I’m confused as to how having more children than someone else is “cheating” the democratic system. Would the OP mind unpacking that a bit? We seem to have somewhat competing notions of what a democracy is.
That may be more common for a moderate denomination like the Methodists or Episcopalians, but I think more extreme and fundamentalist branches of Christianity have a higher percentage of losing the children of members. I grew up in a non mainstream scary Millennialist church and many of the kids I went to services with (including all of my siblings) left around 18.
I thoughroughly agree that this is much ado about nothing and that in any case the right to have or not have children is one of the fundamental rights of humanity.
But let’s look at a different scenario.
A country, let’s call it Yaopindo, has a large ethnic majority and an ethnic minority with a very different culture. The minority is sitting on some prime land full of oil and minerals and all of that. The minority has cultural reasons for not exploiting those resources, and in any case if they were exploited they’d hope that the majority of the money would be returned to their area. The majority, of course, would like to exploit those resources and use most of the money.
So they institute a policy making it easier for huge numbers of people from the majority culture to settle in minority areas. They encourage the majority to have more children than they usually have in those areas. People come in droves- not because they believe in this master plan, but simply because they want a better life.
Meanwhile, demographics are shifting like crazy.
Is this situation okay?
In that it’s a specific attempt to subvert democracy.
It doesn’t seem to be, as a larger group of people having more votes then a smaller group of people who have fewer votes is pretty much the definition of democracy.
Of course, we live in a representative democracy with protections for the minority enshrined in law… so any attempts by the majority to force certain things on the minority are right out. But that’s more a violation of civil rights than a subversion of democracy.
I repeat my request for a cite that this in fact what they are attempting. Your own cites indicate that it is not.
And I continued on to say that the movement “might be doing” this, not that it was their principal motive. The Wikipedia does say that it is an express goal, though not the stated principal one, of the movement. And more importantly, like I said, the thread is about voting with your vagina and the ethics thereof, not about the Quiverfull movement. They are just the catalyst for the thread.
No, it absolutely isn’t. That claim is not made in the Wikipedia article or in the column you linked to. The Wikipedia article does mention that some adherents view it as one of the “secondary, tangible, benefits.”
By and large, these people do not care about democracy or politics. They believe God wants them to be in the world but not of the world. They believe having scads of kids is what God wants and will help bring about his kingdom on Earth and all of that stuff. They are crazy, absurd, and sexist. But if you are going to criticize them, you should at least understand what they are saying and what they are not saying.
As has been said, it’s not gaming the system. The system is the representation of the interests of the people of a nation. As **mtgman **said, if one group outbreeds another, that’s just life. After all, there’s nothing stopping an anti-quiverfull movement of secular humanists from entering into an agreement to breed as much as possible in order to effect change in generations to come. Does the prospect of this scenario (no matter how unrealistic rampant breeding among intellectuals may be in this day and age) scare you just as much as the quiverfull one? If not, you’re being disingenuous about the whole “gaming the system” thing.
I despise the idea of the quiverfull movement, by the way. I think it is based on making men comfortable and women servants. The men get all of the sex they want because it is God’s will. The women cannot exercise control over their own bodies, because, “as Christ is the head of the church, so is the man the head of the family.” I don’t want to see a quiverfull majority. But I am not about to impose restrictions on groups I don’t like. My duty is to continue to extol the virtues of gender equality and humanistic ideals, and pass those values on to my children (if I ever have any).
I’m a programmer. Being a programmer is sort of like being a lawyer in that whatever you build, someone is going to look at what you’ve made and try and figure out that one thing you didn’t think about to break the system.
If Outlook allows you to install virsuses, does that mean that hackers are just playing to the rules of use established by Microsoft? No, of course not.
If you went back to 1787 when the Constitution was being formulated, and told them that Georgia had gone over it and hatched a plan to start breeding like all get-out to gain an uneven power in Congress and presidential election, you can bet that the framers would have gone back to the drawing board.
Specifically plotting to circumvent the rights of those you disagree with, either by killing them, or breeding them out, is nefarious. Having lots of children because you like or believe in lots of children is one thing, but that’s different from plotting to take over the nation by any means necessary.
Well, the thing is, we live in a world of what is & what works as much as what should be. Perhaps the best way to achieve one’s ends is to have as many children as possible & overwhelm one’s enemies. It doesn’t stop with voting; it also includes strategies of naked violence.
Stopping other people from having children is wrong. Having more children than someone who has different political or social views than you is not nefarious.
These people believe in having lots of children. As for hypothetical people who believed what you are proposing, all I’d say is: it’s allowed because the alternative is worse; no family can force its children to adhere to its beliefs, and given the difficulties in having children, the short attention spans and need for instant gratification of most people, I would say no movement of that kind is likely to take root and control the country.
Wrong? Last I was aware, we had a secular government who is concerned with wise choices not any sort of artificial ideas of right and wrong.
Is the world going to be a better place in 50 years for no other reason than because we have 40 billion people? What’s the peak number at which the population becomes “enough”? How do you know we’re not already at it?
That’s a laugh. But anyway I was addressing the statement you made: I agree it’s nefarious to circumvent someone’s rights by killing them. That specifically deprives them of something. Having more children than someone else does not deprive the other person of anything.
That’s about our use of resources, not a population number. In any case I think it’s a different question from this thread. I’m in favor of real sexual education. I might support governments offering incentives for family planning if it was really done properly (meaning it was offered equitably and didn’t target undesirables religiously, racially or otherwise).
Sure it does, just like a DOS attack.
The other side of the Outlook example is this. Say I discover some registry hack that lets me do something that I couldn’t ordinarily do that I would like to do. Am I wrong for not alerting Microsoft and giving them fair warning about putting in this new feature that I want? I don’t think so, not morally anyway. I’m making the program work the way I want it to. The price for this freedom is the vulnerability to malicious code such as viruses.
Besides, the original argument was that the Quiverfull movement was doing something unnatural by having so many children. As has been stated, there is nothing more natural than screwing and having babies. They aren’t using fertility treatments as far as I know. They really are just letting nature decide, so by definition it isn’t an artificial action at all.
Now, if there were a systematic use of fertility drugs to increase the probability of multiple births, maybe you and I could agree. But as it stands, within the scope of the original question asked, I don’t see a particular problem.
I addressed this in my last paragraph of the text you quoted. The issue isn’t with people having lots of children, it’s with people making a conscious effort to subvert democracy. There was a family in my school when I was young with 10 kids or something. I was perfectly happy for them. But that’s an entirely different case from what’s being discussed.
Let’s say, just for illustration, that I don’t like you, Sage Rat. Can I kill you? No? Why not? Because it deprives you of your fundamental and biological right to existence? Where is such a right written down? And what is all of this talk about rights anyway? Maybe it’s in my best interest that you die (hey, that burrito you’re eating looks tasty and I’m starving…). I think you would agree that it is “wrong” to kill you, however you might define it. It’s entrenched in our collective psyches that for some reason, it is “wrong” to kill you.
The defining characteristic of an advanced species is an at least a rudimentary sense of ethics (i.e., right and wrong). Governments are a natural outgrowth of humans’ need for codifying right and wrong in order to coexist.
A DOS attack prevents someone else from using the Web site. My parents had three kids and our neighbors had two, but all of us got to go to school, use the post office and the library, vote, and so on and so on.
I think this is the sticking point. I don’t see it as subversion. One definition of subversion is:
I think you see the Duggar’s movement as “hindering normal operations” of democracy, am I right? I just don’t see it. Democracies are governments of the people. If the quiverfull movement can somehow breed that much, without regression to the mean kicking in as **Kimmy **mentioned, and win enough elections, and somehow get enough like-minded people in all three branches of government, while the rest of us sit by out of ignorance or apathy as it all happens, maybe that’s just nature’s way of telling us that we don’t have what it takes to perpetuate our values.
Again, nothing is stopping you, or me, or anyone else from doing the same darn thing.
And again, I will state that I would feel somewhat differently if I knew that the movement was disingenuous in that it encouraged fertility treatments. But that’s not the within the scope of your question.