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Natural Family, 20 February 2008

Memo to the Howard Center: THAT'S NOT A POLEMIC. THIS IS A POLEMIC.

What does a guy have to do? I call you names. I declare you my nemesis. I oppose everything you stand for, and in the event you ever stand for anything new, I'm prepared to oppose that too, just on general principle.

But you, for all your pro-family talk, are unfaithful. You are untrue. Not only do you slut around town with The Nation, but you send me an email bulletin to tell me about it! "World Congress of Families Responds To The Nation's Polemic In The International Pro-Family Movement". I was crushed.

For one thing, "The Nation's Polemic" was gonna totally be my slogan if this whole calling-people-dumbfucks thing broke wide and made me famous. You know, like how USA Today is "The Nation's Newspaper"? So much for that plan.

And second, that bit in The Nation wasn't even a polemic. When I read the e-mail from the Howard Center, I was expecting something that would make my columns about them read like Garrison Keillor on Xanax. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The Nation – the oldest and largest circulation leftwing periodical in the U.S. – has just published an extraordinarily inept attack on World Congress of Families and those concerned about plummeting birthrates worldwide." - Extraordinary! Inept! Attack! At least two and a half of those words apply to me on a regular basis. But instead, they apply to "Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies", a long article discussing rampant assholery in astonishingly polite terms.

Basically, it just goes on at length about the various groups throwing around the phrase "demographic winter", and how many of them seem to be especially obsessed over the decline of white, Christian populations to hold off the breeding Muslim immigrant hordes. There are a bunch of quotes from a bunch of assholes, a lot of exposition, and Allan Carlson, Natural Family guru and head of the Howard Center and its World Congress of Families, gets mentioned a lot.

Anyway, the e-mail takes particular issue with The Nation's characterization of Carlson's group having only a "token link" to non-white, non-Christian groups. Listen to their incredible debunking:

"That “token link” includes Don Feder (who is Jewish and, besides serving as World Congress of Families Communications Director, was a speaker at three of four Congresses), Dr. Farooq Hassan (a barrister and visiting lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School), a number of distinguished rabbis (including Rabbi Daniel Lapin), Kay Hymowitz (a Manhattan Institute scholar who addressed the Warsaw Congress), and Madame Jehan Sadat (widow of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat) who spoke at the Geneva Congress (1999)."

Someone call Jesse Jackson! This is the REAL Rainbow Coalition. Three to five Jews, a guy named Hassan, and an Egyptian who spoke at one event nine years ago. Now I desperately want to know what the WCoF thinks "token" means. Now, I will admit, the Howard Center has been fairly light on the "too many brown babies" rhetoric, choosing to focus its attention on gay rights, working women, and all those other scourges of society's movement away from the concept of "wombs with legs to bring you a martini".

But as the Nation article shows, a fair amount of that rhetoric does come from people who fly the "natural family" banner, and when crazy racist assholes and the Howard Center are both throwing around the same debate-shaping bullshit terminology, like "demographic winter", it's not unfair to link them. They made their crazy asshole bed, so they shouldn't be surprised at who they wake up next to. Of course, I'm just frightened of their success, as per the traditional "logic":

"The anti-family left, of which The Nation is an integral part, simply seems to be terrified of our success at building a multi-racial, multi-denominational pro-family alliance." - Allan Carlson.

Well fuck you, Carlson. I'm part of the anti-family left, I'm not terrified, and unlike The Nation, I ACTUALLY WRITE GODDAMNED POLEMICS. But no, you have to spend all your time with The Nation. Well, fine. See if I care. There are plenty of other morons in the stupid, stupid sea. And I've got a big-ass net.