A recent Girl Scout-sponsored event in New York City, billed as one that would “celebrate women and girls,” featured a live screening and panel discussion of the documentary MAKERS, a feminist, pro-abortion video account of prominent women who are described as “trailblazing” and whose “pioneering contributions” are purported to have changed America.
At Catholic Stand, writer Mary Rice Hasson describes the May 9th event, which was also sponsored by Girls, Inc. of NYC and PBS station WNET, as featuring “Girl Scouts front and center.” The event was headlined by feminist activists Marlo Thomas and Amy Richards.
Hasson writes:
From the banner backdrop on stage, sporting the logo of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York, to the moderator’s warm shout outs to the Girl Scouts in the audience, to the college-student panelist who identified herself as a former Girl Scout, the event was all about promoting MAKERS to the Girl Scouts.
Hasson states that during the panel discussion, the producer of MAKERS explained that an online platform for the documentary was chosen because “We knew we wanted to reach an audience like Girl Scouts” and girls are online more than anywhere else.
In fact, as Hasson indicates, Girl Scouts USA promoted the screening event on Twitter, and invited younger scouts to “join” the live event or watch it online at a later time. In addition, the MAKERS Facebook page included a photo of the producer of the documentary surrounded by a group of Girl Scouts.
The documentary shown to the Girl Scouts celebrates abortion, lesbian sex, and sexual freedom. The PBS trailer of the film includes an older woman laughing about faking orgasms–not entirely the kind of thing the family would sit down and watch while dunking Tagalongs into a glass of milk.
“The documentary ends by proclaiming the women’s movement an ‘unfinished’ revolution which must be spread worldwide,” reports Hasson.
With Gloria Steinem hailed during the panel discussion, as the feminist icon, it is likely that the Girl Scouts have been chosen as the new torch-bearers of the feminist movement, the organization that will “finish” the revolution.
Hasson writes:
Marlo Thomas framed the past as a time when, “Women were not allowed to do anything,” and took a direct swipe at Phyllis Schlafly’s pro-marriage work. Declaring that, as a feminist, she herself loved men, Thomas said she just “didn’t want to be married” because “I can’t mate in captivity.” Richards, the co-founder of the pro-abortion Third Wave Foundation, an advisor to Planned Parenthood NYC, and a member of the MAKERS Board of Advisors, described how feminism freed women from the “script” of what it means to “be a good woman.” And the former Girl Scout on the panel encouraged girls to see feminism as about “choice,” and being “entitled” to do what they want.
As Hasson concludes, the MAKERS narrative “strips away all pretense that the Girl Scouts USA is ‘neutral’ on the issue of abortion.”
Besides Steinem, the list of so-called “groundbreakers” of American feminism to which MAKERS refers includes former president of Planned Parenthood Faye Wattleton, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Alice Walker, and Hillary Clinton.
Amy Richards, co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, which advocates for abortion and LGBT rights, was introduced during the panel discussion as one of the “visionary role models.” Apparently, Richards is “visionary” because she made the “brave” decision to abort two of her triplets. In MAKERS, Richards describes how her “first thought” when she learned she was pregnant with triplets was, “Is there any way to get rid of one of them?”
In the documentary, Richards defends her decision: “At the end of the day…what matters is that I was in control of my decision.”
http://video.pbs.org/video/2273015711
