All the Horrible Girliness

I read and commented on Jordan's blog regarding an article you can read here. However, I commented before I'd read the actual article, and now that I have, my skin is a bit prickly.

Though the article is entertaining and does touch on my ew ew ew sensibilities as a white, liberal American, much of it is wrong. In a few different ways.

(1) God doesn't want kids.

I was watching some show on MTV the other night about interracial couples, and eventually, I had to turn it off. I am in an interracial relationship, but I've been around my husband's family so much that it sometimes shocks me to see the way many white families think, even church-going, Jesus-loving, supposedly Christian white families. It knocked me backward to hear one white father - almost grandfather - say, with absolute conviction, that he thought it would be better for the baby to have been aborted because life is hard for a mixed child.

I love that, by the way. Mixed child. Not all that far from half-breed, is it? And nobody ever says "mixed person," or "mixed adult." Everyone's just so worried about what box the kid is going to check on the standardized test, and whether they'll be tortured by the swingsets by other kids, because non-mixed kids have such easy existences, right? If you could save your kid from all that hurt and shame by killing them before they know what's happening, you'd do it, wouldn't you? I digress, sorry.

Anyway. I'm sure God, in all her logical, liberal, angry glory, is sitting in heaven rolling her eyes and sighing at all the mothers who dare give birth to more than their allotted share of children, which brings me to:

(2)

Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest?

Hey, Mark, you're an intelligent-sounding guy. I mean, you have a nice job writing for the Gate, yeah? You can string words together with the best of them. Why, then, has the simple fact that white, Midwestern women are in fact NOT the ones giving birth to the most kids eluded you? Ever been to Mexico, or the Philippines? How about Europe, where the fastest-growing population is Muslim?

Hell, let's keep it to America, even your own state: ever visited a black neighborhood in Los Angeles? They tend to vote Democrat, don't they? If we're casting our left-wing stones around here, why don't we talk about how underprivileged, non-white women are giving birth to babies left and right in these neighborhoods without the hope of fathers or steady income? Yeah, those same people who we liberal people hope to help out. If every white Midwestern Bushie pumped out a kid a year starting now, they would still never catch up to the non-white citizens of this land.

(3) Finally, Mark is simply a dick. I think and vote fairly liberally, but I'm ashamed of this guy. I would be surprised to hear that he had any children of his own. Phantom vaginal pain, Mark? Phantom indeed, since you don't know the first thing about having a vagina, and the pain of birth and the heart of a mother is different than anything you will ever experience, so kindly stop behaving as if you have a voice in that matter.

He fails, like so many fail, by being snarky. Fahrenheit 911 could have been great if Moore had cut the goddamn sing-songy assholish voiceover, too.

***

Do I sound this way because I have a kid now? You bet your ass. Before you have kids, you can afford to think that maybe everyone isn't entitled to children, that the population should be controlled and regulated, that there should be tests for parenthood, and you can tell yourself that you believe this way because it's in the best interests of children. But then you have one of your own, and you start wondering who would be doing the regulating, what their interests would be, who would be paying them off, and if you would pass the test. Having a kid makes you fiercely aware of what's in your kid's best interest, and everyone else's interest comes second. That's the nature of things, people; it's how things are throughout history and the animal kingdom; take that as you may.

So if this insane family in Arkansas gets to have sixteen, twenty, fifty kids so that I can have The Bug, I say good for them. The more the merrier.

I'm not saying, by any means, that they aren't creepy as fuck. Maybe that lady should quit pumping out kid after kid and get to know the ones she has. People do not have the moral right to more kids than they can raise. I'm saying Mr. Morford is mean, angry, perhaps misinformed, and has no right to say what God thinks of anything.

posted by Samus @ 1:48 PM