In his homily of January 22, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said the following:

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral – the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called – is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

If you ever had any doubts about the truth of this statement you need look no farther than today’s Washington Post where a creature called Lisa Miller writing in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” feature titled Romney and Santorum and Archaic Ideas of Fertility comes to the conclusion that the large families of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum show that they want to keep women barefoot and pregnant:

There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Especially worrisome is the inevitable corollary to that belief: Women should put their natural fertility first — before their brains, before their ability to earn a living, before their independence — because that’s what God wants.

Smug fecundity…biblical patriarchs…inevitable corollary. The only thing missing are the scare quotes.

Whether or not one has children is obviously a very personal decision. Some, like Miller, believe, as did Margaret Sanger in the 1930s and Planned Parenthood today, that too many of the wrong type of people are having too many babies.

If Miller wants to find smugness she need travel no farther than the nearest mirror.

Through our groveling at the altar of the god Tolerance for 50 years we have allowed the near destruction of the nuclear family in America. Normal is killing children in utero. Normal is legalized euthanasia. Normal is creating embryos for spare parts. Normal is “twin reduction.” Normal is sending your parents off to a nursing home on Medicaid. Not satisfied with those successes, Miller and her God are now attacking people who have the temerity to have the number of children they wish to have.

What she seems to miss is that, contrary to what she is doing, no one is telling her that her decision to have a child makes her a leech on society because this decreases the tax base during her dotage and will inevitably result in her becoming a ward of the state when she is unable to care for herself.

No one is telling her that her failure to have at least 2.1 children means that Social Security and Medicare become more endangered.

No one would tell her that because it isn’t our business and, quite honestly, getting Miller’s residual DNA out of the gene pool sooner rather than later is a manifestly good thing.

She, on the other hand, is telling everyone else how to live and, peculiarly for a feature called “On Faith”, does so for the most banal of materialistic reasons. Reasons that do not bare any relationship to scientific reality.

Small family size does not provide an indicator of either health or quality of education. There are many, many other factors that go into that equation. Being an only child, in boys, has been associated with violent crminality.

Indeed, one could make a very strong case for saying that large families would create the tax base that, in the Worker’s Paradise dreamed of at the Washington Post, would allow top quality health care and education for free.

While she extolls the benefits of her being able to work, she ignores the fact that extended stays in day care facilities while she pursues her dreams is probably turning her single kid into a sociopath.

The time children spend in day care is associated with negative effects in social development. More hours in day care during a child’s early years is associated with less social competence and cooperation, more problem behaviors, negative mood, aggression, and conflict. Negative effects of day care on social–emotional development persist throughout early childhood and adolescence. Day care is linked with poorer average outcomes when children spend more time in center care, enter day care at an earlier age, or are in lower-quality care.

We have enough of those already, thank you.