God Does Not Want 16 Kids
Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply
should you cringe?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly
creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th
child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom
vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is
not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?

And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling
husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be
a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain when
you say that -- isn't more than a little numb to the real world, and
that bringing 16 hungry mewling attention-deprived kids (and she wants
more! Yay!) into this exhausted world zips right by "touching" and
races right past "disturbing" and lurches its way, heaving and gasping
and sweating from the karmic armpits, straight into "Oh my God, what
the hell is wrong with you people?"

But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that
this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this
bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious
interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in
ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF
commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and
worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom
Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's
Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python
which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.

It's wrong to be this judgmental. 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 across our troubled and Bush-ravaged land.
Or is it?

Is it wrong to notice how all the Duggar kids' names start with the
letter J (Jeremiah and Josiah and Jedediah and Jesus, someone please
stop them), and that if you study the above photo (or the even more
disturbing family Web site) too closely you will become rashy and
depressed and you will crave large quantities of alcohol and loud
aggressive music to deflect the creeping feeling that this planet is
devolving faster than you can suck the contents from a large bong? But
I'm not judging.

I have a friend who used to co-babysit (yes, it required two sitters)
for a family of 10 kids, and she reports that they were, almost
without fail, manic and hyper and bewildered and attention deprived in
the worst way, half of them addicted to prescription meds to calm
their neglected nerves and the other half bound for years of therapy
due to complete loss of having the slightest clue as to who they
actually were, lost in the family crowd, just another blank, needy
face at the table. Is this the guaranteed affliction for every child
of very large families? Of course not. But I'm guessing it's more
common than you imagine.

What's more, after the 10th kid popped out, the family doctor
essentially prohibited the baby-addicted mother from having any more
offspring, considering the pummeling endured by her various matronly
systems, and it's actually painful to imagine the logistics, the toll
on Michelle Duggar's body, the ravages it has endured to give birth to
roughly one child per year for nearly two decades, and you cannot help
but wonder about her body and its various biological and sexual ...
no, no, it is not for this space to visualize frighteningly capacious
vaginal dimensions. It is not for this space to imagine this couple's
soggy sexual mutations. We do not have enough wine on hand for that.

Perhaps the point is this: Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding
only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the
Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their
massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the
charming photo suggests, never 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 the culture? Where is the counterbalance,
to offset the damage?

Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who,
along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky
progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to
answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers?
Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say
unto thee, it ain't lookin' good.

Perhaps this the scariest aspect of our squishy birthin' tale: Maybe
the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our
culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the
ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and
pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a
whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of
overpopulation. Is that an oversimplification?

Why does this sort of thoughtfulness seem so far from the norm? Why is
having a stadiumful of offspring still seen as some sort of happy
joyous thing?

You already know why. It is the Biggest Reason of All. Children are,
after all, God's little gifts. Kids are little blessings from the
Lord, the Almighty's own screaming spitballs of joy. Hell, Jim Bob
said so himself, when asked if the couple would soon be going for a
17th rug rat: "We both just love children and we consider each a
blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and
she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them."
This is what he actually said. And God did not strike him dead on the
spot.

Let us be clear: I don't care what sort of God you believe in, it's a
safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables.
God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice
or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have
three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two
dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them)
lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet's resources
faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to
Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children,
she'd have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door.
Stop it now.

Ah, but this is America, yes? People should be allowed to do whatever
the hell they want with their families if they can afford it and if
it's within the law and so long as they aren't gay or deviant or
happily flouting Good Christian Values, right? Shouldn't they? Hell,
gay couples still can't openly adopt a baby in most states (they
either lie, or one adopts and the other must apply as "co-parent"),
but Michelle Duggar can pop out 16 kids and no one says, oh my
freaking God, stop it, stop it now, you thoughtless, selfish,
baby-drunk people.

No, no one says that. That would be mean.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who are you to judge?

God Does Not Want 16 Kids
Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply
should you cringe?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly
creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th
child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom
vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is
not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?

And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling
husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be
a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain when
you say that -- isn't more than a little numb to the real world, and
that bringing 16 hungry mewling attention-deprived kids (and she wants
more! Yay!) into this exhausted world zips right by "touching" and
races right past "disturbing" and lurches its way, heaving and gasping
and sweating from the karmic armpits, straight into "Oh my God, what
the hell is wrong with you people?"

But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that
this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this
bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious
interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in
ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF
commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and
worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom
Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's
Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python
which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.

It's wrong to be this judgmental. 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 across our troubled and Bush-ravaged land.
Or is it?

Is it wrong to notice how all the Duggar kids' names start with the
letter J (Jeremiah and Josiah and Jedediah and Jesus, someone please
stop them), and that if you study the above photo (or the even more
disturbing family Web site) too closely you will become rashy and
depressed and you will crave large quantities of alcohol and loud
aggressive music to deflect the creeping feeling that this planet is
devolving faster than you can suck the contents from a large bong? But
I'm not judging.

I have a friend who used to co-babysit (yes, it required two sitters)
for a family of 10 kids, and she reports that they were, almost
without fail, manic and hyper and bewildered and attention deprived in
the worst way, half of them addicted to prescription meds to calm
their neglected nerves and the other half bound for years of therapy
due to complete loss of having the slightest clue as to who they
actually were, lost in the family crowd, just another blank, needy
face at the table. Is this the guaranteed affliction for every child
of very large families? Of course not. But I'm guessing it's more
common than you imagine.

What's more, after the 10th kid popped out, the family doctor
essentially prohibited the baby-addicted mother from having any more
offspring, considering the pummeling endured by her various matronly
systems, and it's actually painful to imagine the logistics, the toll
on Michelle Duggar's body, the ravages it has endured to give birth to
roughly one child per year for nearly two decades, and you cannot help
but wonder about her body and its various biological and sexual ...
no, no, it is not for this space to visualize frighteningly capacious
vaginal dimensions. It is not for this space to imagine this couple's
soggy sexual mutations. We do not have enough wine on hand for that.

Perhaps the point is this: Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding
only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the
Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their
massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the
charming photo suggests, never 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 the culture? Where is the counterbalance,
to offset the damage?

Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who,
along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky
progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to
answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers?
Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say
unto thee, it ain't lookin' good.

Perhaps this the scariest aspect of our squishy birthin' tale: Maybe
the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our
culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the
ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and
pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a
whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of
overpopulation. Is that an oversimplification?

Why does this sort of thoughtfulness seem so far from the norm? Why is
having a stadiumful of offspring still seen as some sort of happy
joyous thing?

You already know why. It is the Biggest Reason of All. Children are,
after all, God's little gifts. Kids are little blessings from the
Lord, the Almighty's own screaming spitballs of joy. Hell, Jim Bob
said so himself, when asked if the couple would soon be going for a
17th rug rat: "We both just love children and we consider each a
blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and
she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them."
This is what he actually said. And God did not strike him dead on the
spot.

Let us be clear: I don't care what sort of God you believe in, it's a
safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables.
God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice
or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have
three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two
dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them)
lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet's resources
faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to
Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children,
she'd have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door.
Stop it now.

Ah, but this is America, yes? People should be allowed to do whatever
the hell they want with their families if they can afford it and if
it's within the law and so long as they aren't gay or deviant or
happily flouting Good Christian Values, right? Shouldn't they? Hell,
gay couples still can't openly adopt a baby in most states (they
either lie, or one adopts and the other must apply as "co-parent"),
but Michelle Duggar can pop out 16 kids and no one says, oh my
freaking God, stop it, stop it now, you thoughtless, selfish,
baby-drunk people.

No, no one says that. That would be mean.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------