Reply #22: Yeah, I'll raise a cogent argument. RUN YOUR OWN GOD DAMN LIFE....

[Warren DeMontague]

Don't tell other people how to run theirs. Hate kids? Don't want kids? Want to be one of the gleefully self-righteous "childfree" who rolls their eyes at the mom or dad trying to get the stroller up over the sidewalk curb? Good for you. Here's a clove cigarette and a beret that matches your soul patch.

But this bullshit about "don't reproduce- for the environment".. I'm sorry, maybe it's a hopelessly anthropomorphic point of view, but the reason I WANT there to be an environment is so that our descendants have a planet to live on. And you know what? Hand-wringing about how awful everything is aside, life for most humans right now is a fuckload better than it was 30,000 years ago. 3,000 years ago. 300 years ago. I realize the move-into-a-yurt crowd likes nothing better than to flagellate themselves over evil technological planet-destroying inventions like indoor plumbing, but the same science that gave us the internal combustion technology which we now need to move beyond also has given us the ability to feed billions more people than we would have been able to even decades ago. Yes, we have some problems, and overpopulation is one of them. But, as no one who posts these bullshit threads ever wants to acknowledge, the overpopulation is NOT taking place in The United States, Japan, Europe or other advanced nations.. advanced nations where birth control is (for the time being here, although the GOP would change that) legal and more or less available, the standard of living is relatively high, people are fairly well educated and there is a degree of independence from control-minded, backwards-ass religious "authorities" who have nothing better to do than micro-manage and moralize about the most personal, intimate decisions people make in their own lives. (hmmmm... remind you of anyone?)

...Get it? In places where there is a decent standard of living, education and birth control are available, and people are FREE to make their own decisions, they reduce birth rates ON THEIR OWN. With no help from hectoring, bitchy, self-righteous, snotty "childfree" types who are mad because they got stuck on the red-eye from JFK with a crying baby.

Having kids is, for many of us, the most meaningful thing that we've done in our lives. FAR AND AWAY. Can't understand that? Don't understand that? Don't want to understand that? Fine. But I can't think of a more useless, much less pointedly fucking obnoxious activity than to sit around getting snotty and self-righteous about it, bitching about it, and hectoring people for it. It's like meat eating... even more so, because while there may have been periods in history when our ancestors were strictly vegetarian, they ALWAYS reproduced. So- sorry! It's a behavior that's not going away.

Get over it, already.