A-holes and Insects – or Mother Nature Doesn’t Care If You’re a Good Liberal

by Charles Winecoff

Decades before George Clooney began using “Darfur” to swat away the unfashionable nuisance of “Iraq,” the hollow eyes and distended stomachs of starving Biafran children gave America’s impressionable “me generation” a reality check during commercial breaks.  Parents shook their heads and wrote checks.  “We have so much,” went the refrain.  “The world is so unfair.”

My pretty fourth-grade teacher, who taught us everything from math and history to a dash of entomology (study of insects), didn’t think so.  One day, unprompted, she told her class of 10-year-olds that she wasn’t really concerned about the Biafran babies because mass starvation was just nature’s way of controlling overpopulation.  (My parents were mortified.)


Margaret Sanger

Hard to fathom how, less than three decades after the Holocaust, any educated person could harbor such cold acceptance of the cruel suffering of fellow human beings - much less voice it (and to children, no less).  But whoever said the human race is on a one-way path to progress?

It’s widely assumed that, in every moment we’re alive, we’ve reached a new pinnacle – of modernity, experience, knowledge, enlightenment – that we always move forward, never back.  But what if we don’t?  What if we’re fated to make the same mistakes (disguised with innocuous new names) over and over again?

Fifty years before my lesson in urban savagery, Margaret Sanger, the Saint of Planned Parenthood, advocated beliefs that were not dissimilar to those of my twisted teach.  The fabled women’s rights activist was all about negative eugenics – meaning making sure ”social misfits” and other undesirables never got the chance to repulse the right people, by making sure they never got born.

“Birth control,” she declared in 1923, “is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, or preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”  Her mission: to stop ”keeping alive thousands who never, in all human compassion, should have been brought into this world.”

Sanger was ambitious.  She actively advocated for sterilization of the great unwashed – the “feeble-minded, insane… deaf, deformed and dependent,” including “orphans, ne’er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless and paupers.”  Talk about a hard knock life.

Before she came along, President Teddy Roosevelt had responded to a drastic drop in the national birth rate with a more positive (but equally elitist) message.  He encouraged turn-of-the-century yuppies to do their primitive best and reproduce – to, in theory, bring more of the “right” kind of people into the world.  But the goddess of “choice” found hope only in curtailing options for the disenfranchised.

“I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor,” Sanger wrote, “and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found.”  Indeed, her whole life seems to have been spent rebelling against the devout Roman Catholicism of her parents; Sanger’s mother got pregnant a whopping 18 times (which probably explains a lot).

Yes, thanks to Sanger’s one-woman crusade, 8300 people were sterilized in the state of Virginia alone.  Her most famous casualty was a young rape victim named Carrie Buck, whose tubes were ultimately cut – against her will – because she was allegedly promiscuous and mentally “challenged” with a rocky family history.  “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote of the case.  Snip snip.


Betty Friedan

Forty years later, feminist Betty Friedan picked up the Puritanical, less-is-more torch and hailed the American family a “comfortable concentration camp.”  Easy to dismiss such a statement as cheeky rhetoric.  But even in our seemingly advanced society, fascism still seethes just beneath the surface - behind a smile, an empathetic word, a good intention.  People like to control people.

As Paul Johnson points out his absorbing bestseller, Intellectuals, “social engineering has been the salient delusion and the greatest curse of the modern age.  In the twentieth century it has killed scores of millions of innocent people, in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China and elsewhere…. It is the birthright of the totalitarian tradition.”

In the popular countdown, the number one eugenicists were obviously the Nazis, who took social engineering to nightmarish new heights.  But after the post-War baby boom of the 1950s, we got soft – resting on our liberators’ laurels and blindly trusting in the assumption that, as a species, we were finally evolving and growing.

In fact, revolving and shrinking is more like it.  As a good friend once said, “People don’t live long enough to learn anything.”

Gays and lesbians, for instance, were once an invisible minority in America.  In the 1950s, they were labeled mentally ill, often forced to undergo electro-shock therapy or sent off to asylums along with the rest of Sanger’s degenerates.  Yet in 2009, out and proud American LGBTs – exalted and protected by the media and endowed with all the legal rights to form civil unions (and, in some states, marriages) – march naively alongside the covert Stalinists of International ANSWER, whining that they “can’t breathe” in the redneck USA.

Never mind that we live in a country where even the former Republican Vice President – the father of an openly gay daughter - has publicly declared that “People ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”  (Which is a more forthright statement than any the Democratic President has said.)

Meanwhile, in the heterosexual paradise known as Iran, gays who dare to exist (or get caught doing so) continue to be executed, to the tune of about 15 deaths per month – with barely a peep of solidarity from the most powerful and affluent gay community in the Western world.

Recently, violence exploded in Tehran over the rigged re-election of murderous homophobe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Students and others were inspired by the daring and unusual sight of the opposition candidate – gasp! – holding his wife’s hand in public.  As protesters were bludgeoned and shot in the streets, what did the gay community here do?  They donned green (once upon a time done only on Thursdays), brazenly equated the Iranian riots with their armchair petulance over Obama’s (unsurprising) neglect - and courageously withheld checks from the DNC.

Newsflash: West Hollywood is not Tehran.

And sadly, Mir-Hussein Mousavi ain’t Michael Jackson.  The minute the King of Pop stopped breathing, the gays dumped their Iranian brethren to attack Perez Hilton on Twitter.  A few days later, President Obama officially killed gay solidarity with Iran: he distracted the griping gays with an overdue bone, hosting a Stonewall anniversary party in the East Room of the White House – and proclaimed “June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.”  (What about June 2010?)

The LGBT community proved its collective attention span is no better than the average teenager’s.  Riots?  What riots? Memories of atrocities perpetrated against mankind no longer get passed down generation from generation; they end up on T-shirts.  Not even the gay community can remember its darkest days anymore – though God knows, they still love the drama!

As long as there are celebrity train wrecks, oppressed people will remain diversions.  Which makes me wonder: how will gays - or any Americans – react when faced with the next imminent threat?  Deadened by trendy moral relativism, will we even be able to recognize such a thing anymore?

If comfy, urban gays think they can’t “breathe” now, wait until they really start suffocating – not from the widely promoted ”fact” of greenhouse gases, rising seas, and over-population – but from a rapid rise in religious fundamentalism brought on as a direct result of the hardcore secular, anti-family, anti-life legislation most “progressives” support.  The gays will wish they could turn back time and vote for John McCain!

In his book, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity (and What to Do About It), author Phillip Longman presents demographic evidence that over-population is, like global warming, a myth (that the scientific community and the media can’t afford to give up).  Rather than growing, world population is actually shrinking, and at alarming speed - a concept that does not bode well for gays or any other “liberal” minority.

Why?  Because, writes Longman, unless people start having more babies – and fast - ”unsustainable trends end.”  Current global fertility rates are half what they were in 1972.  According to the Census Bureau, by 2050, one out of every five Americans will be over 65.  Imagine the seismic cultural shift Madison Avenue will have to make in order to attract that hot new 55-99 demographic!  You’ve come a long way, granny.

Yet our culture continues to promote endless, sexy images of successful, attractive, single individuals who are always in complete control of their personal choices and surroundings.

“Population growth underlies our modern concept of freedom,” Longman declares.  “Not since the fall of the Roman Empire has the world ever experienced anything on the scale of today’s loss of fertility.”  And when people die off, fundamentalism blossoms – to keep the species going.  Many of the attitudes we associate with the Victorian Era - religious revivalism, moral rigidity, gender role conformity, intolerance of birth control, glorification of motherhood – were actually rooted not in religion, but in demography.

The Industrial Revolution threw people into the cities, where children suddenly became economic burdens and obstacles to upward mobility.   Husbands and wives no longer worked together at home, the number of single women and prostitutes skyrocketed – so late Victorian housewives took it upon themselves to march the streets as moral crusaders for the good of society.

Yes, lesbians and gays (and suburban swingers) can look forward to a whole new generation of PC-resistant Anita Bryant mutations, fighting sin to save the children.  Escalating national debt – check! – and a soon-to-be-massively-overburdened ObamaCare bureaucracy – check! – could help Puritanical thrift and temperance make monstrous comebacks.

Previously gay-friendly friends and neighbors could become more suspicious of “alternate lifestyles,” not because the Bible or the Koran demands it – well, maybe the Koran - but because they would no longer be able to afford the luxury of such conduct.  “Those who reject modernity,” says Longman, ”seem to have an evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons, or Muslims… ”

To quote Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan:  “Have babies – Allah wants it.”

According to the London Times, the number of Muslims living in the UK grew by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone – a growth rate 10 times that of the rest of the country’s population.   And this isn’t by accident.  In Australia, for instance, British-based Sheik Abdul Raheem Green exhorted Muslim couples to have no less than four children each - to ensure that the land down under becomes a pure Islamic state.

Today, there are no less than 85 Shariah courts operating in the UK.  As columnist Peter Whittle recently pointed out in the Telegraph, a ”survey by Policy Exchange… showed that 72 percent of young Muslim men thought that homosexuality should be recriminalised,” reminding that “there are some pretty disturbing things being said by some Imans about what is best for gays, i.e. death.”  (Could it, perchance, be time for American gays to rethink their hostility towards the Mormons?  Just asking.)

So-called “youth gangs,” contemptuous of infidels – that’s us - have made cities all over Europe increasingly dangerous for women, Jews and gays.  The upside is that the rise in gay-bashings by young Muslims has caused many hitherto left-wing Dutch gays to vote conservative by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

Yet good American progressives continue to shill for a nanny state, willfully ignoring the fact that socialism in Sweden and the Soviet Union failed miserably to maintain even replacement-level fertility rates – never mind the gaping holes a shrinking populace puts in the sails of the environmental windjammer.  What a concept: mankind might actually be part of Mother Gaia, after all; without resorting to killer tax hikes, health care rationing, or concentration camps, we may just destroy ourselves naturally!  So recycle while ye may!

And fasten your seat belts, boys – or start hooking up with some surrogate moms quick.  Because unless we actively try to keep the species going, we’re ushering in what Longman calls “the fundamentalist moment… a fundamentalist future.”  As the saying goes, everything old becomes new again – be it positive eugenics, the Jackson Five, or the Islamic Caliphate.

So the next time you’re up in a plane, looking down at the earth, and you see a bunch of tiny dots moving across the landscape like ants, remember that’s all we are: bugs on a rotating ball.  Mother Nature has a plan for us, and she’s in no hurry to tell us what it is.

In the meantime, don’t get too comfortable, because it only takes a moment to step out of line, fall out of favor – and get smushed.


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Posted Jul 10th 2009 at 5:02 am in Featured Story, Politics, Religion | 210 Comments