Tom’s Big Picture

If you kill somebody in our state, we’re gonna kill you back- even if it’s an unborn child.

Some of you will have seen this already:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2769639

Observations:

A. Beautiful family. And knowing the media, you know they were trying very hard to find a bad example to feature in this report. It speaks a lot about the people involved that this family was the “worst” the media was able to find.

B. I assume the pastor featured was not the pastor of this family- and the report I believe makes that pretty clear. Dan Scott, the local pastor interviewed, is clearly in “damage contol” mode- as in, “how can I reassure these nice media people that we Christians aren’t weirdos like this family?” And, under pressure, he spills his worldview, referencing “overpopulation” and “limited resources” for reasons not to have lots of children.

Now, in fairness, Scott is merely parroting the received wisdom of our age- but there’s not an “overpopulation” problem with this couple’s children. In contrast, the Western world is going to have a serious underpopulation problem in the next 100 years. Children like these don’t result in “limited resources”, but rather are priceless human capital who will add to the total resources available to the rest of humanity.

Scott, you’ll be interested to know, is pastor of a megachurch in Nashville, and his humanist educational background probably betrays the source of his bias:

Pastor Scott holds a BA in Sociology/History, a Masters of Arts in Humanities, a Master of Arts in Psychology and a post graduate certificate in Trauma and Abuse. Pastor Scott is fluent in Spanish and French and is dedicated to racial reconciliation.

Something tells me Scott would not support politically incorrect solutions to true overpopulation, like mandatory birth control for welfare recipients, but is nevertheless very eager to distance himself from a family populating the world with beautiful, well-adjusted children on their own dime.

C. Depending on which of the offered definitions you take, “quiver full” does not necessarily mean absolutely no birth control (I’ve read somewhere that a quiver in OT times held five arrows, but of course because of high infant mortality they would have had many more than that to ensure 5 survived). The point is to have at least 5 or 6 kids. That’s achievable- what worries me about an absolutist worldview is rolling 1/30 odds for Down Syndrome (and other developmental issues that increase exponentially with maternal age) at age 45. Unless a parent is financially independent enough to provide for a special needs child for life (even past the parent’s death), it would seem irresponsible to intentionally take such a large risk that, if such an outcome occurred, would ultimately put a burden on the taxpayer- not to mention the time and resources that would be taken from the other children. I’m not advocating abortion of course, but I just mean using non-abortive birth control to manage the risk after a certain age. A reasonable inflection point before the risk starts accelerating seems to be age 39 or so. Statistics below:

I’m sure very few people will take this middle position- it seems as if we are wired up for ideology.

And if people must choose an ideology, then the full-on “Quiver Full” philosophy is infinitely preferable for our people to the Culture of Death and its below-replacement birth rates we have now.