Be Fruitful & Multiply

Most Americans don’t like large families. Mark Morford is one of them. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 19, 2005), he reports that Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar in Arkansas gave birth to their 16th child.

Morford says the children are “mewing” and “attention-deprived.” Of the family, Morford says “this bizarre Duggar family” has “18 spotless, white, hyperreligious, interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair.”

He goes on: Is it “wrong to suggest that it is exactly this kind of weird pathological protofamily breeding-happy gluttony that’s making the world groan and cry and recoil, contributing to vicious overpopulation rates and unrepentant economic strain and a bitter moral warpage resulting from a massive viral outbreak of homophobic neo-Christians….” (Actually, America is not overpopulated, and America is one of the richest nations on earth.)

Morford continues: “Why does this sort of bizarre hyper-breeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? [Actually, Arkansas is in the South.] In other words — assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will never be allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right — where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on culture?” Calling the Duggars “asexual” is ridiculous. And Morford calls Michelle “unhinged.” Perhaps it’s Morford who is coming “unhinged” with this rant.