The Media Research Center fancies itself as a bunch of movie critics, though they don’t bother to actually watch any of the films they criticism and their idea of criticism is to attack any movie that promotes ideas it wants censored — criticism of the Catholic church and abortion being among those.
The MRC’s Tim Graham and Brent Bozell devote their Jan. 2 column to unloading on their newest target, the film “The Danish Girl,” for telling the true story of a man who became transgender and underwent the first gender-reassignment surgery. The sneering begins right out of the gate, with the very first sentence devoted to attacking NPR for not pretending the film doesn’t exist: “As night fell on Christmas Eve, National Public Radio was in its usual holy-day mode, using your tax dollars to mock the traditional Christian creed.”
Actually, Christmas Eve isn’t a “holy day” in most Christian religions, and Bozell and Graham offer no evidence that any “tax dollars” went toward the production of its story. So they’re wrong right of the gate as well.
Graham and Bozell go on to rant that any promotion of the film is “propaganda,” as is the film itself, and they’re appalled that gender-reassignment surgery is being called “gender confirmation surgery” because it’s really nothing more than “maiming of the male body.” In response to the main character’s declaration that “God made me a woman,” they hiss: “God did not do this; it is man attempting to undo what God created.”
Graham and Bozell go on to rant that “No one is allowed to rebut [the film’s star Eddie] Redmayne’s Christmas Eve ‘trans ally’ sermonizing with facts or, even worse, Christian teaching.” Read: It’s MRC policy that fair-and-balanced media means gays and transgenders must be denigrated in the media at every opportunity, preferably with as much bile as possible.
They then go on to attack the man whose story inspired the movie as having descended into “madness,” then complained that the movie didn’t portray it, favoring the “radical politics” of treating a transgender person like a human instead of the monster they wanted to see on screen.
That is, if Graham and Bozell had actually bothered to see the film. They give no indication that they have; apparently, all that was required to generate a column’s worth of hateful swill is that NPR story.
Yep, no need to offer an informed analysis of the film when right-wing ranting serves Graham and Bozell’s purpose just as well.