Is it Really “Overpopulation?

[powerpress]

A lot of myths are floating around – about overpopulation, “Catholic” universities, and morals of the sports world. Unfortunately, that’s what they are – myths.

PRI Review

June 2, 2016

Host: Dr. Christopher Manion, KM

Remember the old zombie movies? You know – the stories of people who just wouldn’t go away – no matter how many times they died?

Well, bad ideas have the same habit of coming back to life again and again, no matter how many times they’ve been proven wrong. As Professor Mel Bradford used to say, keeping up with them is like mowing the lawn – proving them wrong just once is not enough: their bad ideas – and, unfortunately, their lies – keep coming back to life.

That’s why Stale, old Malthusian ideas–disproved, debunked, and discarded over and over again–continue like zombies to come back the dead.

For instance: Some so-called security analysts still blame the so-called population bomb for causing all the trouble in the Middle East and Africa. Large cohorts of young men cause terrorism, conflict and violence, they say.

At PRI, we have to repeat again and again the truth about population control. No matter how many abortions and abortifacients population controllers provide to Third World countries, terrorism and chaos continue to plague the world — in both “overpopulated” and underpopulated countries alike.

PRI president Steve Mosher reminds us repeatedly of what everyone already knows, the murderous campaign against Christians in the Middle East has everything to do with radical Islamist theology — And that ideology is very effective for recruiters.

After all, as Father Jim Schall, our good friend and longtime politics professor at Georgetown, points out, Islamic terrorists have every right to credit the Koran with their violence and assassinations. They are not heretics, Father Schall observes – they are merely taking their Islamic faith to its logical conclusions.

Catholic author Robert Reilly points out that there are more books published in Spain every year – with a population of some 35 million [note: the current figure is 46 million – ed.] – than are published annually in Islamic countries with over 1 billion inhabitants. Unlike Christianity, Islam does not encourage productivity and growth – instead, it encourages violence and dominion.

Yet many Moslems desire a peaceful life with economic stability – and they are fleeing the Middle East for America and Europe not because of overpopulation back home, but because of the fruits of Christian civilization in the countries in which they desire to live.

Does anyone argue that the turmoil in Libya was caused by that country’s youth bulge?

Once the tyranny that was Khadaffi’s Libya was destroyed by the Western powers, leaving a dozen or so Khaddafis to joust for dominance heading in all four directions – East towards Egypt, south towards Africa and Boko Haram, West towards Morocco and Tunisia.

And north, of course, towards Europe – where many of them have caused chaos and crime, crimes for which they would be summarily beheaded under Sharia Law back home.

The same roadmap goes for Iraq, whose Christian prelates sadly explain that America’s war on Iraq caused the murderous chaos that now prevails there. So now, hordes of migrants pour across the nonexistent borders of northern Africa and the Middle East, all bound for Europe.

Finally, if “overpopulation” causes war, how does one explain the aggressive behavior of countries like Russia, China, and North Korea?

Russia’s population is aging, literally dying, yet it is engaging in wars defensive or offensive, depending on who’s side you’re on – with Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova.

China’s population is aging and dying as well, thanks to the Communist Party’s one-child policy begun almost forty years ago.

That policy has now expanded to two children, because the Party realizes that their controlled population is out of balance.

But the Communist government is still fully in charge – families still have no privacy whatsoever – and their move comes far too late to redress the country’s population collapse.

And yet communist China is aggressively claiming large swaths of the South and East China Seas – the sure sign of a government in trouble: unite the people by making war.

Meanwhile, China’s satrapy, North Korea, can barely feed its shrinking population, yet it is constantly firing off missiles, carrying out nuclear tests, and threatening war against the United States and South Korea.

Throughout the poor countries of the Third World, population is not the problem, dictatorships and corruption are the problem. But we should not expect that those who benefit from power and corruption will admit it.

Second Segment

Research conducted by The Cardinal Newman Society reveals that at least 10 Catholic colleges have honored individuals at their 2016 commencement ceremonies who have publicly opposed Church teaching in their statements and actions.

But I want to focus on two.

In 2004, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) released “ Catholics in Political Life,” which requires Catholic institutions to withhold honors and platforms from public opponents of Church teaching —

The document states that “the Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins, CSC, had said that this statement does not apply to non-Catholics such as President Barack Obama. Bishop John D’Arcy responded that it certainly applies to Jenkins.

A year before Obama appeared, Notre Dame’s faculty Senate – a body consistently comprising ambitious political players in the academic sandbox – announced that, quote, “the University should not compromise its academic aspirations in its efforts to maintain its Catholic identity.”

The vote reflected what the late Prof. Ralph McInerny, the most illustrious scholar ever to teach at Notre Dame, called Notre Dame’s “vulgar lust for prestige.” And those so-called aspirations certainly include cash: in fact, after Obama’s appearance in 2009, Notre Dame’s public relations department announced that a newly-arrived $30 million grant from the federal government had made 2009 the best fundraising year in Notre Dame’s history.

So Notre Dame’s once illustrious character as a Catholic institution can be sold for 30 million – when Judas only got 30 pieces of silver for his government grant.

Well, here we are, seven years later. And taking Father Jenkins at his word, apparently Joe Biden isn’t a Catholic either. Because this year, Biden was honored by Father Jenkins with the University’s most prestigious award, the Laetare Medal.

The lame excuse that Father Jenkins had offered in 2009 – Obama doesn’t count, because it is not Catholic – simply collapsed in fatuous fawning for government money and secular prestige. Those of us whose families have been connected to Notre Dame for years have every right to be dismayed – but Notre Dame doesn’t care about us.

And curiously, it doesn’t care about its students either.

Holy Cross Father Bill Miscamble, longtime Notre Dame history professor and prior History Department chairman, helped put together a website designed to guide Notre Dame students towards a handful of Notre Dame professors whose classes were still consistent with Catholic teaching, as well as with academic standards. Within a day, unnamed superiors forced Father Miscamble to disassociate himself from the effort; to add insult to the injury done to Notre Dame students, these superiors insisted that Father Miscamble remain silent about their action. This high-handed Power Play came from men seething with envy and resentment. They envied Father Miscamble’s popularity in scholarship, and resented is defense of Catholic truth that the University had increasingly abandoned since the 1960s.

Unfortunately, folks who love Georgetown have fared little better.

In fact, Georgetown grads tell me it’s even worse.

There, the university invited Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards to speak on campus. Richards, as we all know, is the poster girl for abortion on demand worldwide.

Two Jesuit professors at the University actually lobbied to have a pro-life speaker on-stage with Richards, but undoubtedly her contract contained an ironclad requirement that no opposing voices need apply.

The reason is simple: when there’s an honest debate, the abortionists always lose.

So the proposal of the two Jesuit faculty members — who actually believe in the so-called “free exchange of ideas” — was rejected by the organizers of the event, according to the campus newspaper.

“It’s wounding to me that students in a Jesuit school would reject the good counsel of two senior Jesuit professors,” theology professor Father Stephen Fields, S.J., told The Cardinal Newman Society. “We had a plan to promote the FULL, free exchange of ideas, and so heal a deep rift on our campus. It pains me that the Lecture Fund seems to have put its own career plans over our community’s integrity.”

Just a minute – did he say career plans?

You bet he did. We have learned the hard way that pro-life, pro-family, orthodox Catholics need not apply to any positions in government, nonprofits, or private organizations that are under the gun by the powerful left in culture and politics today.

Nobody in his right mind, for instance, would allow a vocal exponent of the only kind of family there really is – mom, dad, and kids – to occupy any position in his organization. It would bring on a withering attack from 1000 federal agencies and countless cultural forces, as well as the usual suspects – annoyed screamers demanding public worship of perversion.

Yes, Big Brother is serious, and he doesn’t like competition. We have recounted in the past how the millionaire chairman of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, was forced to leave his own company – which he had founded – because he supported marriage in the state of California. Kim Davis, a County Clerk in Kentucky, was jailed because of her support of marriage – which Pope Francis happily recognized when he gave her a private audience during his visit to the United States last year.

And let’s face it, there are students at Georgetown who are still mesmerized by the so-called success of perhaps their most infamous graduate, William Jefferson Clinton, class of ’68 – yes, that’s the same Bill Clinton who will not even deny that he is a rapist for fear of being sued for libel.

That’s right, Sam Donaldson actually asked him, amazingly enough. “Talk to my lawyer,” Slick Willie said.

Even though Pope Francis constantly admonishes us to put aside our greed and lust for power in order to serve Christ in the face of the culture of death, many of today’s Catholic students realize that they must pay off tens of thousands of dollars in government debt – that’s right, Obama took over the student loan program in 2010 – and the students have no idea how they’re going to pay those loans off.

But Mrs. Richards does. Planned Parenthood urges young women to contracept and, if necessary, to abort their children if those children pose a threat to their career or to their financial future. And remember, folks, young women graduates are just as burdened by student debt as men are.

So much for careers – and back to the scandal at Georgetown.

In reality, the Georgetown students were merely mimicking the Notre Dame faculty members who cheered on the universities drive towards secular prestige at the cost of its Catholic identity, and welcomed the most abortion friendly president in history onto the campus, while arresting over 80 peaceful pro-life demonstrators.

For Notre Dame, being pro-life was a thing of the past: now, government money and secular press these, however vulgar, are the goal. In the University is now spending $400 million – that’s right, $400 million – on a renovation of the football stadium. It will contain lucrative skybox seats by the thousands, and the University will now designate the football stadium, and not Sacred Heart Basilica – where I was baptized long ago – as the center and crossroads of the campus.

Well, all this raises the specter in the unholy alliance between big government, big business, and the radical feminist movement – and Catholic educators were not far behind.

In the 1960s, the radical feminists, basing their argument on the left wing egalitarian arguments popular among the New Left, demanded that businesses and professions open their doors with “equal access for women.”

Now, equality, like many leftist slogans, always sounds nice in the abstract – until it starts doing real damage. So many good Catholics were pleased when Notre Dame opened its doors to women in the early 1970s.

Professors certainly liked it – it gave the University the chance to eliminate the bottom third of males in the applicant pool, so classes were suddenly filled with smarter boys and very smart girls, since only one third of the student body was female. In fact, Dan Saracino, who is today the Provost for admissions at Notre Dame, told me that so many brilliant girls were applying that Notre Dame could fill the quota for women with salutatorians and valedictorians. Of course, other factors contributed to a well-rounded female student body, but the professors noticed a significant rise in the academic talent of the new student body pool.

Moreover, Notre Dame and other Catholic universities lobbied hard with expensive consultants to encourage Congress to make available to a larger population student loans under programs guided by government legislation.

As the student loan population expanded, the law of supply and demand applied once more: students had more money for the same number of colleges and universities, so the price rose much faster than inflation. At Notre Dame, tuition, room and board in 1966 was about $2000. Adjusted for inflation, that figure would be some $16,000 today.

However, Notre Dame’s tuition, room and board in 2016 is almost $60,000. In the same trend has occurred on campuses all over the country.

So far, universities. Well, what about business? The radical feminists demanded that women be allowed equal access to employment. Businesses loved it – a wave of new workers seeking the same number of jobs meant lower wages – For women as well as men.

And given today’s average debt burdens amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, those women are told they dimply **have** to go to work, or they’ll never pay them off

So forget the crib – welcome to the cubicle.

Have you ever wondered why average income for the majority of Americans has been stagnant since the 1970s?

There you have one very important reason.

So the feminists were happy, and businesses were happy. What about the government?

Lo and behold, middle-class families in the 1950s could be raised with several children with one breadwinner, virtually always the father. Not so in the 1970s – when inflation was roaring because of out-of-control government spending.

So suddenly the feminist dream of women becoming workers instead of mothers – choosing not the crib, but the cubicle – produced disastrous results. First, the sexual revolution and the pill combined to allow such women happy sex lives which their mothers and grandmothers had saved for marriage. Second, the average number of children per family declined radically.

Third, whether or not they married – and with each passing year fewer women did marry – working women with children had to hire child care.

And forth, the plague of divorce and the steep rise in the number of single mothers created new households where there was once one, and virtually all of those households were poorer.

Now look at it from the government’s point of view:

More people on welfare – more work for the government bureaucrats!

And more taxpayers – where in the 50s the father of an intact family was the only taxpayer, by the 70s, add it up: the working father, the working mother, and the daycare worker are now dependable taxpayers. And furthermore, the government’s rampant inflation made it a lot harder for traditional families to survive with only one breadwinner even if they tried.

So there you have it: the feminists got their equality – the cubicle instead of the crib; moreover, they had succeeded in attacking the traditional family by making it increasingly difficult to raise one.

Next, big business. It got cheap labor, by the simple law of supply and demand, and entire new industries were created to serve the new economy: daycare centers and housecleaning companies to do the work that stay-at-home mothers used to do; an entire new generation of restaurants, fast food, and ready to eat meals in stores to serve families who had no time to cook at home;

And never forget the lawyers – the biggest business of all: divorce reached an all-time high, impoverishing further the family and its members, especially women, who usually got the short end of the stick – a fact that feminists rarely admit.

Third Segment

What’s happening to the sports world? Athletics used to be a training ground for discipline, character, and excellence, but those days are long gone. But today, on the college level as well as in professional sports, the athletes themselves are hardly role models – and the executives and administrators who oversee them aren’t much better, even when they’re wearing suits.

We’ve talked about the NCAA’s rank hypocrisy – letting the University of North Carolina play year after year, when the university’s own Chancellor quit in disgrace four years ago because of a massive fraud perpetrated on hundreds of student athletes who were allowed to get academic credit for black studies classes that they never attended – in fact, the classes were often never even held.

On the other hand, the NCAA threatened to pull its national championship out of Indianapolis only hours after Indiana pastor religious freedom bill last year.

We have to recall the professional sports are in debt, big time, to collegiate athletics – college-level sports programs spend billions of dollars that the pros don’t have to, even though the colleges are really farm teams for the high dollar world of professional sports.

That’s why the pros avoid at all costs anything that might upset their cozy relationship with collegiate athletics.

And what about collegiate athletics? They are managed by run-of-the-mill college administrators – which population is possibly the most left-wing, politically correct job category in the country.

The athletic directors and coaches have to have their antennae carefully attuned to the latest left-wing drivel champion by their employers. And lo and behold, those administrators constitute the governing bodies of the NCAA. It’s unlikely the college coaches share all of the liberal shibboleths of the faculties where they work; because, after all, those coaches actually have to work. But step out of line, and they will pay the price: the still famous and undoubtedly remarkable college coach Lou Holtz was fired from at least two head coaching jobs because he supported a pro-life Sen. and his campaign for reelection – and if any politician stuck in the crawl of the average academic, it was North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.

And that was 30 years ago – and things have only gotten worse.

But why his the world of professional sports acquiesced to this demagoguery? The answer is simple: professional coaches at all levels, as well as the scouts they send to hundreds of college games every week depend on the goodwill of those colleges every bit as much as those colleges depend on the pros. After all, they all make money on the deal – and these days, sad to say, it’s increasingly all about money.

Now, on top of NCAA’s hypocrisy, we get ESPN, the high-cost cable sports network that is helping college football cash in big time. Even there, PC gender ideology reigns, with the network’s firing of baseball great and three-time World Series winner Kurt Schilling – all because he told his followers on Facebook that “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves.”

Here ESPN is unique. It finds itself caught between two of the most radical leftist institutions – America’s higher education establishment and Old Media, both of which bar entry to anyone who doesn’t march to the left-wing anthem.

Well, a month ago Target announced that it would allow men to use the women’s restrooms and dressing rooms in their stores.

The American Family Association said enough is enough – let’s boycott the joint.

And since then, Target’s stock has plunged 20% – in one month.

Folks, any other stock plummeting like that and Wall Street would call it a crash, but the usual suspects are making the usual excuses – “all retail is down,” said major department stores like Macy’s, JCPenney and Kohl’s all posted weak first-quarter sales, said the New York Post.

So this month Target blamed what it called an ‘increasingly volatile consumer environment’ for the drop – well, the situation in its bathrooms is certainly getting volatile. CEO Brian Cornell said on a call with media. “It’s been a very wet and cold start to the year in the Northeast, and it’s been reflected in our sales.”

And he was talking about first-quarter sales – before the men-in-girls bathrooms policy was announced.

And if you’re pro-life, Bernie Sanders wants to sic the government on you:

Here’s Bernie in his own words:

I have a 100 percent lifetime pro-choice voting record. I believe, that not only do I vigorously oppose Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, I think we should expand funding for Planned Parenthood. And it is no secret, that in states all over this country, in a dozen different ways, there are governors and legislatures who are trying to make it impossible for a woman to control her own body. I will use the Department of Justice to go after those states, in every way that I legally can .

Her Bernie, why stop there? Why don’t you send in the IRS after your enemies list like Bill Clinton and Obama did?

And during his audience before tens of thousands of people in Saint Peter’s Square in May, Pope Francis said that the Christian virtue of piety and mercy shouldn’t be confused with the compassion we feel towards our pets. It sometimes happens, he said, “that we have these feelings toward animals, and yet remain indifferent in the face of the suffering of our brothers and sisters.”

As brings to mind the syndrome reflected by such organizations as the so-called “People United For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals,” most widely known by its acronym, PETA.

Aristotle and Aquinas agree that all men have a natural desire to be moral, or at least to consider themselves moral. No one likes to consider himself a Cad or a scoundrel.

Therefore, we find that pro-abortion advocates often trumpet their morality by opposing smoking, obesity, or warm weather. No matter what depravity and intrinsic evils they might celebrate, they will always provide themselves with a moral parachute.

Back to our ethical animals people. Many refuse even to eat the meat taken from one of their departed animal brethren. But I wonder, how many members of PETA are pro-life? How many of them would demonstrate for the ethical treatment of their unborn brothers and sisters?

And last, PRI President Steve Mosher and our ace research colleague, Jonathan Abbomonte, have just released a troubling report:

Leaders of the world’s most powerful countries are meeting this week at the 2016 G7 Summit in Ise-Shima, Japan, they write.

The 2016 Summit, like previous G7 meetings, has focused on some of the most pressing issues in the modern world. Items discussed included China’s bogus claim to the entire South China Sea, the Syrian refugee crisis, ways to rebuild a war-torn Ukraine, and formulating a strategy to defeat ISIS. But now G7 leaders are committing to advancing “sexual and reproductive health, rights, and services,” a term that, for pro-abortion activists, is synonymous with abortion on the international stage.

A group of lawmakers pushed for access to abortion and “sexual and reproductive health” to be included as a topic of concern at this year’s Summit. A recent conference sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) paid for a gaggle of pro-abortion lawmakers to assemble in Japan to pressure the G7 to support of radical pro-abortion policy.

Tune in to our next podcast to hear more about this international hijacking by the worldwide pro-abortion forces.

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