Every LIttle Baby Is a Miracle Straight From God
Dear Merrill,
Yeah, but in L.A. you can get chicken waffles.
Why do people think they have the right to demand that a Kevin Smith movie
not be seen? It's like some misbegotten bastard stepchild of the civil rights
movement, I guess, but for some reason, everybody's forgetting that just
because you're Catholic doesn't mean Kevin Smith doesn't have the right to make
fun of you as much as he damn well pleases. As in, he could've made a movie
called Fuck You, Pope if he wanted. But since I was recently called a
"callow, superficial, self-obsessed bunny" by one of
Slate
's
readers (I didn't mind the adjectives, but "bunny" kind of hurt), I guess I
should skip the Kevin Smith and Moesha ruminations and get on to the "grown-up"
news (damn, that means I have to skip the Journal feature on the @
symbol!).
After my psychotic outburst of HMO-vitriol, I almost hesitate to comment on
your remark about Christopher H. Smith, because regarding the deal that was
worked out to impose "anti-abortion" restrictions on international Third World
family planning aid programs as a condition of paying our long-overdue U.N.
debt, I'm on the verge of spinning out into berzerker mode again. Look, its a
free country (OK, so actually, its a really expensive and not to mention
debt-ridden country, but I digress), and people can believe what they want. But
while I respect the Right of Iowa Gun-Lobbyists and Southern Fundamentalists
Not To Respect a Woman's Right To Choose, when it comes to global
overpopulation, it's not a matter of some domestic political disagreement, for
Christ's sake, you're talking about the whole world.
The same goes for (speaking of Catholics) all the medieval doctrinists in
the Vatican who seem bent on imposing a third-world fertility program on every
underdeveloped and uneducated native populace under heaven. As a genuine
honest-to-goodness Son of a Preacher Man, I feel qualified to say that I don't
think Jesus is standing at the gates of Paradise shouting down "Send More Dead
Babies!" As Christopher Hitchens pointed out simply and clearly in his great
(and much-hated, and banned) book (and film, too, though I haven't seen it) on
Mother Theresa, it's one thing to say you have this long-standing religious
belief and tradition and you want to stick to it out of devotion to your faith,
but when you are not only a) blindly encouraging poverty-stricken masses to
breed like rabbits, but also b) actively stopping, I mean, going out of your
way to directly oppose, the efforts of those courageous souls who are trying to
make sure those people can get a handful or two of grain and maybe a few ounces
of clean water to wash the parasites out of their underwear every day. Then
it's no longer a question of how Every Little Baby Is a Miracle Straight From
God. And if your spiritual traditions can't handle such an obvious fact (note:
not religious opinion, but science fact, like as in, you know, math), then you
must be stopped. And, yeah, that goes for the pope, too.
And I eagerly await your thoughts on the string theory article. I'm not
sure, but I worry that it may conflict with the biblical account of
Genesis.
I love you, too, Merrill,
Todd
