CORRECTION: One reader points out that Bowdoin is not in Boston. He's right and I should have written the headline "Boston's philosopher..." The prof's frame of reference is Boston although she doesn't live in Boston. I haven't altered the title because links would break.
A friend who's a journalist points out that Boston's archdiocese was once the most powerful archdiocese in North America, so it's particularly significant this piece ran in the Boston Globe. The foundations of Roman Catholicism continue to crumble.
Soon after matriculating at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I took a job cleaning the walls of a Roman Catholic church near Park Street and the Common. There are good jobs and bad ones. This was bad, but not because of the pay or fellow workers. it was the work itself. Every interior surface of that Roman Catholic church was black with the soot of votive (vow) candles the pious had purchased and burned to the Blessed Virgin Mary, a saint, or sometimes God Himself. Decades of soot. Decades of intentions.
This was the Roman Catholicism that read the Globe back thirty-five years ago, but the Roman Catholic church is changing and the Globe is pedalling hard to keep up. Yesterday they ran an opinion piece written by a prof of philosophy at Bowdoin College and the piece's content takes your breath away. Titled "Here's Why China's One-Child Policy Was a Good Thing," Bowdoin's philosopher told Boston she believes freedom of religion should not extend to freedom to have children. The prof likens the denial of freedom to reproduce to the denial of freedom to yell "Fire!" in a movie theater, telling us that "uncontrolled fertility is likely to have worse consequences than the false cry of 'fire!'"
Why?
Because of...
"soil depletion, lack of fresh water, overfishing, species extinction, and overcrowding in cities." That last one is funny, at least for those of us who live in Bloomington. Our city fathers and mothers are doctrinaire liberals who have spent the past ten years shutting down any land use for building domiciles outside our city center while enticing real estate corporations to fill city center with tall buildings where people are stacked on top of each other. In other words, in our town, "overcrowding in cities" is a moral commitment and I thought this was a principle shared by all progressives?
Because they alone recognize and can put the beauty of wilderness to good use, they confiscate the country, cheering on President Obama each time he signs another one of his executive orders nationalizing the rural land formerly loved and owned by those they refer to as "trailer trash." Meanwhile, they pile on top of each other in their hundred-square foot apartments, their restaurants and breweries, their theaters and galleries, their concerts and sports games. And after being zealous to overcrowd their cities, they charge country boys an entrance fee to national parks, camping fees for national forests, fishing and hunting fees, and they refuse to allow groups of nine in the Boundary Waters. Or have they lowered it to seven or five, now?
Tell me, what exactly does some philosophy prof in her overcrowded city know about the country? About the soil, the water, the fish, and the game? I bet she doesn't even know that usage of 'game.'
But the prof is in high dudgeon:
...it is clear that having more than one child is just something that none of us — Chinese or American — has a moral right to do.
She gets even more brash:
Does the right to religious freedom mean we have a right to do whatever our religious doctrines dictate? Of course not. No one thinks that if a religion required, say, human sacrifice, those who follow it would be allowed to engage in ritual killing, no matter how sincere their belief. We want to accommodate religious practice whenever we can, even when that has some cost to social welfare. But again, if the cost is too great, we tell practitioners that in this case they need to amend their own ways. We’ve done this many times and will do it again. Typically, a change like this (allowing contraception) doesn’t cause an otherwise thriving religion to collapse and fail.
Just a couple points about the above. First, the prof's religion does, in fact, require human sacrifice. it's called abortion and this ritual killing of unborn children is the foundational principle of all feminism and therefore the sine qua non of all progressive politics. Don't ever stop shoving into their faces the cruelty, oppression and endless bloodshed of helpless babies their demon god demands. Make them look at it. Make them feel it. Make them smell it. Make them lick it up and eat it as Moses made the Children of Israel eat and drink their golden calf.
Second, note how casually the prof among the elite Boston intelligentsia speaks of limiting our First Amendment rights when the "cost to social welfare" becomes "too great." And remember, we're talking about religious couples having children, here.
Third, note the prof's equivocation between parentheses in the final sentence. "Allowing contraception" actually means "requiring contraception." The paragraph is not about freeing Roman Catholics to use contraception, but requiring them to do so.
We're pleased to report, though, that the prof ends on a magnanimous note:
if...we needed sanctions to get people to refrain from having an unsustainable number [more than one] of children, they wouldn’t be physical in nature. Fines may be the best way to go...
So, on top of trying to fit more federally mandated car seats and booster seats into our vans, paying our school taxes while also paying for our children's non-government education, staying abreast of our town mothers and fathers' zoning laws for bedrooms and windows and square feet per child, paying ten or fifteen thousand per child to have a hospital birth, sacrificing half of the normal household's income to have our children raised by a real mother, and suffering the indignities of shopping at Aldi and Walmart, they're going to fine us each time we add a little blessing? Really?
The misanthropes.
mis·an·thrope
ˈmis(ə)nˌTHrōp,ˈmiz(ə)nˌTHrōp/
noun
1. hikikomori
Tim serves Clearnote Church, Bloomington, Indiana. He and Mary Lee have five children and big lots of grandchildren.
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