Posted on 07/03/2012 3:50:01 PM PDT by wagglebee
New York, NY (CFAM/LifeNews) — Love him or hate him, Stephen Colbert doesn’t waste time getting to the point. In last Thursday’s interview with Melinda Gates on the Colbert Report, he asked Melinda about her newest initiative and cut straight to the chase: the new population control movement exists to save lives by erasing lives.
Colbert: “But now you’ve got a new charitable hobby horse you’re on, and it’s not necessarily saving people’s lives, so much as it’s stopping people’s lives from existing. You want to provide family planning to 120 million men and women around the world.”
Melinda Gates: “Right.”
The old population control movement existed for more or less the same reason, to eradicate poverty by eradicating the poor. In fact, the only major difference between the two movements is one of semantics. Today’s newest generation of population control proponents are still billionaires, still from the first world, and are still convinced that the poor are at the center of the world’s woe.
What’s changed is their marketing campaign and rhetoric.
The word “control”, especially when placed directly after the word population, evokes a flood of concrete historical memories that include coercive family planning programs still infamous today. The programs were known for addressing poverty through forced sterilizations, eradicating the poor in order to eradicate poverty. In the process, they robbed the poor person of their humanity and replaced it with a number in order to fill fertility quotas.
The policies were racist and driven by ideological fear. They were sponsored by many of the same organizations that make up the new population movement today. The new movement, however, has attempted to distance itself from its past with a very modern, subtle shift in ideology. No longer do they emphasize eugenics or even use the word “control”, but prefer the word “empowerment” and the ideology of women’s rights.
Today they use words like “population dynamics” and phrases like “demography is not destiny”. They shame the poor world into believing that the real problem isn’t so much investment in their education, health, or economy as it is their fertility. They tell them, “if you only would use family planning to ‘space your children’ properly you wouldn’t have the problems that you do, you wouldn’t be so poor and uneducated.” Then they tell these people, especially women, many of whom have access to modern methods of family planning, that it is their “right” to use those methods, even though, given their strong insistence, it seems to be less of right than an “obligation”.
Their message is as clear as it was 5o years ago: the poor are the problem, and according to this movement, it is the poor that are the ones responsible for solving it. How? By controlling their population growth. By not having children. The billionaires can’t do it for them, they can’t force them. They can pay them to do it, they can educate them on to do it, they can even increase their access to the services that will help them to do it, but they can’t make them. They already tried that.
So instead they focus on rights, and they focus on shame, and they tell people like me, in the first world, that the poor people in the Southern hemisphere would be okay if they just had access to contraception. And we mostly believe them. Except, something just doesn’t seem right.
Does development really come from contraception? And is it really a problem of too many people? What about investing in jobs, education, health and infrastructure? Perhaps those are the real problems. Perhaps, and this is just a wild guess, that is the way the North has been able to grow….
The North developed without contraception. It became rich and educated without contraception. Fertility began dropping later, and again, without contraception. Instead it was education that made the difference. It was economic growth provided by investment and the entrepreneurship of people, not numbers.
The new population control movement, led by billionaires like Melinda Gates in coordination with organizations the like UNFPA and governments that include both the United State and the United Kingdom, still wants to eradicate poverty by eradicating the poor, it’s just that, for historical reasons, they can’t come out and say it so directly. Yet, every now and then they do, just as Melinda did the other night. This needs to be made clear. This movement must be de-masked, and defeated once again.
I think that Melinda Gates actually believes that increasing the poor’s access to family planning will really better their lives. I also think that many of the people involved in the population control movement in the 40s, 50s and 60s did as well. However, what they don’t seem to be able to understand, or at least reconcile is that this is not the only solution. Instead it’s a solution that comes at the cost of reducing people to numbers, and one that will put billions of dollars into “empowering” people to stop having children rather than educating them and helping them to build a society where they are valued as a resource rather than a curse.
Yes, Melinda Gates is Catholic, but this is not the “preferential option for the poor” that we have been educated to at Church and in school for the last 2,000 years. No, that option is built on love, responsibility and the experience of seeing human beings as protagonists and not numbers.
LifeNews Note: Timothy Herrmann writes for the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. This article originally appeared in the pro-life group’s Turtle Bay and Beyond blog and is reprinted with permission.
That’s a good one too.
God’s answer to population control is nature, disease, drought and other natural disaster. Messy stuff no one wants to be a part of or see others suffering. So we feed just enough and vaccinate just enough for those who live closer to God to create unchecked more and more folks who are unable to take care of themselves. I’m not sure what the answer is, abortion is wrong, yet encouraging people to have fewer children may help. As would encouraging chaste monastery and convent life among the poor. Not sure that would work in this day and age or in certain regions or cultures.
Where was she when Hitler needed her???
Who died and left this scumbag in charge of population control.
The left is obsessed with control and not only killing people but trashing freedom. The lower the population, the easier it will be to fantasize about a pristine world and to centrally control those who are left. Unfortunately for them, freedom is God’s greatest gift to mankind. And those who seek to destroy it will some day reap their reward.
Quick look to Wikipedia says Lamm is alive and well at 77 years old.
I see he won’t get out of the way.
Typical. The rules they want to impose will not apply to them. All the green nuts need to live in mud huts w/o electricity, ride bicycles or walk and not be allowed to burn wood for heat.
Hypocrites!
Blessings, Bobo
Years ago I did a study on human population reduction. War had little effect on numbers, as the population was quickly renewed. Famine seems to be the most long lasting, as it so devastates a place that it can take hundreds of years to recover.
Plagues, however, had a dual effect. While the population quickly recovered, for numerous reasons, prosperity jumped.
Two big examples of this were the Renaissance following the European Black Plague of the 14th Century, and the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution after the plague of the 17th Century.
To start with, plagues work from “the bottom of the pyramid up”, killing the poor and unhealthy. Many older people die and their children inherit their wealth much earlier, and small, inefficient farms are combined. Prices drop and wages go up because labor is at a premium. The wealthy use some of their wealth to subsidize the arts and sciences.
Were a plague to hit the US right now with these effects, it would wipe out most of those on welfare and other government aid, most of the aging Baby Boomers, and so our costs for Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Welfare, Food Stamps, etc., would plummet. Many of the illegal aliens would die as well as “stupid” people who did dumb things that got themselves and their families infected.
Odds are good that this woman and her husband are rich enough to have a plan for medical science to bring them back from the dead at some point in the future. In their mind, a populace planet is a threat to the required stability for that to happen.
I don’t buy this want to save the world crap.
I hope Melinda enjoys her riches-—or her husband’s riches—here during this earth age, because she will be destitute in the afterlife for an eternity, unless she asks forgiveness for her arrogance.
Just wait until the libs want to start shipping poor Chinese and Indians and Pakis that just “want to better their lives” on boats.
Didn’t they do that to build the railroads? lol The railroad museum in Carson City, NV is full of “oh, the poor Chinese immigrant/slave/indetured servent” that they now welcome with open arms.
Can’t have it both ways.
I am disappointed. I thought he would voluntarily die.
Guess he is the typical hypocrite. Pardon me, he is a rat.
rats are hypocrites. goes with the territory.
Thanks,
and Blessings to you,
Bobo
So true. All the money in the world and she’s gladly throwing away her salvation. Maybe it’s BECAUSE of the money........camel thru a needle and all.
Abortion, euthanasia, contrived famines, withheld medical care, and gas chambers are ways to gain power, but they aren't an end unto themselves.
The purpose of communism isn't mass murder although it has used mass murder. The purpose of communism is to concentrate power in a chosen few while telling the people they are in power. Socialism is the same thing. Black liberation theology? Environmentalism? The green movement? It's all about power, murder is simply a tool.
Suggesting that all these movement that desire to steal my liberty only want to do that for the express purpose of mass murder makes no sense, further it's a huge underestimation of their true goals.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.