PRI Review for April 10, 2017
Contempt For The Family Abounds On The Left;
Father of Four Forcibly Sterilized in China;
President Trump Stops All Funding To UNFPA
The popular culture’s disdain for marriage often waxes ineloquently into outright contempt.
Let’s face it. The Left can’t stand genuine marriage: taking after Karl Marx, they deny that it has any standing or status in law and culture. In fact, Karl Marx left his own family destitute, and his socialist friends had to support them – imagine the irony, the founder of Marxism forcing his friends to exercise voluntary charity.
Sounds like a socialist sin to me.
Today’s Left attacks marriage relentlessly, hijacking the very term to celebrate what thousands of years of history has condemned as deviant behavior. The attack on language is not just Humpty Dumpty’s version; The Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin also wrote an entire book on the use of language to promote the revolution.
So in today’s moral free-for-all – perhaps we should call it a free-fall – the Left can hijack language, but they can’t hijack reality. So when they are confronted with a genuine marriage that affirms common sense and simple morality, the Left goes ballistic. Especially when it has its roots in religion – that is, a sacramental marriage.
Which brings us to Vice-President Mike Pence. Several years ago, when Pence was a member of Congress from Indiana, a news article reported that Pence “never eats alone with a woman other than his wife. Moreover, he won’t attend any events featuring alcohol without her by his side.”
Now this seems to be well within the realm of common sense, especially for a public figure – and especially for a member of Congress or the Senate. It’s no secret that elected officials are constantly bombarded with fawning admirers, and not a few of them are, shall we say, less than noble in their intentions.
But the fact that the Pence family considers its practical approach to be routine has gotten some on the Left all riled up. In fact, the fact that their decision has a religious dimension has them even madder than Alice’s Mad Hatter.
But wait – a lot of people might have simple routines that are just common-sensical. Why would the Pences’ routine have to be “religious”?
It’s simple. Their marriage is sacred, and that means that everything they do reflects that sacred character.
But enter the feminist firing squad: the fact that the Pences act that way at all is sexist, right? And the fact that it’s religious don’t make it any less sexist. If anything, religion just exacerbates the hate crime.
A prominent feminist in Canada recently went so far as to assert that because Pence is Christian, his relationship with his wife broadcasts what she calls the “rape culture.”
Behind the bile, she’s claiming that Christianity is sexist. And so is marriage. Because all men are naturally rapists, she asserts, according to the Catholic Church – so women need the protection of marriage to protect them from the constant threat of assault.
You know, they used to say ignorance is bliss, but this gal is blissfully bonkers. A quick look at ancient tribal custom will reveal that pagans took marriage a lot more seriously than Canadian leftists appear to. Wedding ceremonies lasted for weeks in some cultures, and were an announcement to the community that, hey, folks, these two are now married, and all you single guys and gals take note, this is a public announcement. They’re off limits.
Is that a bit inartful? Well, ancient tribes were very realistic. Their understanding of human nature was a rough draft, but it got the basics right. For them, the dissolution of the family mean the dissolution of the tribe, of society itself. Marriage and family were the glue that held it together.
Since this seems so elementary, why does the Left not understand it?
Let’s take a look at the godfather of today’s chic Marxist intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre, and his not-so-beloved wife, Simone de Beauvoir. This French couple – I use that term advisedly – had an “open marriage. Jean-Paul was famous for his endless seductions, which he did not want his marriage to impede. Simone supposedly accepted this arrangement – she was a brilliant woman, capable of rationalizing almost anything – but it was also natural for her to hate it, because it violated simple reality.
And Pence’s feminist Canadian critic hates marriage too, because she knows only the flagrantly noxious version that de Beauvoir had with Sartre, not the kind that Pence has with his wife.
Pence the Christian represents the rape culture because Sarte’s libido was insatiable – well, why should Pence be any better?
It is the feminists who are the true fundamentalists. A Christian marriage is fundamentally evil to the feminist because the Christian wife and mother, according to Simone and her sisterhood, are prisoners of Kinder, Kirche, and Küche – children, church, and the kitchen – they are slaves to motherhood, religion, and family, yearning to be free.
All Simone de Beauvoir could do with her freedom was to watch her husband have an endless series of notoriously public affairs. For the truly liberated feminist, that’s marriage – and for any married woman, that experience would be sheer Hell.
So when we see the feminists rage against men and marriage, we have to remember their pain. They don’t want to be used and abused like Simone was, so they want a ticket out of their suffering and think that abortion is the only way back to sanity. Men are beasts, children are parasites, the church is a patriarchal hypocrite, and the kitchen is a prison. So marriage is slavery to a cruel and domineering buffoon.
No wonder they’re mad. They have been lied to all their lives. And like Simone de Beauvoir, they are intensely jealous – of men and of marriage. And that jealousy often turns to envy, and hate.
That’s where they’re coming from. So perhaps they feel better calling Vice-President Pence names.
Given this twisted view of reality, Mike Pence’s approach is all the more sensible. Because in addition to loving his wife, he knows the raw and vengeful culture of Washington’s left-wing feminists.
Washington is full of miscreants, and it’s also full of folks with cameras on their cell phones. And it’s full of low-lifes who’d love to get some notoriety, their 15 minutes of fame, and go viral on the Internet. So imagine a couple of women – you know, the kind who disrupt town meetings screaming and waving their pro-abortion signs, their number is legion – imagine such a duo stage-managing a scandal. At a public event, one of them will throw herself into the arms of a surprised male target while the other snaps a few quick pictures to post on the web.
Now: imagine two scenarios. In the first, the official’s wife is standing next to him, and is horrified at the lewd interloper.
In the second, the official’s wife is back home in the district with the kids. And a neighbor calls to tell her about the pictures she just saw on TV.
Sad to say, there are ugly and vulgar women in the world who hate everything Christian. Thousands of them marched in Washington in January, celebrating abortion and condemning Christian virtue. In today’s debased Washington culture, they will do anything to harass, impede, and destroy.
Because these women have been betrayed, and Washington played a central role in their betrayal.
In one very real sense, the feminist has a right to be mad. When the feminist movement was budding in the 1960s and early 70s, “women’s liberation” open the doors to millions of jobs for women. But as University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall points out, millions of those women were victims of a con game, a ploy that was celebrated by government, corporations, and leftist ideologues all at once – a very rare alliance indeed.
How did each of these institutions and movements benefit from feminism? Well, consider: the government got millions of new taxpayers – not only those women who postponed marriage to enter the workforce, but those married women with children who chose to be “liberated” from the kitchen. But wait – it became immediately obvious that their children would need childcare – and suddenly, where there had once been a mother working in the home, and no taxpayers, we find a mother working for an employer; so now the mother must employ a child care worker. Voila – two new taxpayers for the government, where before, there were none!
Meanwhile, corporations and other employers who had a static number of jobs in the struggling economy of that era suddenly had millions of new job applicants for the same number of positions. By the law of supply and demand, that meant that wages would rise much more slowly, if they rose at all. Even when ideology prevails intellectually, market forces prevail when it comes to jobs and wages. And the working women lost, even though the feminists declared victory.
That’s right, let’s not forget the third group – leftist ideologues. They celebrated as well: quickly the Supreme Court acknowledged the burden that childhood puts on mothers who don’t want to be mothers – for social or for economic reasons. So the justices issued the Roe v. Wade decision to liberate such women from the burden of their unborn children, setting them free to be productive workers in the economy.
Of course, for the ideologues, we must remember that since Karl Marx the left has hated the family, because an intact family is the major institution of a free society, and thus the primary enemy of the leftist tyrant.
In every possible way, we have to defend the family and celebrate its defenders.
This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. When we come back, we’ll have a rare treat – some good news about the United Nations.
Second Segment:
The U.S. will cease funding the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)—the notorious U.N. agency that has been the chief international cheerleader for, and financial supporter of, China’s repressive “Planned Birth” policies from their beginning.
U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker received a letter from the State Department on Monday stating that it had been determined that UNFPA was supporting the management of a family planning program involved with coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization and that, per a provision in U.S. law known as the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, it was therefore ineligible for federal funding.
“The Chinese Government’s Population and Family Planning Law, even as amended in 2015…clearly constitutes a “program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization, and are an integral part of the comprehensive population-control program the Chinese Government advances” the letter stated, “[UNFPA] continues to partner with the [China National Health and Family Planning Commission] on family planning, and thus can be found to support, or participate in the management of China’s coercive policies.”
Funding that would have otherwise been allocated to the UNFPA will be reallocated to the Global Health Programs account for family planning, and maternal and reproductive health programs.
“Defunding UNFPA is a great victory for the women of China and everyone who respects the inherent dignity of each and every human life,” says Population Research Institute President Steven W. Mosher, the first American eyewitness of Communist China’s widespread policy of forced abortion and forced sterilization under the one-child policy.
On the ground, investigations directed by Mosher exposed numerous human right abuses under the one-child policy and provided the impetus for the Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 Administrations to cut U.S. funding to UNFPA. Under Bush 43, for instance, PRI reports led the U.S. State Department to conduct its own investigation which confirmed PRI’s findings, namely, that the One-Child Policy was just as rigorously enforced in Chinese counties where the UNFPA was in charge as elsewhere in China.
“The UNFPA was not a force for moderation in China, but was aiding and abetting the Chinese government’s enforcement of the policy,” says Mosher.
Mosher’s earlier research and testimonies before Congress further played an important role in helping to craft and pass the Kemp-Kasten Amendment in the 1980’s.
With the exception of former-President Obama, U.S. Government funding for UNFPA has been cut at some point under every U.S. President since Reagan.
Cutting UNFPA funding is estimated to save taxpayers an estimated $32.5 million dollars in 2017—the amount of funding UNFPA received in core contributions last year. While core contributions have provided the mainstay of U.S. funding for UNFPA over the past decade, the U.N. entity has also received significant funding from other sources of foreign aid in recent years. Under the Obama Administration, UNFPA received over $340 million from the U.S. Government in either obligations or disbursements.
The move to end funding for UNFPA comes as a response to a presidential memorandum issued by President Trump earlier this year on January 23 rd. The Memorandum directed the Secretary of State to enforce the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. The Kemp-Kasten Amendment allows the president to cut funding for any organization that supports or manages a family planning program where coerced abortion or forced sterilization are practiced.
The Kemp-Kasten Amendment has been included in every foreign appropriations act since 1985. Kemp-Kasten, in its most current version states:
none of the funds made available in this Act nor any unobligated balances from prior appropriations Acts may be made available to any organization or program which, as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.
President Trump’s January 23rd memorandum had also reinstated the Mexico City Policy, a separate regulation that prohibits U.S. Government funding for any foreign nongovernmental organization that performs or promotes abortion as a method of family planning.
Since the advent of the one-child policy, the China Government has committed over 364 million abortions, according to data from the National Population and Family Planning Commission and the State Department’s 2016 Report on Human Rights Practices.
Under the one-child policy, women who exceeded their allowed number of births were subjected to any number of severe penalties including unlawful detention, confiscation of property, home demolition, involuntary sterilization, and crippling fines equal to two to ten times their annual disposable income.
Coercive abortion remains a core implementing component of family planning policies throughout much of China today. According to the State Department’s 2016 report, policies requiring women to submit to abortion if they are over their birth quota continued to be enforced in Hubei, Hunan, and Liaoning provinces despite allegations that China’s planned birth policies had been loosened following the adoption of the two-child policy. Statutes requiring “remedial measures” (a common euphemism for abortion in China) for over-quota births continued to remain official policy in Guizhou, Jiangxi, Qinghai, Yunnan, and Guangdong even after the two-child policy was put in place.
UNFPA has continuously implemented cooperative projects in China since the advent of the one-child policy in 1980. As recently as 1991, the then-executive director of UNFPA heaped praise on China’s family planning program saying , “China has every reason to feel proud of and pleased with its remarkable achievements made in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past 10 years.”
In a press statement released yesterday, the U.N. entity continues to maintain—its continued partnership and past support of China’s planned birth programs notwithstanding—that the UNFPA “promotes the human rights of individuals and couples to make their own decisions, free of coercion or discrimination.”
However, to this day, UNFPA has never apologized for its support and praise of China’s one-child policy. The U.N. entity continues to work in close collaboration with the Chinese Government, including the China National Health and Family Planning Commission in the areas of “reproductive health” and “population dynamics.” The UNFPA’s current five-year program in China will continue until 2020.
There is little doubt that the China Government considers their partnership with UNFPA as an endorsement of its one-child policy. Reporting on a meeting between Vice Premier Liu Yandong and UNFPA director Babatunde Osotimehin, the Xinhua News Agency describes the event saying:
Speaking highly of the cooperation between China and the UNFPA…Liu said the cooperation strongly supported the implementation of China’s population development plan and promoted China’s development in the population field.
“UNFPA’s support of China’s family planning program is reprehensible,” Mosher says, “no organization or entity which supports a program where coerced abortion and sterilization take place deserves one penny of our taxpayer dollars.”
This has been PRI Review from www.pop.org. When we come back, we’ll look at more repression in China.
Third Segment:
Father of Four Says He Was Forcibly Sterilized by China Family Planning Officials
Jonathan Abbamonte reports.
A 42-year-old man and father of four has claimed that he was forcibly sterilized in southwest China at the hands of local family planning authorities in Yunnan province in southwest China.
The victim, a Mr. Hu, says that he was detained by family planning officials on the evening of February 8th while he was visiting a friend’s house for the Chinese New Year. According to Hu, several family planning officials arrived at the scene in plain clothes telling him that he was required to go with them to the town government office.
Since the early 1980’s, China’s one-child policy had made it illegal for most couples to have more than one child. Couples who exceeded their government mandated birth quota where penalized with steep fines, equal to from two to ten times their annual income. In 2016, the China Government changed the one-child policy to a two-child policy. Couples are now allowed to have a second child but are still prohibited from having a third.
Married at the age of 19, Hu had three children with his first wife. After the couple’s third child, Hu’s wife was sterilized and the couple paid the compulsory fine. Hu later divorced and remarried and had a fourth child with his second wife.
According to Hu, despite having had only one child with his second wife, family planning officials insisted that he was in violation of the two-child policy and would therefore need to be sterilized.
Refusing to comply with officials’ demands, Hu argued that he had already paid a fine for his third child and had committed no wrong. Hu further argued that the Yunnan family planning officials had no authority over him as he was no longer registered in that province but was now registered instead in Sichuan province where he and his family have been living for the past few years.
Family planning officials then purportedly proceeded to push and beat him, according to Hu’s account of the incident on Weibo :
Ten population control workers surrounded me while the local Communist Party Secretary Lo and the worker wearing glasses grabbed me by the collar. Then they began to beat me and pushed me around. A fist hit me in the face, and my neck was clawed and scratched. They forced me to sit on a stool and took pictures. Then one of the workers shouted, “immediately notify the [clinic] that we are bringing in someone by force to be sterilized.”
After Hu’s wife attempted to intervene, police arrived at the scene. According to Hu, police told him to cooperate with the family planning officials and then proceeded to detain his wife and child. Police allegedly threatened Hu with imprisonment if he continued to resist sterilization.
“If I had not agreed they would have put my wife and I in jail for 15 days on the grounds of disorderly conduct against a government agency, then they would have sterilized me anyway,” according to Hu’s account on Weibo, “when I went to the local police station this is what they threatened me with.”
After being subjected to pressure by police, Hu was subsequently vasectomized at 1 am on the morning of February 9th and then released.
“My little son was only two years old,” Hu explained in the post:
Besides, the weather at this time of year was very cold. I was afraid for my wife and my two-year-old’s safety and well-being. I was very angry that I was being subjected to this terroristic pressure. But because of concern for my wife and children I was forced to agree to their demands that I undergo this operation.
According to the South China Morning Post , the Yunnan province Health and Family Planning Commission has asked the local family planning division office to investigate the incident.
According to Sixth Tone , official documents purportedly obtained by the media outlet reveal that Hu’s visit to his hometown over the holiday provided the chance for family planning officials to “seize the opportunity,” and that Hu voluntarily accepted vasectomy after being given a “thorough and detailed” explanation of the family planning law.
Under China’s planned birth policies, sterilization is often compulsory for women who exceed their government-mandated birth limit. Earlier PRI investigations in China revealed a widespread practice of forced sterilization under the one-child policy. One such woman encountered by PRI investigators was even compelled to submit to sterilization twice after she became pregnant after being sterilized for the first time.
In 2013, a 42-year-old woman from Hubei province bled to death after she was forcibly sterilized following the birth of her second child. Family planning officials compelled her to undergo the operation even after her doctor warned her that she should not undergo surgical sterilization due to possible health risks.
This has been PRI Review from www.pop.org. Thanks for listening.
