Armed and fertile

The other article in last week's issue of The Nation which has everyone buzzing is Kathryn Joyce's piece on a group calling themselves the "Quiverfulls [sic]".  They are a loose network of very fringe-y fundamentalists who try to churn out as many babies as possible, believing the key to winning the long-term culture war is winning the baby battle.

Instead of picketing clinics, Pride writes, Christians should fight abortion by demonstrating that children are an "unqualified blessing" by having as many as God gives them. Only a determination among Christian women to take up their submissive, motherly roles with a "military air" and become "maternal missionaries" will lead the Christian army to victory. Thus is Quiverfull part of Mary Pride's whole-cloth solution to women's liberation: embracing an opposing way of life as total and "self-consistent" as feminism, and turning back the tide on a society gone wrong by populating the world with right-thinking Christians.

I have to admit, I have a grudging admiration for these people.  They're crazy, but they are consistent, and that's not easy to find.  I have often argued that, if the "pro-life" movement were coherent, this is the position it would have to take.  Choosing whether to have children doesn't start with pregnancy.  If you are one to believe that snuffing out life before it actually begins is a heinous crime, then you should have to answer why you are not producing as much life as you are able.  And, heaven knows, you cannot stop with what you can support financially, since this is not an excuse for poor women who want an abortion.  Faith in God and all that.

The ultimate goal for the Baby Factories, of course, is to eventually run off us child-hating liberals with a tidal wave of their spawn.  There are good reasons to be vigilant about the theocratic threat, but this isn't one of them.  We may not breed, but we adopt (so to speak), and these authoritarians aren't going to change the historical pattern of hemorrhaging their charges in large numbers to the sweet smell of freedom.  This is the 21st century, and it is becoming increasingly hard for fundamentalists to incubate their children deep enough into the Christian bubble to shield them from deleterious influence and still function. 

Comments

[Clint]

And, apparently, wet dreams make the baby Jesus cry.

Or something.