Bill Muehlenberg

Save the Planet: hate humanity

There is never a shortage of those who are so obsessed with saving the environment that they are quite happy to implement quite anti-human policies along the way. Examples abound of planet-loving, human-hating zealots who are more than willing to side with nature against humanity when push comes to shove.

I have documented plenty of such cases in the past, and will doubtless do many more in the future. Just today two more examples came to light which are worth commenting on. The first involves our good friends at Planned Parenthood.

You may recall that the founder of this organisation was Margaret Sanger, one of modern history’s more ugly eugenicists. She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Just one quote from her helps to set the stage:

Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods. Eugenists emphasize the mating of healthy couples for the conscious purpose of producing healthy children, the sterilization of the unfit to prevent their populating the world with their kind and they may, perhaps, agree with us that contraception is a necessary measure among the masses of the workers, where wages do not keep pace with the growth of the family and its necessities in the way of food, clothing, housing, medical attention, education and the like.

We who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health. The eugenist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold that the world is already over-populated. Eugenists imply or insist that a woman’s first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state.

Her organisation is still peddling this stuff today. Its current President, Cecile Richards continues to argue for birth control, abortion on demand, and other radical anti-population measures, in the interests of saving governments money: “Birth control is one of those issues that actually saves the government money. So an investment in covering birth control actually in the long run is a huge cost savings because women don’t have children that they weren’t planning on having and all the sort of attendant cost for unplanned pregnancy.”

But as one pro-life commentator pointed out, “In reality, birth control is already widely available to women and even young girls, on a sliding scale basis, so that those who cannot afford the dangerous steroidal pills can receive them at little or no cost. [Covering all birth control as preventive care] will not increase its availability, but will dramatically increase Planned Parenthood’s profit margin, by not only requiring new private health plans to cover 100% of the cost, but also requiring state Medicaid programs to pay 100% of the cost for all Medicaid recipients.”

Or as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops pointed out, contraception and sterilization “prevent not a disease condition, but the healthy condition known as fertility.” Yet the population control crowd does in fact view fertility as a curse to be worked against, instead of a blessing to be embraced.

Another recent example of this mentality came from a recent article in New Republic. A Yale historian suggested that Hitler and Stalin may have been in part motivated by economic and environmental concerns. As Timothy Snyder writes,

Both Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror took place during an interval of environmental risk: between the identification of a critical environmental problem and the introduction of the technologies that would solve it. National Socialism and Stalinism both identified enemies to be eliminated, of course; and today, when we talk about Nazism and Stalinism, we understandably emphasize the hatred – the racial hatred of Hitler and the class hatred of Stalin. But there was an economic and environmental side to their ideologies as well: Both Hitler and Stalin made killing seem to serve a vision of economic development that would overcome environmental limitations.

He is not quite suggesting that Hitler was a greenie, but he offers the recent past as a test case of what may take place in days ahead. He goes on to suggest that in the future such concerns will drive other states into genocidal actions. Concerns about global warming and the like may propel other dictators into action.

Charles Colson has just penned a commentary on this. He says in part,

Still, I can’t help but notice that in his speculation about future instances of ideology leading people to deny the humanity of others, he overlooks actual instances of what is happening today.

An obvious instance is abortion-on-demand. It’s hard to think of a better illustration of ideology – in this case the exaltation of personal autonomy – which denies the humanity of others and kills people. On the environmental front, global-warming hysteria has given license to an anti-human view that portrays people as a problem to be managed. This ideology leads some to openly discuss the need for ‘culling’ the human race, as if people were livestock.

Others talk about more vigorous and even coercive population-control measures as a way of ‘saving’ the planet. One recent ad even portrayed a teacher blowing up students who weren’t committed to reducing their personal CO2 emissions! I’m not making this up!

“Snyder’s argument reflects what happens when we abandon the biblical worldview, with its inherent dignity given to every single human life, and when we deny the sovereignty of God. Worldviews, as you’ve heard me preach so many times, do matter – not just in preventing climatic disaster – but in preventing human beings from being killed in the name of a human ideology.

But sadly it is not just the ideologues and ruling elites who can take an anti-humanity stance. Increasingly the masses are being deluded into believing we must take radical actions to cull our population. Australian Dick Smith and his anti-population growth crusade is one obvious example here.

And a recent poll found that a third of all Australians think that families should be limited to just two children, in the interests of saving our environment. Thus we may not be far off from China’s coercive one-child policy. It seems a misplaced concern about planet earth has turned even Aussies into anti-child and anti-people campaigners.

Proper concern for the environment is never amiss. But when it becomes an excuse for anti-human policies and programs, then we need to learn the lessons of history. Eugenics is still with us. Its image may have been tarnished a bit during the Holocaust, but it is still alive and well, and needs to be resisted just as fiercely today.

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