Overcoming Indifference: Making the Population Connection in a
Crowded World

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), March 28, 2010, by John Seager, President of Population Connection.

In his 1966 Planned Parenthood acceptance speech Dr. King spoke of “the hard-core bigot as one of our adversaries.” The year before — on what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965 — civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma, Alabama on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, six blocks away. State and local quote lawmen unquote attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. One young marcher, the 26-year-old son of a sharecropper, whose skull was cracked open, was named John Lewis.

Almost exactly forty-five years later that same man, now Congressman John Lewis, had racial epithets hurled at him as he walked to the Capitol building to cast his vote for health care reform one week ago. This was just one part of a wave of hate and violence across the land aimed at elected officials seeking to carry out their constitutional duty to vote.

While debates about the nature and meaning of God, of a supreme being never seem to end, can there be any doubt that evil lives among us?

Evil and bigotry, whether products of nature or nurture or both, thrive in the darkness of ignorance. They feed on a diet of half-truths, misinformation and outright lies. Some of it comes from their fellow fanatics. But much of it is the deliberate product of highly paid hypocrites who profit hugely from their own distortions.

Each of us must work to counter these distortions in his or her own way.

At Population Connection, we are dedicated to two basic notions. In fact, to quote a Virginian, one could say that we hold these truths to be self-evident:

First, that every woman and every couple on this planet should have unfettered access to education, information and affordable family planning services;

And second, that every woman should be fully empowered to decide when, whether, and how many children she wishes to bear, if any. It is, quite simply, her body. It belongs to her - not her father, not her husband, not her priest or minister or rabbi or imam, not her village chieftain and certainly not her Congressperson.

In a world where women have been subjugated for millennia, this basic notion, this declaration, this right - remains revolutionary.

Consider the words of R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: “The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous.”

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said: "An 'unintended pregnancy' could be a wonderful surprise, not planned but welcome. Why should the government be in the business of 'preventing' a surprising but welcome pregnancy?"

A Texas Bishop, John W. Yanta, has denounced contraception as "intrinsically evil" and “a big part of the culture of death."

A Canadian priest, Raymond J. de Souza, opined in National Review that “If children are a sign of hope in the future, Europe — and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and the United States — is losing its will to live.”

And the heinous Ann Coulter, darling of the far-right, said this on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox program about the murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller: “I like to think of it as terminating someone in the 203rd trimester.”

Time after time, O’Reilly himself referred to “Tiller the Baby Killer.”

So what to make of these commentators? Do they share some blame for the murder of Dr. Tiller and others?

The so-called Tea Partiers have now disavowed the slurs and acts of violence of those who yelled the “N” word at Congressman John Lewis, who spat on Emanuel Cleaver, a black congressman from Missouri, and who tossed bricks through windows at congressional offices. I hope the Tea Party people are sincere in their denunciation of hate speech and of acts of violence. For many months, they cultivated a garden of hate - aided and abetted by a covey of right wing radio blabbers.

Yes, these blabbers are buffoons, but they are dangerous buffoons. And we ignore them at our peril.

I urge you to tune into to them. Pay attention. Because millions of your fellow citizens listen to them every day. I worry that the fragmentation of the media allows “hate bubbles” to grow unnoticed, just as the real estate bubble grew and then burst. We simply must pay attention.

Pay attention when Ann Coulter says, as she once did on Fox News: “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'” Several of Coulter’s books have reached #1 on The New York Times bestseller list! The same is true of Bill O’Reilly and others.

So, how do we counter the hard core bigots that Dr. King spoke of?

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it best: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” It’s our job at Population Connection to expose strange, hateful ideas – whatever their source or provenance — to the bright light of reason. And it is yours as well.

While Americans have shown the ability to make smart choices, there are some worrisome facts about our fellow citizens:

• The pollster George Barna found that 12% of Americans believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife;

• According to a poll conducted by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, one American out of five thinks the First Amendment includes the right to own a pet!

• In a February 2009 Gallup poll conducted on the 200^th anniversary of Darwin’s birth only 39% of Americans said they believed in evolution;

Not all ignorance is fanaticism. And not all inertia is borne of ignorance.

Talking about the struggle for equality, Dr. King spoke of a second adversary when he said that “the millions who were blind to our plight had to be compelled to face the social evil their indifference permitted to flourish.”

Today and every day 25,000 children around the world will die needlessly from preventable causes. Most will die from overpopulation. Now their death certificates, if any are issued, will not state that cause of death. The immediate cause of death is most commonly a water-borne pathogen. But look behind the proximate cause, and you’ll see that the vast majority of these deaths are the result of overpopulation.

Every day we add 210,000 people to the earth’s population, every year another 78 million. Virtually all of this growth is in the poorest places on earth. There are more than 200 million women worldwide who want to limit their family size but who cannot afford contraception or who have never even heard of it.

We know what to do. In fact, population growth is the only global challenge for which all of the following three things are true:

1. We know how to fix it;

2. It’s relatively inexpensive;

3. Women everywhere want it.

A big part of the solution involves money, and, relatively speaking, not much of it. For years, Congress and then-President Bush dragged their heels, placing obstacles such as the Global Gag Rule in the way and slashing US funds for family planning.

Times have changed. President Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule. He restored funding for UN family planning. Last year, thanks to President Obama and to a majority in Congress, we saw a 40% increase in funds for international family planning.

According to the Global Health Council, this increase of $180 million will result in:

• 1.6 million fewer unplanned births;

• 1.4 million fewer abortions

• 110,000 fewer Infant deaths

And it will save the lives of more than 6000 mothers – enabling them to help take care of their families and, hopefully, to live productive lives.

And that’s all in a single year. And all for about 60 cents per year for each person in the US.

So, money matters. And it really is the first priority. But it takes more than money. Dr. King said there is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted. His remarks are as relevant today as they were then. Here in the US more than 10% of all births are unwanted. I don’t mean merely unplanned. About a third of all births are unplanned but in 10% of all births the children are actually unwanted. That’s more than 400,000 unwanted children born in the US every single year.

Some years ago, we held a roundtable with recent teen mothers. During the session we asked them why they had gotten pregnant and had their children. Of course being a good family planning organization, we wanted to hear all about lack of access to contraception. But, sometimes people don't give you the answers you want to hear. What they said was that it was all about love, about wanting to be loved and about wanting to be the most important person in someone’s life.

I don’t quite know how you get the Congress to appropriate love and caring, I’m not even sure there is a committee in charge of it, actually. I guess it must fall to what is known in Congress as the committee of the whole, that is, to all of us.

Love means remembering those who have fallen victim to hate from Dr. King to Bobby Kennedy to Dr. Tiller. Love means speaking out vigorously and forcefully against hate and its merchandisers. Love also means paying the bills. It means funding the things that need to be funded. And it means taking 15 minutes or so each month out of a busy schedule to let your legislators know what you want them to do. Go to our website or join our Facebook Fan page. It’s free and makes taking action easy. A lot easier than it was when John Lewis tried to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge on that Bloody Sunday in 1965.

Just one month after Dr. King received the Margaret Sanger award in 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy journeyed into the cruel heart of apartheid. In his Affirmation Day speech at the University of Capetown, South Africa, Robert F. Kennedy proclaimed that: “Each time a man (or a woman) stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he/she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

And what does this have to do with population? Professor Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University got it exactly right when he said:

“The real issue with population is not just numbers of people, although numbers matter and statistics give us quantitative insight and prevent us from making fools of ourselves. The real crux of the population question is the quality of people’s lives; the ability of people to participate in what it means to be really human; to work, play and die with dignity; to have some sense that one’s life has meaning and is connected with other people’s lives. That, to me, is the essence of the population problem.”

Thank you.