We don’t want to make a habit of bashing Ted Turner, especially given that there are so many other wealthy population control wackos around. But he is such a tempting target (a father of five children who would limit the rest of us to one) that we can’t resist get- ting in one more lick.
Not that Turner can be accused of hypocrisy. With Turner, what you see (or hear) is what you get. When Turner admonished us to have no more than one child, he immediately issued a mea culpa for having five of his own.1 “What can I do now that they’re grown,” he groaned, “Shoot them?”
Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, in a soon-to-be-published report, rightly calls Turner “a thoroughly appropriate spokesman for the population control movement, for he refuses to be constrained by political correctness.”2 Who else would have the gall to issue his own version of the Ten Commandments, including: “Thou shalt not have more than two children or no more than my nation suggests.”3
We called Phillip Evans, Turner’s media spokesman, for a response to the charge that, having fathered five children, Turner is somewhat overqualified to speak to the population control crowd. Evans had no comment, but then what could he possibly say’? Younger population control advocates won’t suffer from Turner’s angst over having too many children, since they are largely a barren lot. Liberals in general have adopted, without the need for China-style coercion, what Moore calls a “one liberal, one child” policy. Over time, of course, this means that population controllers are headed for extinction. “[I]f two centuries alter his death, we owe any debt of gratitude to Malthus,” Moore bluntly jokes, “it is that his ideas may be inadvertently improving the gene pool by thinning the liberal herds.”4
