s a shocking story and meant for the persecution of Christians,” Swanson said on his radio program. “They create a gigantic caricature of a biblical Christian and then they turn them into rapists, so this kind of thing is propaganda, pure and simple propaganda. This is the kind of thing that happened with the Jews in the 1930s.”

This suggests Swanson hasn’t actually watched (or read) the tale. It isn’t simply a futuristic theocracy, it’s one grappling with massive infertility. It’s clear to anyone watching it that the story is of the futuristic dystopia genre. There’s war, nuclear fallout, and (seemingly global) mass infertility. In other words, this isn’t simply a “what if Christian fundamentalists took over” story.

But while we’re on the subject, Swanson is on record calling for LGBT individuals to be exiled or executed. That’s actually one of the more galling aspects of the show—the summary execution of gay men and infertile lesbians—and it goes unmentioned by Swanson in his diatribe against the show.

It’s curious that Swanson objects to the show because of its depiction of the rape of the handmaids specifically. Swanson doesn’t mention that gay men and adulterers are put to death in the show, or that women are banned from working outside of the home or having their own bank accounts. Perhaps he does not mention those things because, when it comes to Swanson, those things are not caricatures.

On Swanson’s radio show, feminists are called “selfish, narcissistic, family-destroying whores.” And yes, Swanson has called for the death penalty for homosexuals, provided they are first given time to repent. He has also called for lynching Girl Scout leaders (you can’t make this stuff up). Upset by a 2014 Rose Bowl float depicting gay marriage, Swanson wondered “what the Rose Bowl parade would do if we had the stoning of a homosexual along the parade just as an expression of free speech and all that.”

Swanson is on record stating that the “wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.” He was involved in the “Birth Control: The Movie” project, which has recently turned its attention to glorifying Anthony Comstock, whom the website states “fought the battle for national purity and won!” What did Comstock do? Oh, that’s right—he banned contraception. It was his laws that kept getting Margaret Sanger arrested.

Swanson is about as close to the pre-Gilead Commander Fred depicted in the Handmaid’s Tale as you can get. As you may remember—if you, unlike Swanson, have been keeping up with the show—pre-Gilead Commander Fred was not happy about the idea of handmaids either; he only accepted it because of the massive plague of infertility threatening society.

When it comes down to it, Swanson appeals to the handmaids to call the show a caricature because he is on record supporting essentially everything else depicted. If Swanson doesn’t like how fundamentalist Christianity is portrayed in the Handmaid’s Tale, he might do well to stop sounding exactly like Commander Fred.