Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Outbreeders: Mandating A Baby Boom For The Culture War

             

Flooding The Nation With  
Christian Rightwingers




Imagine a country full of home-schooled children who are taught that people who do not believe what they believe, act the way they act, live the way they live deserve to be discriminated against, deported, incarcerated, or worse... Sounds like a B movie filled with tykes whose eyes emit laser beams, vaporizing people they feel threatened by, doesn't it? 

Well, that B movie is just the thing envisioned by Bryan Fischer's D-class intellect.  The reasoning goes like this: the left has so many pro-choice people, feminists and homosexuals that the right will outbreed them and (insert maniacal laughter) take over the world!  

Bryan Fischer of the AFA:
What this means quite simply is that liberals are breeding themselves out of existence ... All this represents a marvelous opportunity for conservatives. We can regain political control of this country by simply following the biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

Of course, the thought never occured to Fischer that  some gays, feminists and pro-choice peopler might be bred in the process, because true Christians NEVER have gay,  pro-choice or feminist children. Note to Fischer: breeding to outnumber doesn't guarantee complete extinction, unless you couple overbreeding wityh conscious genocide - the kind that your friends want in Uganda (and Zimbabwe and Texas).

And those conservatives he speaks to, none of them are "on the dole" are they? Popping out kids for the sake of a political population explosion means that the parents better have the means to support them. Fischer is a typical pro-lifer who confuses being "pro-birth" with "pro-life." After the infant gets slapped on the butt and cries, Fischer doesn't care what happens to the kid. Pay for those kids? Their homes, their food, their clothes, their education? Don't be ridiculous! Once that kid is born, the parents have to make do.  Let them shell out for Fischer's beliefs. After all, that's the American way! And if the kid winds up becoming a criminal on death row, well, Fischer will never attempt to stay his execution. So it's pop kids out as fast as possible, imbue them with as much hatred for liberals as you possibly can, hope they survive to voting age, then sick them on an unsuspecting Congress (OK, the last may not be very hard to do). Pretty cool idea, huh?

QUIVERFULL

The Quiverfull movement espouses having as many children as possible, faithfully following the dictum "Be friutful and multiply." If every child is a "gift from God" then the movement's followers can be viewed as somewhat greedy. But according to some, Quiverfull people are more than greedy for "gifts from God", they are "culture warriors":

wikipedia:
On July 25, 2005, ABC Good Morning America segment, "Is eight really enough?" Deborah Roberts interviews Rachel Scott, author of "Birthing God's Mighty Warriors". Rachel Scott discusses the trend toward larger families, managing finances with more mouths to feed and she states, "when good people stop having kids, society fails."

If this militaristic stance seems familiar, look back to  evangelical leaders like Rod Parsley and Lou Engle. Their sermons are filled with militaristic jargon that would make a general proud. The unfortunate thing about religious militarism is that too many congregants react emotionally and physically to it. 

Fundamentalists aren't very good with metaphors.

And the militarism is most effectively used on children from day one. Breeding little armies is very "fruitful". One of the most blatant examples of "breeding for God" has been cable TV's Duggar family. The family's promoting over-population to such an extent that one wonders about the parents' motives: are they supporting the kids or are the kids supporting them? 

A century and a half ago P.T. Barnum would have figured out a way to make the Duggars a sideshow in his circus. Or at least Michelle Duggar: "Meet the amazing woman who just can't stop bearing children!!" But in essence, they've already done that to their family and in this day and age, being a sideshow, ahem, I mean a celebrated family, can be very lucrative. They can afford to propagate.

More kids! More kids! Don't Abort! Seriously, Bryan Fischer and Tony Perkins (to name a few) are getting frightfully demented with their hypocrisy. Can you imagine how the Duggars would be treated if they were black and on food stamps? Perkins would have  advocated forcibly tying Michelle's tubes at least 10 kids ago as well as questioning the "morality" of the parents for introducing the children to welfare and poverty.


Quiverfull is also promoting sterilization reversal surgery. As yet it hasn't purchased fertility drugs en masse, but give it time. 


Critics of Quiverfull add one more flaw in the crank 'em out movement: 


wikipedia:

Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, a former ardent Quiverfull adherent, birth-mother of eleven children, and former editor of Gentle Spirit Magazine, argues that the Quiverfull movement is one "in which women and children are routinely and systematically subordinated and subjugated by the men in their lives - fathers, husbands, older sons,. . .pastors, elders, leaders - as a matter of biblical principle." Seelhoff charges that Quiverful adherents "never talk about the victims of the movement, other than to distance themselves, to explain how it is that the victims are aberrations."
The most famous victim of Quiverfull's proselytizing has been Andrea Yates, the Houston housewife who drowned her five children in a bathtub on June 20, 2001. 
Her first psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, warned Yates and her husband against having more children, stating in Yates's medical record two days later, '"Apparently patient and husband plan to have as many babies as nature will allow! This will surely guarantee future psychotic depression."
From the Dionne Quintuplets to Octomom, extreme fertility will always be a headliner, but the topic has never really had political implications. Until now.

The Duggars are slated to headline Tony Perkins' Values Voter Summit