Copyright © 2013 by P. A. Ritzer
10 January 2013
In a December 30 article in the New York Times, Heather Timmons and Sruthi Gottipati reported on the reaction of women in India to the recent brutal gang rape that killed a young woman in New Delhi and to the cultural conditions that allow for such brutality. The article contained this paragraph:
After years of aborting female fetuses, a practice that is still on the rise in some areas because of a cultural preference for male children, India has about 15 million “extra” men between the ages of 15 and 35, the range when men are most likely to commit crimes. By 2020, those “extra” men will have doubled to 30 million.
After admitting that the source of the problem is the aborting of female babies, we are informed that the reason for it and the criminal problem that ensues are due to males: “a cultural preference for male children,” and “15 million ‘extra’ men.” Really? I submit that the problem is not 15 million extra men. The problem is over 15 million missing women, who were violently destroyed while in the sanctity of their mothers’ wombs.
Rational and knowledgeable demographers have long warned that the coercive and brutal government programs, in which unborn children are savagely and often forcibly sacrificed to the false god of Population Control, would lead to an imbalance of male to female children. Contrary to population-control propaganda that such an imbalance would lead to women and girls being treated far better for being more rare, rational demographers have long and accurately predicted the present reality of horrendous treatment of girls and women when there are too few women compared to men: the raping, bride sharing, bride stealing, sexual slavery, human trafficking, and warfare that would ensue. The “cultural preference for male children” contributes to the problem when families are forbidden by law or otherwise coerced to have no more than one, two, or few children.
So in the real world there exists a genuine war on women born of liberal policies. That real war contrasts starkly with the one concocted by Democrats that consists of a thirty-year-old, third-year law student–who could expect to make $160,000 a year upon her graduation–not being provided free contraception by a Catholic university in violation of its core principles. And the real war is violent: the violence of abortion and sterilization committed against the mother, the violence of abortion committed against the baby, and of course the resultant raping, bride sharing, bride stealing, sexual slavery, human trafficking, and warfare. Throughout Asia female babies are disproportionately aborted, especially in China with its one-child government policy “complete with forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, kidnapping of ‘illegal’ children” (wonder what happens to them), “and other brutal tactics” with the help of United States taxpayer dollars provided by the Obama Administration (“UN Slammed for Its Forced Abortions in China Using U.S. Funds” by Alex Newman in The New American).
How many Americans would stand by and allow the government to forcibly abort a child and sterilize a woman after she had already had one child. And yet, now that the United States is under a Democratic administration again, that of the radically pro-abortion President Barrack Obama, we United States taxpayers help to support just such carnage through population-control programs of the United Nations and other organizations abroad, not to mention the sweeping work of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, here at home. As I wrote in an earlier post “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat”:
So the Democratic Party uses our tax dollars to support Planned Parenthood ($487.4 million in the last reported year 2009-2010), the largest abortion provider in the country, founded by the Democrat darling and racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who had a special enthusiasm for aborting black babies. (Sanger even addressed a meeting of the Lady’s Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, fully consistent with the racist history of the Democratic Party.) But don’t worry about Democratic funding of Planned Parenthood, because President Obama assures us that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms for poor women. Another Democrat lie. Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms; they commit abortions. And they make millions of dollars a year doing so. Here is one case in which the Democrats do not denounce making a profit. And Planned Parenthood also gave $12 million to re-elect President Obama. So, they get nearly $500 million a year from the Democratic government and donate $12 million of it back to re-elect the Democratic president. How . . . mutually beneficial.
By the way, recently released information indicates that Planned Parenthood received $542 million of taxpayer money for fiscal year 2011-12 from the Obama government to violently kill 333,964 babies in their mothers’ wombs. I wonder who the Planned Parenthood folks voted for.
And so much of this is justified by another liberal lie, that of overpopulation. The overpopulation lie has been so pounded into the heads of people over the last several decades that we have come to accept it as a given when all evidence points to the contrary. Overpopulation is just one more in the great mesh of lies that liberals have woven to blot out the light and subject all of humanity to a dreadful darkness of fear, from which the liberals promise to rescue us as long as we grant them ever more power and control over our lives. Think environmentalism, man-made global warming . . . (And keep in mind that one of Al Gore’s homes uses twice the energy in one month that the rest of us use in one year. Also consider his recent sale of his network to Al Jazeera for a big profit. Do you think he really believes the stuff that he and other Democrats have been shoveling at all the rest of us?)
So here is the truth: Human beings have not and will not overpopulate the world. Proving that to you is beyond the confines of this post; so do your own homework with just a click of the mouse at Population Research Institute and/or Overpopulation is a Myth. Get informed. Remember, ignorance is one of the liberals’ most potent tools for enslaving people. (Just to give you one thing to consider: there is no relationship between population density and poverty or prosperity except that a community must reach a certain level of population density before division of labor, which raises the standard of living, is feasible. Some of the most densely populated regions and countries are some of the richest, and some of the least densely populated areas are some of the poorest. What really matters is the political and economic makeup of the place. Generally, those with the least controlling governments and the freest markets are the richest, those with the most controlling governments and shackled markets are the poorest.)
There is plenty of room for all the babies. So, get married first, and open yourself to the result of your loving relationship, more human beings graced with a supernatural destiny. Do not be afraid. Fear (like ignorance) is one of the great weapons liberals use to drive us into bondage. But according to the One who could not be vanquished by the lie, “the truth will set you free.” So shed your fear, take personal responsibility for your life, and come out from the darkness of liberal tyranny and into the light. Live in the light and freedom of the truth, and savor the sweetness of life.
Revisiting Dr. Seuss In Parenthood (Part One)
5 January 2012
The following commentary first appeared in Saint Austin Review, July/August 2005. It appears here with some revisions. Quotations in quotation marks and block quotes are from the works being considered.
In this election year, we might give special attention to the case of Yertle the Turtle and consider well the growing weight of government and taxation, especially considering the founders’ conviction that it must be a limited government–as established with the Constitution, “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed” (as the Declaration of Independence would have it)–that best secures the “unalienable rights” with which our Creator has endowed us.
Copyright © 2003 by P. A. Ritzer
I remember my brother saying, years ago, that he looked forward to having children of his own, so that he could again watch old Disney movies. I, for my part, in my parenthood, have discovered the joy of revisiting Dr. Seuss and sharing his works, his stories, his words with my children.
This is not my first revisiting. The birth of my nephew and godson in 1990 opened the door for the first revisiting, which went so far as to include sharing with him and his parents a breakfast of green eggs and ham. It was during this first re-acquaintance that I remember declaring that Dr. Seuss was the Shakespeare for children. This declaration, besides being inspired by an adult appreciation for the genius of these works that I had so enjoyed as a child, may also have been an enlightened response to a long-remembered concern, voiced by my parents, and possibly initiated by my teacher, that at second, third, or fourth grade (some grade that was still on the first floor of Sacred Hearts School), perhaps I was too old to be reading Dr. Seuss. My youthful appreciation for these works has since been further vindicated, at least in my eyes, by the discovery that these classics were prescribed for my wife, long before she met me, to alleviate the stress of medical school exams, by a good friend and classmate, with whom she read the works in a stairwell amidst their echoing laughter. The prescriber is now a psychiatrist for both children and adults.
I offer no blanket endorsement or recommendation of the thought and works of Theodor Seuss Geisel. I do not know his thought and have not read all his works, nor have I revisited all his works which I read as a boy. But rather, what I wish to do is to share, as an adult and parent who struggles to live a Christian life in our modern world, an appreciation for the values expressed in at least some of the words, stories, and works of Dr. Seuss.
Certainly, in Green Eggs and Ham the reader is taught a lesson about deciding to dislike foods before one tries them, but does not the persistent Sam eventually wear down the nameless green-eggs-and-ham-hater’s pride- and ignorance-based prejudice, so that he might lead a fuller life with his discovery: “’Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!’” Thus, the changed fellow can come to the grateful conclusion: “’I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!’”
And, in our culture in which the words nip, tuck, and augmentation have become commonplace, might not the young reader benefit from considering the case of Gertrude McFuzz, a “girl-bird” who “had the smallest plain tail ever was. One droopy-droop feather. That’s all that she had. And, oh! That one feather made Gertrude so sad,” when she compared herself to “a fancy young birdie named Lolla-Lee-Lou,” who “instead of one feather behind, she had two!” This state of affairs leads a jealous Gertrude to one day shout in anger, “‘This just isn’t fair! I have one! She has two! I MUST have a tail just like Lolla-Lee-Lou!'”
Despite the admonition of her wise uncle Doctor Dake, who assures her, “’Your tail is just right for your kind of a bird,’” she throws tantrums, until he tells her of the pills of the pill-berry vine, which will make her tail grow. And although one pill gives her tail another feather, “exactly like Lolla-Lee-Lou,” she decides to “grow a tail better than Lolla-Lee-Lou.” And she does, by gobbling all the pill-berries down. She grows a tail so stupendous that “that bird couldn’t fly! Couldn’t run! Couldn’t walk!”
It takes her uncle and his assistants two weeks to fly Gertrude home. And Dr. Seuss relates:
And how much smarter or wiser might the young reader be after considering the case of Yertle the Turtle, king of the Pond on the Isle of Sala-ma-Sond, where “the turtles had everything turtles might need. And they were all happy. Quite happy indeed.”
So, Yertle begins to build a higher throne on the backs of his subjects, by commanding the turtles to stack themselves up, one on top of the other, beneath him, so that Yertle can see more and exclaim: “’I’m Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! For I am the ruler of all that I see!’”
But the burden on the common folks grows to be too much to bear, so that “from below in the great heavy stack, [comes] a groan from that plain little turtle named Mack,” who petitions the king from his distress at the bottom of the stack, “’I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.’”
By now, though, the power-drunk Yertle has lost all sense of proportion, and after silencing Mack, he begins to call for more turtles that he might build his throne higher than the moon, when:
And from that throne, shaken by the common movement of the lowest subject upon which his corrupt foundation of exploitation is built, falls the mighty Yertle, “that Marvelous he,” into the depths of the mud. And “that was the end of the Turtle King’s rule!” The tyrant is thus deposed, “And the turtles, of course . . . all the turtles are free As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”
(to be continued in Part Two)