Biden's Capitulation Before China's One-Child Policy an Embarassment to America

The controversy over Joe Biden's statement that he does not "second guess" China's one-child policy continues to escalate.

John Boehner and Mitt Romney immediately criticized the Vice President and then a Biden staffer attempted to walk back the offensive words. But let's put this in a larger context. Biden is not just speaking deplorable moral relativism; he is engaging in a far-reaching reshaping of long-standing American foreign policy.

From the Heritage Foundation's blog, The Foundry:

Earlier this week, Vice President Joe Biden unnecessarily acknowledged and condoned communist China’s one-child-only policy in a speech to Chinese leaders while visiting the country to speak on U.S.–China relations.

Biden admitted he does not “second-guess” the horrific, decades-old policy, which often forces women to undergo unwanted abortions and sterilizations. His careless remarks singlehandedly compromised the U.S. position on human rights as it relates to population control. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R–OH) rightly called on the White House to issue a “clarification or correction.” A Biden spokesperson has since issued a statement saying he finds the policy “repugnant.”

Ironically, Biden has some history of opposing unethical abortion practices similar to the one-child policy, including a 1981 amendment that bears his name, which states that U.S. funds may not be used for biomedical research related to abortion or involuntary sterilization.

Until 2009, the Kemp–Kasten Amendment denied federal funding to organizations or programs that supported any kind of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization. Unfortunately, after a long legislative battle, the Obama Administration restored funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which supports Chinese family planning initiatives in certain parts of the country and claims it plays no role in coercive practices.

And while “coercive” abortion is technically illegal in China, it’s clear that abuses continue. The annual State Department country report on human rights, published this past April, says regarding China and its one-child policy:

…intense pressure to meet birth limitation targets set by government regulations resulted in instances of local family-planning officials using physical coercion to meet government goals. Such practices included the mandatory use of birth control and the abortion of unauthorized pregnancies. In the case of families that already had two children, one parent was often pressured to undergo sterilization.

By resuming U.S. funding to the UNFPA, the United States undoubtedly signaled reduced concern about these fundamental abuses of human rights. Vice President Biden’s remarks can only reinforce that message.

The Obama administration is by far the most pro-abortion, anti-life administration in American history and it is moving official American foreign policy radically leftward.

John Boehner's office responded to the attempted walk-back by Biden's staff as follows. (via John McCormack at the Weekly Standard)

Boehner's office responds that Biden himself, not a spokesperson, should "publicly state the new words his staff has used" and that the Obama administration should cut off U.S. taxpayer funding of the UN Population Fund:

It’s welcome news that a White House spokesman has clarified that the Vice President opposes China’s repugnant “one-child” policy, as Speaker Boehner said Monday he hoped the White House would. But now that such a clarification has been offered, the Obama administration needs to back its backpedaling with action.

There are two things the Obama administration can do immediately on this front. One is for the Vice President himself – the individual who holds the office, and who uttered the damaging comments Sunday – to publicly state the new words his staff has used. The other is for President Obama to announce the United States will stop contributing money to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which supports China and has been linked to implementation of the one-child policy. Until the administration takes these actions, the clarification issued by the Vice President’s spokesman Tuesday will ring hollow.

The most radically pro-eugenics administration in US history will not likely make a U-turn now. The only hope is to limit the damage they do until election day in November 2012 and pray that they will be defeated decisively.

Culture of Death Watch: Losing the Ability to Be Shocked

The Culture of Death grows stronger and stronger all around us and part of that process involves us becoming hardened by the constant refrain of praise for death and killing as the solution to all our problems. We hear a constant drumbeat of propaganda for ideas that are evil and anti-humanistic, but by which we are decreasingly scandalized and ourtraged.

One measure of the morality of a person or a people is what outrages and scandalizes him or them. And, conversely, a measure of the immorality of a person or people can be what fails to outrage or scandalize him or them.

When David and Victoria Beckham (celebrities in Britain, I gather, but they could have been Joe and Mary Smith for all it matters) had their fourth child, a promoter of the Culture of Death named Simon Ross had this to say:

The Beckhams, and others like London mayor Boris Johnson, are very bad role models with their large families. There’s no point in people trying to reduce their carbon emissions and then increasing them 100% by having another child.

(via Jill Stanek)

There are multiple layers of evil in this short statement.

First, the right to family formation is a private matter for each family. No one has the right to prevent anyone from marrying and having a family and that includes busybody moralists like Ross and also the State. Let me be absolutely clear: the Family precedes the State historically and ontologically and is not under the jurisdiction of the State. The State did not create the family and cannot abolish it. The right to marry and have a family is one of the most basic of all human rights and cannot be denied with justice, no matter how much some people would like to do so. Simon Ross should mind his own business.

Second, the population of all Western countries (with the exception of the United States) is well below replacement rates and this will create tremendous social and economic problems going forward. Japan's stagnant economy with fewer and fewer workers to support more and more retired folks is giving us a preview of what is in store for all developed countries (except the US) in the future. The population controllers, who are in the grip of a romantic Utopianism, do not understand the damage they have already done and are continuing to do. If they are not stopped, they will take us right back to barbarism.

Third, in the good old days the post-Christian liberals were merely secular humanists, meaning that they rejected revelation and orthodoxy but still tried to implement a Christian ethic in which love for humanity was central. Secular humanism had no basis and could not endure, but while it lasted at least it was pro-humanity. What comes after secular humanism, however, is truly terrifying. It is anti-humanistic - the will to power - the strong dominating the weak. Eugenics is a big part of this program and the population controllers lust after the day when the State will control the Family and they will control the State. They think they will be like God. It is important to understand that the Culture of Death is so regnant today because we have moved beyond theism and beyond humanism to an anti-humanistic, statist, elitist, amoral, will-to-power ethic in which the strong aim to dominate the weak.

We should not simply dismiss people like Simon Ross as "kooks with funny opinions." Such people are dangerous. Read C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World if you need help imagining a world in which people like Simon Ross have seized political power and mowed down Christian opposition.

163 Million Missing Girls: Feminism and Population Control

The Wall Street Journal has an article entitled "The War Against Girls" which reflects on the fact that since the 1970s over 163 million girls have been aborted by parents seeking sons. It elaborates:

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl's counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.

- - - snip - - -

Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent." As examples she notes that high sex ratios were at play as far back as the fourth century B.C. in Athens—a particularly bloody time in Greek history—and during China's Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide.) She also notes that the dearth of women along the frontier in the American West probably had a lot to do with its being wild. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768.

The contraceptive mentality says that we should be able to control our fertility without controlling our sexual urges. This encourages us to think we can get away with being selfish and the more selfish we become the the more killing unwanted children becomes feasible in our thinking. The idea of spacing out children by using natural family planning requires responsible and mature patterns of marital communication and self control. But contraception eliminates all need for communication or self-control and creates an entitlement mentality where we feel entitled to all the selfish pleasure we want with no consequences. The problem with that approach to sex is that it reduces it to an individualistic way of gratifying our own lusts instead of making it personal communication and and expression of personal commitment.

Gratifying our selfish lusts as individuals also is morally corrosive in a broader sense. It does not contribute to the self-discipline necessary for true community, but actively reduces such self-discipline. Abortion is basically an act of selfishness and no where is this more obvious than in sex-selection abortion.

The fact that feminism as a political movement will not oppose sex-selection abortion is telling. It shows that feminists understand that opposing abortion for any reason is fatal to their cause because all the major reasons for abortion are essentially selfish. If you start distinguishing between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" reasons for abortion, pretty soon most abortion will clearly appear to be illegitimate and feminists dread that outcome most of all.

Yet feminists claim that abortion "empowers" women. The use of the word "empower" suggests that the fundamental feminist worldview understands life to be a continuous struggle for survival and power. Contemporary feminism would not be possible without social Darwinism and Nietzschean ethics as its background. That is why it is open to eugenics and population control, as well as the agenda of eco-fascism.

Al Gore recently has been talking up population control as a logical extension of his eco-fascist alarmism. The pseudo crisis of overpopulation becomes a justification for elites using governments to seize control of the fertility of the population, which is to invade even the privacy of the family in order to exert control. The more they can move reproduction into the lab and under government regulation and thus destroy the family, the more totalitarian the rule of the social engineers can be. Here he is caught on camera talking about population control.

You will notice how glibly he uses the language of "empowering women and girls" as if he was liberating them from the oppression of the family. Of course that is how he thinks; he is a feminist. But notice what the real world outcome of the contraceptive mentality he is pushing actually is: 163 million murdered girls.

I don't know how anyone can regard being aborting as being "empowered." But what we need to understand is why feminists like Al Gore can remain unperturbed by sex-selection abortion even while pushing a population control agenda based on the contraceptive mentality as liberating. The key question is: "Liberating for whom?" Who get liberated? All women. No, just those who are strong enough and ruthless enough to impose their will on the weak, the young and the helpless. But if imposing one's will on those who are weaker is the meaning of liberation, how can it apply to all women? Of course, it can't. Not all women are going to be liberated if feminism wins.

This fact has become glaringly obvious in the way the liberal, feminist establishment has gone beserk in its hatred for Sarah Palin and other conservative women over the past few years. "Palin Derangement Syndrome" is the tag for a well-known, widespread phenomenon that at first glance is confusing. Why would women prostitute themselves for the leftist ideological cause by turning against another women who just happened to be running for the "wrong" party? Aren't feminists supposed to be for women? Isn't feminism more than partisan politics? It is only when you realize that feminism is anti-women that you can make sense of all this.

Feminism is essentially an expression of modern, Enlightenment, hedonistic, hyper-individualism. It is rooted in the ideas of Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche and it constitutes a clear rejection of natural law, absolute morality and Christianity itself. Trying to compromise with it is not likely to be any more successful than was the German Christian attempt to find common ground with the Nazis because it is inherently opposed to ideas that are basic and integral to Christianity.

The only force in the world that will stand up for the right to life for girls is the Christian Church. It won't be Islam, it won't be Enlightenment secularism, it won't be postmodernism and it certainly won't be feminism. Only the Christian Church has, as part of its bedrock teaching, the idea that procreation is not entirely under the control of individual humans, but involves a cooperation of the married couple with God. This conviction makes procreation mysterious and holy and it prevents all attempts to to reduce it to technology. And only when we see the conception and birth of children as a mysterious, holy, act of God in which we are privileged to participate then we do not see ourselves as manipulators and as in control.

To kill the innocent is to separate oneself from God and to incur Divine judgment. To advocate for an evil ideology that justifies killing the innocent for one's own convenience is to place oneself in opposition to Jesus and the love commandment. To go through the verbal and mental contortions necessary to turn prejudice against girls and women into the "empowerment of girls and women" is to display a capacity for self-deception that Romans 1 attributes to persistent, unrepentant, deliberate idolatry. The problem with feminism is is that it is a form of self-worship, idolatry of the self.

From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany: A Review

From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) by University of California historian Richard Weikart is a book which raises uncomfortable questions for anyone who wishes to reconcile Darwinism and humanism, let alone Darwinism and Christianity.

Let us set aside for the moment the question of whether and how Darwinian evolution might be compatible with the Genesis account of creation or the historical Christian doctrine of creation as it has developed over the centuries. This book does not deal with that question but it does deal with one that must be addressed before it is even worth discussing the question of whether evolution can be reconciled with the Christian doctrine of creation.

This book takes up the question of the compatibility of Darwinism with a humanistic ethic of respect for human life and compassion for the weak. This ethic of humanistic compassion (as exemplified in the liberal German theologian/physician Albert Schweitzer or in the life of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, for example) is common both to conservative and liberal Christianity and also to the Western humanism inspired by it, as in, for example, the secular organizations Doctors Without Borders, the International Red Cross and the Save the Children Fund. The issue this book raises is whether or not Darwinism is compatible with any of full-fledged Christianity (eg. Mother Theresa), liberal Christianity (eg. Albert Schweitzer) or secular humanitarianism (eg. the Red Cross). Or are all of these types of humanitarianism undermined and ultimately destroyed by Darwinism.

The book is an intellectual history and it focuses primarily on Germany in the period from the 1870s to the 1920s. The final chapter then discusses what influence the widespread and somewhat diverse interpretations of Darwin's work in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries might have had on Hitler himself. It follows recent Hitler scholarship (such as Ian Kershaw's massive biography) in viewing Hitler not as an amoral monster (which makes him so unlike us that we can use him as a stick with which to beat our debating opponents without ever taking him seriously), but as a man with a consistent ethic that he and many of the people around him had good reason to regard as "scientific" given the science of the time.

But if Hitler was not an amoral, nihilistic monster, but rather a rational, consistent, scientific thinker who implemented an ethic which (1) was legitimately derived from or at least strongly influenced by Darwinism and which (2) was shared by many leading scientists and academics of the day, the consequences are radical and far-reaching. It means that either Darwinism is wrong and, in fact, evil or it means that Darwinism is true and that we must give up humanitarianism as silly sentimentalism that must give way to a truly "scientific" outlook on life.

Of course, at this point, the obvious response will be to distinguish between "Darwinian evolution" on the one hand and "Social Darwinism" on the other and to assert that one can believe in the former without accepting the latter. While it is a fact that many individual thinkers have in fact made this distinction, the question raised by this book is whether or not this distinction is based on anything more solid than wish fulfillment. It is well and fine to accept Darwinism and reject Social Darwinism, but is this anything more than an inconsistent move made by thinkers who refuse to face up to the inherent logic of their position?

The contribution of this book is to show that during the period under consideration the anthropologists, biologists, politicians, activists, etc. who believed that the Christian ethic must be overturned and replaced with Darwinian ideas in order for society to progress did not distinguish between Darwinism and Social Darwinism. This first, logical, naive impulse is likely more honest and more realistic about the long term impact of Darwinism on society.

The second half of the 19th century was characterized by a widespread belief in progress by both Christians and secularists. Science, meaning technological science, was seen as the engine of progress and it was understood that science had emerged out of a Christian, not an Oriental or other worldview. The effect of Darwinism was to break the link between Christianity and science and to associate in the minds of many people science and progress with atheistic materialism. Prior to Darwin, atheism and materialism were pre-Christian errors that Western civilization has progressed beyond - particularly as a result of the union of Greek rationalism with Biblical revelation. The Bible presented the world as a contingent effect of a rational decision of God to create - by His Word - and Greek rationalism offered a disciplined method of rational inquiry that seemed to match up perfectly with the Biblical picture of a God who speaks the world into being by His Word and then upholds its laws by His gracious Providence. This gives us an incentive to explore the contingent creation by means of human reason and makes the idea of progress as a result of discovering nature's laws perfectly reasonable. To the extent that nature's laws depend on nature's God, science and progress are both inextricably linked to (and dependent upon) God. This was the link that Darwinism was perceived as breaking, in particular by means of the theory of natural selection, which explains how nature's laws can exist without nature's God.

Richard Dawkins is one contemporary thinker who stresses the degree to which Chance replaces God in Darwinism. If Chance can be seen to perform the work God used to be required to do, then we can have a scientific universe without God and a perpetually-progressing society without God. In this scenario, man stands supreme at the top of the evolutionary ladder God-like in his understanding and, especially, in his technological mastery of matter that enables him to create new things and eventually the New Man out of the raw material thrown up by evolution. This is why the story of eugenics was so inter-woven with the rise of Darwinian thinking and evolutionary ethics. Creating a New Humanity is the task of the Creator Man who fills the vacuum left by the disappearance of the old Christian God, who has now been rendered superfluous - not proven to not exist, just rendered superfluous as in the famous quip of Laplace "I have no need of that hypothesis."

The value of Weikart's book is its intensely detailed and fair-minded chronicling of the writings of German scientists, ethicists, activists and politicians between Darwin and the period of chaos after World War I in which Darwinism was absorbed into the bloodstream of the German scientific mind. It does not answer or explicitly raise the question of why Darwinism became so popular and persuasive to so many people so quickly, but this is an important question to consider. Was it so persuasive because it had so much explanatory power that the old paradigm did not have? Or was it so persuasive because it reinforced the spirit of the age and offered a Faustian bargain by which modern man could gain the god-like power to destroy and create?

In the case of Hitler, it would seem that we have a man who attempted to seize this god-like power and by so doing unleashed great evil and destruction upon the world. Have we rejected Hitler while accepting Hitler's worldview? And, if so, is our sentimental humanitarianism a vestigal survival of a worldview that has been permanently discredited for us? And, if that is true, how long before the relentless, iron logic of destroying in order to re-create in our own image tempts us into the kind of madness that characterized Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s? Does Western civilization teeter on the precipice of self-destruction because of its acceptance of Darwinism in place of the Christian doctrine of creation?

These are the questions raised by this excellent book. I highly recommend it.

The Myth of Overpopulation

Here are two videos on the over populations myth. They are brief and to the point. Enjoy.

Ignatieff Pro-Abortion Stance Continues to Draw Fire

Here is a very good article in the Globe and Mail by Niel Reynolds calling Michael Ignatieff on his attempt to use abortion as a wedge issue against the Conservatives. He is surprisingly blunt (considering that this is the mainstream media we are talking about) and points out that Ignatieff is calling for a certain funding priority (abortion services) that inevitably decreases funding for other purposes. By all means let us debate the priorities here.

"How low can you go? Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff will surely come to regret his comments the other day on Prime Minister Stephen Harper's commitment to champion, as a G7 initiative, maternal health care in impoverished countries. Mr. Ignatieff expressed concern that Mr. Harper would use the funds to make it harder for poor women to get abortions – with appalling consequences. “We don't want to have women dying because of botched procedures,” Mr. Ignatieff said, implicitly suggesting that Mr. Harper does. “We don't want to have women dying in misery. . .

But hard questions remain – and Mr. Ignatieff's answers aren't obvious. Would he distribute as much food and medicine as he possibly could? Or would he invest in do-it-yourself abortion kits? How much funding would he give to the various abortion-rights organizations? In which countries? With what consequences? Applying Mr. Ignatieff's own rhetorical construct, would his diversion of funds result in the death of another mother and child? One set of choices here is humanitarian. The other can be ideological.

Within days of the quake, The Washington Times reported that abortion-rights groups had launched a major fundraising drive in the U.S. to finance “reproductive choice” in Haiti. On one level, you can understand why. One cannot imagine a worse place on Earth to give birth. But in a place where suffering exceeds relief, do you not necessarily help the living first?"

There is a reason why a certain type of person is anxious to give to help the poor of the world from reproducing themselves and it is not pretty. This theme of reducing the population of the poor so they are not such a burden on us has been a staple of the eugenic movement since its inception and a major method by which Planned Parenthood appeals to white, middle class fears of the "breeders" overwhelming the resources of the world.

Nice going Ignatieff. Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, the Nazis and Margaret Sanger would be proud of you for carrying on their tradition.

Ignatieff, Eugenics and Racism

Here is another great column by David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen on the Michael Ignatieff abortion fiasco. Warren points out that Ignatieff confuses killing unwanted children with maternal health, even though they have nothing to do with each other. "Health" here is just a euphemism that functions as smoke to hide the eugenic agenda. Here is the end of his column:

"I wrote on the weekend about Michael Ignatieff's demand that Stephen Harper include abortion and contraception "services" in his G8 scheme to improve maternal and child healthcare in the poorest countries. My immediate purpose was to remind readers of the huge and vicious lie upon which the Liberal leader is trading. For we do not improve the health of a baby by killing it.

The proposition may be evil and absurd; yet according to several media sources, there is evidence it is popular -- especially among woman voters who had been trending towards Harper's more socially and fiscally conservative policies. I know several examples of "swing voters" in this class, and can more or less follow the thinking. I'm afraid it is not flattering to them.

Note the genius of Ignatieff's appeal: not for more contraception and abortion here, where we have surely had enough, but rather in "the poorest countries" -- which we think have long been producing "too many babies." And, too many babies who could be clamouring to come here one day. Harper's policy might increase the load; Ignatieff's might reduce it.

Even within North America, abortion appeals to some because it does, in fact, disproportionately reduce the offspring of certain racial minorities. The eugenic argument for it was actually the first to be made, back in the days when it was still acceptable to speak about the fertility of the "lower orders" and the "inferior races."

This argument is still very much alive, though today dressed up in feminist jargon. "Population control," through the United Nations or otherwise, has always consisted of "breeding instructions for the blacks, browns, and yellows." And this is precisely what Ignatieff is selling, to the sort of people who want to buy it."

Think of this the next time you hear leftists trying to pin the "racist" label on conservatives and remember that they are just trying to deflect attention from their own racist and eugenicist policies. He is right on in noting that eugenics today is dressed up in feminist jargon - to the shame of feminists everywhere.

(HT ProWomanProLife)

Diane Francis Advocates China's Coercive One-Child Policy For the Whole World

The Financial Post today has an article that is so far out that it is almost a parody. Andrea Mrozek thinks it is a spoof because she says, from what she knows of Diane Francis, "she's not an idiot." Me, I'm sticking with the "she's an idiot" theory, although it would be a relief if Andrea turned out to be right.

Here is what Francis has to say:

"The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.

The intelligence [sic] behind this is the following:

-If only one child per female was born as of now, the world's population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.

-By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world's forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards."

Read it all here.

So it is OK in today's Canada for a journalist writing in a mainstream paper to advocate forced abortion, forced sterilization and government imposed eugenics on the population. And this is in the name of saving the planet from global warming. The only question is "Who will save us from our 'saviors'?"

And some commentators on this blog wonder why people disbelieve in global warming? Maybe they do for the same reason they reject Hitler's views in Mein Kampf! Maybe because they think totalitarianism is evil. Maybe because they just want to have somebody working when they are retired so that they actually get the pension they are depending on. Maybe the idea of widespread economic global disaster is not on their list of "Favorite Things." Maybe they are just hard to get along with, stupid, Fundamentalists. Or maybe they have not taken leave of their senses as the author of this article apparently has done.

I'll tell you one thing. If I had something like AGW to sell to the public, I sure wouldn't hire Diane Francis to be my marketing consultant. "Save the vegetation; murder a baby human!" What an idiot.

Further:
J. Wesley Smith is all over this story:

"Can you believe it? China–an unmitigated tyranny–has become, among the hysterics like the NYT’s Thomas Friedman and this writer, the country with policies worth emulating! Not one word decrying the terrible human rights violations of imposed abortion, female infanticide, and China’s explicitly eugenics policies.

And yet, we are told the global warming agenda is so progressive, so humane. Anyone who doesn’t see the potential that global warming could become the pretext for destroying human freedom and imposing death culture policies just isn’t paying attention.

Update: Somebody is clearly pushing this meme, because promoting radical population control is also in today’s Telegraph, absent extolling China."

John Holdren: Extremist and Fanatic

John Holdren, Obama's top science advisor, is an extermist and a fanatic. His views are compatible with totalitarianism and his career has been a series of wild predictions of imminent apocalypse that supposedly justifies heavy-handed government intervention to stave off disaster. This article by Steven Mosher is an eye-opener. It is the most complete account I have read so far of just how far out Holdren's views are.

Mosher's discussion of Holdren's views is based on Holdren's 1973 book, co-authored with the Ehrlichs, called Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions. Mosher writes:

"You might think that no one in their right mind would suggest that
American women, like their Chinese counterparts, could be forced to abort their
children. Yet Holdren et. al. wrote “[I]t has been concluded that compulsory
population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion,
could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis
became sufficiently severe to endanger the society." (p. 837) Lest you be fooled
by the passive voice (“it has been concluded”), let me point out that it was
Holdren and the Ehrlichs themselves, who have not one whit of legal training
among them, who “concluded” that there was nothing in the Constitution that
forbade forced abortion.

Holdren turns out to have a particular animus against single mothers, whom
he apparently believes should have their babies seized by the government and
given away to other couples to raise. As he writes on page 786, “One way to
carry out this disapproval [of single motherhood) might be to insist that all
illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who
generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single
mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through
adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it.
Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people
than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising
children along. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to
marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption,
depending on the society.”

But if you think this is extreme, it gets worse:

Then there is Holdren’s proposal to put infertility drugs into the nation’s
drinking water to effect a mass sterilization. “Adding a sterilant to drinking
water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than
most proposals for involuntary fertility control,” he writes. But it doesn’t
horrify Holdren, who apparently sees no ethical or moral problems with such a
nightmarish scheme. Instead, he dispassionately outlines the technical
specifications for such a sterilizing agent, which “must be uniformly effective,
despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying
degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of
dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of
the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.” (p. 787-8) Only a
morally unhinged individual would imagine a sterilant that the government could
use to stop all Americans from having children.

Just when you think the limit has been reached, the eugenic thinking becomes explicit and frightening:

"You might think it cannot get worse. You would be wrong. In Holdren’s imagined
population control utopia, anyone whom the government decides is causing “social
deterioration,” can be compelled not to have children. Let me quote what I
believe is the most chilling sentence in the whole book: “If some individuals
contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the
need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive
responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their
resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.
(p. 838)

Rather than passing off the comments in his 1973 book as "youthful indiscretions" Mosher shows that there has been a continuing pattern throughout his career to use scare tactics centering on imminent disaster as a justification for heavy-handed government intervention and control of the population. He concludes:

"What Obama’s new Science Czar really is is a professional doomsayer along the
lines of his mentor, Paul Ehrlich. To advance his scientific career, he has
advanced one end-of-the-world scenario after another. He has been, one must
admit, rather spectacularly successful at this, given that he is now bending the
ear of the U.S. President. But he has been consistently wrong on the facts and
in his predictions. The fear mongering that he habitually engages in gives
science, and scientists, a bad name."

___________ Comments ______________

It is staggering to think that the president of the United States appointed this man to a position of responsibility in his administration. Here are a few random implications:

1. Nobody outside his narrow little ideological circle is going to take him seriously. The whole global warming threat is being discredited to the extent that it is promoted by kooks like him. Why should be believe in global warming when the same people are telling us that the sea levels will rise by 13 feet who told us that much of the earth's population would be wiped out by 2000 by famine? Why put that kind of person in that kind of position if you want people to believe what the government says?

2. His eugenics beliefs are straight out of the 1930's and he is as dangerous as any Nazi. He should be shunned, not appointed to high office. He is morally disqualified for government office.

3. If he has seriously repudiated the views expressed in the 1973 book, then let him explain how his overall worldview, which allowed him to see forced abortion and sterilization, infanticide, government control of fertility etc. as morally permissible, has now changed. I'm willing to bet that his fundamental worldview has not changed; he has merely become more sly about what he knows he can get away with admitting in certain forums today. If I'm wrong, it would be simple for him to prove it by speeches, articles etc.

4. What does it say about Obama that he would appoint people like Van Jones, a self-professed Communist until recently, and Holdren, a self-professed eugenicist? Do they reflect Obama's worldview and politics? How moderate is a man who sits in the pew of a Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and who surrounds himself with an administration full of leftist radicals, former employees of Planned Parenthood and eugenicists?

12 Reasons why Abortion is the Most Important Moral Issue of the 21st Century

The Culture of Death says that human life is cheap and can be discarded when not wanted. The Gospel of Life says that human life is created in the image of God and must be cherished and protected in every possible way. Our culture faces a choice between life and death.

The right to life is the most fundamental and important of all human rights and no other human rights are possible without it. There can be no feeding of the hungry, no clothing of the poor, no visiting of the prisoners and no offering a cup of cold water to those who are murdered before birth. No one can be truly concerned for the poor, the weak, the helpless, the elderly, the frail, the handicapped, the minority, the economically disadvantaged or the victims of discrimination who is not pro-life. It makes no sense to be anti-war or anti-capital punishment while being indifferent to the murder of the weakest and most helpless among us. All social justice issues begin with the issue of abortion.

Some would have us believe that abortion is “just another issue” to be horse-traded in the cut and thrust of party politics. But the fact is that abortion on demand is a central issue one for those who are advancing the agenda of the Culture of Death. It is nothing less than legalized private killing and is the key to many other anti-humanistic behaviors, principles and policies. Abortion is far from being a single, stand-alone issue. It reveals a mindset that is deeply pathological and it reflects a society that is altogether too passive, resigned, tired and apathetic when it comes to resisting evil. Abortion sets a precedent for taking other forms of human life.

1. Euthanasia - the next issue to debate after abortion on the list of those promoting the Culture of Death is euthanasia. If pre-born human life is of no value and not worth protecting, then the elderly and the sick are at great risk. Euthanasia presupposes that human life is no different from animal life and that what is acceptable and humane for animals must be acceptable for humans. The principle of the sanctity of human life is at stake. We need to remember that some people have just as great (or greater) financial incentives to kill their parents as they do to kill their preborn children.

2. Infanticide – Many people believe infanticide is “no big deal” but Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians, along with many others from all religions and no religious backgrounds, beg to differ. It is an issue of murder. No one can explain why it is all right to kill a baby one minute before birth, but not one minute after birth. Abortion on demand – which is the law in the US and Canada – is a certain prelude to infanticide. The Greco-Roman culture that early Christianity confronted (and converted) practiced infanticide by exposure. Christians would go out to the garbage heaps of Rome to save children. One could even argue that abortion is just a technologically advanced form of infanticide.

3. The Silent War Against Black People – More black babies are aborted than white ones – proportionately. Planned Parenthood often locates their abortion facilities near black inner city neighborhoods. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a eugenicist who favored limiting births among the “inferior races” and Planned Parenthood carries on her racist program of eugenics today. People of African descent in North America know that many white people wish they would just go away; abortion is one of the methods used to implement that wish.

4. The Silent War Against Girls - Abortion is legalized private killing and baby girls are more vulnerable than baby boys. For many social and financial reasons, parents often choose to abort a girl so they can try for a boy. In countries like China and India this practice is so wide-spread that it is now beginning to cause many social problems due to a shortage of women, but it is increasingly common in the West as well. No one can be a true Feminist who fails to oppose the killing of babies just because they are female.

5. The Silent War Against Handicapped People - About 90% of Down Syndrome babies are now killed before birth in the US. What is this but blatant, unjust discrimination against the handicapped? This is a very new phenomenon based on recently-developed pre-natal genetic testing. How can we as a society expect to nourish a respect for the handicapped among us if we allow this evil attitude to take root that killing one’s child just because he or she does not measure up to our standard of perfection is morally acceptable? The sympathy accorded parents who abort handicapped babies is appalling and parallels the sympathy accorded to Nazis who launched their euthanasia program against the handicapped in the 1930’s.

6. The Corruption of the Medical Profession – The introduction of legalized abortion into Western societies required that Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors for over two millennia had to be revised. Doctors renounced their oaths to “do no harm” and added killing to their job description. For centuries, doctors have been trusted precisely because they always refused to get involved in taking life, even when pressured by the state to become executioners, for example. As doctors become desensitized to killing, patient trust will decline and we all will be worse off as a result. This affects people who have no direct involvement in abortion, euthanasia or other culture of death practices.

7. The Corruption of the Law – Western law has gradually been reformed over centuries to prohibit the legalized private killing of individuals by other individuals in power over them. Once under Roman law the Patriarch of a household held the power of life and death over members of his household. This was abolished under Christianity. The same goes for the right of the White slaveholder to kill the slaves he owned. The same goes for the right of Lords under feudalism to kill those under their authority. At various times and in various ways, the Christian West abolished all right of private killing. But in the second half of the Twentieth century legalized private killing made a comeback as mothers gained the “right” to kill their children. Soon children will have the “right” to have their parents killed under euthanasia laws. The principle of the inviolable right to life as the foundational human life is being eroded.

8. Eugenics – Eugenics is a group of humans taking control of the future evolution of the human race to make is in their own image. For example, the eugenics movement of the early Twentieth century was widespread and powerful in all Western countries and one branch of it motivated Nazi campaigns of forced sterilization, killing of “useless eaters” and cruel medical experiments in the death camps. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a leader in this movement and sought to use sterilization, contraception and abortion to decrease the “breeding potential” of inferior races like African Americans. Eugenics is scientific racism combined with violence.

9. Cloning people for Spare Parts, i.e. So-called “Saviour Siblings” – This was recently legalized in the UK by the Labour Party. To bring human beings into the world just for the purpose of taking their organs out of them to transplant into another person is sick, evil and demonic. At this moment, the idea of aborting a fetus to harvest its organs or tissue to save a sibling is considered ethical by many people. Abortion is essential to people with this mindset. The novel Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is about children raised for no purpose other than to have their organs harvested at the cost of their lives. It is unbearably sad and morally repulsive both at the same time. This is the “Brave New World” into which the Culture of Death leads and abortion is an absolutely necessary step on the road to get there.

10. The Choice Women Need - and deserve is not just the “choice” to kill their babies or be on their own raising them. The pro-abortion forces are not really pro-choice. If they were they would have better responses than just abortion and welfare for women in crisis pregnancies. They would support women who choose to carry and place for adoption. They would support women who choose to carry and raise the child. They would understand that most women want to bear the children they conceive, but find the deck stacked against them and abortion the expected thing to do. We should not let men off the hook and let it be simply the woman’s problem. Women deserve better.

11. Abortion on Demand Only Benefits Predatory Males - who are not prepared to take their responsibility as fathers. If we really cared about women and children we would demand that men take responsibility for their actions and we would stop treating women like sex objects for males who pervert sex into something selfish and superficial. The culture of abortion is great for men who want to pressure women into having sex and it is great for men who want to exit the scene once the natural result of sexual intercourse occurs. But it is not great for women or for children or for society as a whole.

12. Demographic Suicide – Almost 60 nations of the world currently are not reproducing themselves and world population is set to age rapidly and start declining during the 21st century. When a wealthy nation refuses to have enough babies even to maintain the population and thereby chooses to die out, one has to wonder what kind of despair lies behind such a collective decision. We need 2.3 babies per 1000 women per year and most of the Western world is currently between 1.3 and 1.7. But the root causes of a decision to commit demographic suicide are very important. The hedonism, materialism and individualism of Western culture, which the West has exported around the world, are pathological symptoms of a deeper spiritual malaise. People who are schooled to think primarily of their rights and entitlements are simply unable to commit to self-sacrifice and the common good. Abortion feeds the culture of entitlement and selfishness and the end result of the Culture of Death is the decision to die as a culture.

There are other reasons, but these are twelve of the most compelling ones to make the eradication of abortion from civilized societies the highest priority for the 21st century.

Special Olympics for Obama?

By far the best response to Obama's gaffe on the Leno show about Special Olympic athletes has come from one those athletes, who has challenged Obama to a game:

"Kolan McConiughey, a Special Olympics competitor who has bowled three perfect 300 games, tells TMZ that the Prez has to score a lot higher than 129 to beat him. Kolan says he bowls an average of 266.

Kolan - who works at a grocery store in Ann Arbor, MI - said he'd love to go to the White House to beat Barack on his own lane. Kolan said, "He's cool, but he can't beat me." We posed the challenge to the White House. They said "no comment.""
http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2009/03/special_olympic.html

The left-wing media has basically let Obama off the hook on this one. But imagine the horror with which the New York Times would reacted if Bush had made this remark? Which is to say that the NYT would not have genuinely been horrified; it just would have seen an opening to stick it to an ideological foe.

This is a good time to be reminded that Obama fully supports abortion for eugenic purposes. He thinks it should be legal for anyone wanting to abort a baby that might be born with a disability. But he is an abortion moderate. Jim Wallis and the NYT said so.

Discrimination Against Handicapped People in the UK

The following story in The Mail On-line details widespread neglect of handicapped people in London hospitals. Now that eugenic abortion has been widely accepted in Western society, with arount 90% of babies diagnosed as probably having Down's Syndrome being killed by their parents and doctors by abortion, the logic of the lives of handicapped people not being worth protecting is being extended to handicapped children and adults. From the story:

"A vulnerable patient starved to death in an NHS hospital after 26 days without proper nourishment. Martin Ryan, 43, had suffered a stroke which left him unable to swallow.
But a 'total breakdown in communication' meant he was never fitted with a feeding tube. It was one of a number of horrific cases where the NHS fatally failed patients."

For the whole story, see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110054/Starved-death-NHS-hospital-Damning-inquiry-highlights-case-patient-left-food-26-days.html

The handicapped persons advocacy group, Mencap, has issued a damning report called "Death By Indifference," which details six cases of patients who died by neglect. All were handicapped. To see the report click here:
http://www.mencap.org.uk/case.asp?id=52&menuId=53&pageno=

Ann Abraham, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, has now begun to investigate the cases outlined in the report and The Mail On-line reports that sources close to the Ombudsman say that she will issue a "withering verdict" of a "devestating" overall picture of neglect.

Why are handicapped people being neglected? How does a 30 year old die of a broken leg in one of the richest countries of the world - one that has socialized medical care? What is behind this callous treatment of the weakest among us? If this is happening in London, what is the likliehood that this is the only place it is occurring?

Here is just a summary of one heart-rending story from the Mencap Report

"Emma was just 26 when she died. She had a severe learning disability, which meant she sometimes had difficulty communicating how she felt.

Emma was admitted to hospital for tests – she was upset and in pain. The hospital found her behaviour difficult to manage and sent her home without any help to control her pain. When Emma and her mum went back to the hospital for the results they were told Emma had cancer.

There was a 50:50 chance that she would survive if she was treated, but the doctors decided not to treat her. They said she couldn't consent to treatment. Again Emma was sent home with no way to help with her pain.

A week later Emma wasn't eating or drinking, so her mum took her back to the hospital and tried to make the doctors treat her daughter.

Still having to watch her daughter suffer from the cancer, Emma's mum went to the High court to force the doctors to treat her daughter, but by the time the order came through, the cancer had progressed too far.

Emma was admitted to a palliative care hospice where she died a month later."

I'm not sure who to feel sorry for the most: the mentally-impaired person who is being killed by neglect or the spiritually-impaired persons doing the killing. According to my theology, the former lose their physical lives, but will live forever with Jesus, but the latter lose their souls and will live forever cut off off from God in hell. I suppose the answer is that we should be most worried about what the culture of death is doing to all of us.