Last night ABC (TV) News NightLine profiled the Bates family, presumably on the occasion of this family--all 21 of them!!--visiting New York City (evidently at someone else's expense).
This family has gotten publicity before, for their 19 children--and the mother says she hopes she doesn't have to stop there! She is 45 and has had a couple of miscarriages. You'd think her baby-making machinery would be pretty worn out by now.
I think it's wrong for people to have large families, even quite a few fewer than 19 (see my August 5, 2012 posting, "Even the US Must Control Birth Rates"); so it truly upsets me when someone has that many children and thinks it's a good thing.
Mr. Bates says, "We're going to have as many children as the good Lord gives us." I have news for you, Mr. Bates: It's not "the good Lord" who gives you the children, it's you boinking your wife.
Well, these people--who live in "the hills of East Tennessee"--are, as the TV segment described them, "ultra-conservative Baptists." It wouldn't do any good for me to argue with them or tell them what I think. From my point of view they're a different species. And if they knew I was gay, they'd run the other way, sure that I was the Devil incarnate.
Maybe ironically, for people who evidently are pretty fond of procreation, they're puritanical regarding sex. They swim dressed in jeans. One of the older boys, upon seeing people sunbathing in Central Park, said "They forgot most of their clothes."
The mother home-schools her kids, too. (To keep them, I'm sure, from being exposed to ideas that they don't agree with.) I haven't got facts on this, but I'd bet a lot of home-schooled children have some difficulty getting into college.
If I had a time machine and could send this family somewhere in an instant, with the push of a button, I'd send them where they belong--back in Old Testament times.
Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein
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Why is it always the least desirable people who have lots of kids? One of my favorite comic movies is "Idiocracy," which predicts a future dumbed-down society as a result of the most stupid people having all the kids. By that measure, there probably were not enough Kennedys.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that the interests of the quality of the human gene pool would be served if fewer stupid people had children and more smart people had children (or more children, which is pretty much the opposite of what happens). Unfortunately, this raises scary prospects for many people. For one thing, the Nazis had a program called Lebensborn, where they brought together hand-picked, "perfect" specimens of the Aryan race to allow them to breed. And--even worse--the flip side of their eugenics efforts was to cleanse the human race of the "races" that they deemed undesirable--for example, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and various other Slavs. So, the Nazis gave all eugenics programs a very bad name, and who can say when that stigma will wear off?
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