You may have heard about the Duggar Family, the Arkansas couple who have 16 kids, ages 1 to 17. Although they are Evangelicals, they abandoned birth control after four years of marriage, embracing the idea that children are gifts from God and accepting as many children as God might give them.
The Duggars inspire mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, if they say that it’s God’s plan for them to procreate 16 people, who am I to say that it isn’t? Truly, they live lives of heroic sacrifice. On the other hand, nowhere does it say in Scripture that we are called to have as many children as possible. Apparently, after child #10, a doctor advised Michelle the wife that she probably shouldn’t have any more kids, which could be a serious enough reason to refrain from having any more. Also, their children’s names all begin with the letter J. But the Duggars are not living on public support, as the husband makes a good living in real estate, and their hearts seem completely focused on God.
But to Mark Morford, a lunatic columnist in San Francisco, the Duggars are a threat to all that is right and good:
Let us be clear: I don’t care what sort of God you believe in, it’s a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet’s resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she’d have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.
You gotta read the entire diseased essay. Morford’s columns are light-years beyond parody. He manages to pack all of the Left’s hatreds into a comparatively small space, screeching against chastity, marriage, Christianity, Wal Mart, etc. And where did the “repressed pedophilic priests” come from? If someone is pedophilic, wouldn’t it be good for them to be repressed?
Assuming he’s not truly insane, Morford does say a couple of things worth commenting upon. First, overpopulation, even if you believe in it, is a local problem. Arkansas is not overpopulated. It has 20 people per square kilometer, well below the density for the entire U.S., meaning that there are 33 states with higher densities. New Jersey’s population is 2,110% more dense, and somehow most of them manage to eat and clothe themselves, except perhaps in Newark. Even if Arkansas were “overpopulated,” it’s unlikely that one couple having 16 children is going to make much difference.
Second, Morford suspects that maybe in the long run, it’s people who have more kids who will inherit the earth, because his buddies on the Left aren’t producing many “funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring.” Those who are in love with sterility and death will eventually die out, like dinosaurs. Quite perceptive.
I’d like to sentence this guy to a New Jersey retirement…with lots of ants, rodents, and taxes….and that includes the politicians therein.
Though this guy is a weirdo and I don’t agree with much of anything he says in the linked article, I wouldn’t say that he is typical of speakers or opinions from the left, any more than what the KKK or any other fringe group or speaker says is typical of the right. Saying that ‘He manages to pack all of the Left’s hatreds into a comparatively small space’ is really misrepresenting the whole thing.
Too often we tend to lump people or opinions into nice little boxes, left or right, when in fact the guy is just plain ‘out there’.
I don’t think that we are headed for ‘overpopulation’ worldwide any time soon; all of the fears and threats are kind of like the ‘greenhouse effect’, we simply don’t have enough sound scientific information to support any of the fears. Even though the worldwide population keeps increasing daily / yearly, so does our worldwide output of food, due to scientific agri-advances. Many areas that experience hunger and overpopulation (they typically go hand in hand) are suffering from these effects due to civil war or trying to live in areas where crops simply can’t be grown, or in areas that periodically suffer natural disaster (typhoons, drought, etc.). Often relief efforts are met with war, violence and stealing of the supplies.
Sure, there are places where the population density is probably too high, mostly due to environmental / regional circumstances. I am not too sure that a woman having 16 kids indicates national or worlddwide overpopulation gone wild…
John, are you saying the Left likes chastity, traditional marriage, Christianity, and Wal Mart? I can give plenty of examples of how much they hate those things. This guy just expresses it in a particularly nutrageous way.