Poor Baby Yoda. He never saw it coming.
One day, he’s the darling uniter we need in a tumultuous time, and the next, he follows J. K. Rowling and Ellen DeGeneres down a path no Yoda has trod before. He’s been canceled.
But even if he’s soon forgiven, the real lesson is not for Baby Yoda. Rather, it’s for those content to level false charges of genocide on a galaxy far, far away while embracing the real thing here.
When Disney unveiled The Mandalorian last year, it did more than unite a Star Wars fan base divided over the controversial film Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It launched a cultural phenomenon in a cooing Child (i.e., Baby Yoda) and his gun-slinging, unlikely savior Mando — not a bad early Christmas gift as the world prepared to enter the ominous age of 2020. But, as Vanity Fair reported last week, that changed when Baby Yoda caught sight of forbidden fruit.
In the recently released “Chapter 10” of the hit series, Mando takes on a second charge in the “Frog Lady.” This amphibian is no femme fatale, but her situation is nevertheless dire. Toting an aquarium full of her own eggs, she begs passage to another planet where her husband will fertilize them, or, as we’re told, “her line will end.” But where Mando sees frustration, the Child detects a feast.
And that’s when the charges of Baby Yoda committing genocide began.
While Baby Yoda thought no one was looking when he snacked his way through a handful of Frog Lady’s eggs, woke Twitter warriors were on the job. “Baby Yoda Canceled Amid Accusations of Genocide,” the Vanity Fair headline read. Though appropriately tongue-in-cheek, the piece delivers evidence of genuine fan fury, including a tweet reading, “Gosh, Baby Yoda is losing the charm. I hated him because he ate the eggs of a frog lady and her species. IT’S AN EXTINCTION!!!” More sedate users turned Twitter into personal confession booths: “Genocide for sake of ‘cute humor’ is never very funny. I mean, I laughed but I felt really guilty about it.”
But genocide this is not. Even a Wired article condemning the Child as an “amoral toddler goblin” and suggesting the moniker “Darth Cutesius” could not avoid the obvious: “The Child ate a woman’s unborn babies. OK, fine, they were unfertilized eggs.” As Wired corrects, these were not baby frogs. Because the eggs had not been fertilized, they remained mere eggs, not individuals but parts of a larger whole: Frog Lady herself.
We must, however, forgive those who overlooked the distinction. The confusion of parts and wholes has long plagued ethical thought, most evident in the enduring abortion debate. When the pro-life crowd condemns this act of killing innocent pre-born humans, abortion supporters often retort, “It’s part of the mother’s body!” But this is to confuse parts and wholes. An ovum is part of a mother. A sperm is part of the father. Where these cells are does not change what they are. So, when Frog Lady drops her ovalike olives into the cocktail carried on her back, they remain parts of her body.
The change comes when sperm and egg unite in fertilization. Then, the smaller parts of the larger wholes cease to exist. A new whole comes into being. For Frog Lady and her beau, this would be a very young frog. And for humans, well, Jedi mind tricks are not required to find the answer to this riddle. Humans create other humans.
Baby Yoda’s alleged crime, then, is more akin to plucking prizes from a hen’s roost than tyrants decimating “undesirables.” Call it gross or a violation of Frog Lady, perhaps, but it is not genocide.
And herein lies the dark irony of canceling Baby Yoda. Keyboard crusaders who condemn killing parts of a frog lack the same fury over killing whole human babies by abortion. Worse yet, while Disney is admonished for this tale of fiction, women continue to be urged to “Shout Your Abortion” to normalize a brutality all too real.
This is moral myopia. We click tongues and keyboards at a green baby’s misdeeds while approving of those who kill babies here. We are enraged by mistaken genocide while celebrating the real thing happening on our watch.
Baby Yoda missed the memo, but we must not. Too many humans care more about parts of members of another species than they do whole members of their own. Until we correct this, there will be no balance in the Force.
Seth Drayer (@sethdrayer) is vice president of Created Equal, a pro-life applied apologetics organization.
