Finneran: The Nutty Professor

Friday, November 06, 2015

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Sarah Conly, photo courtesy of Bowdoin College

Just another day, just another tyrant here in the land beyond Oz. Our brute dictator of the hour comes from the academy. No great surprise there.

She’s an Associate Professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and she’s nuts. Dangerously so. Her name is Sarah Conly. I pity her students at Bowdoin. Hopefully they will survive the torture and indoctrination segments of her class.

Perhaps because she is nuts the Globe gave her ample editorial space to spread her doomsday message of a looming end-of-days for Planet Earth………..unless of course we embrace the gentle touch of government agents enforcing a strict limit of one child per couple here in America and around the world.
The background story here is China’s recent decision to lift its vicious restriction on Chinese couples having more than one child, a policy both brutish and barbaric in concept and in execution.

While acknowledging the shortcomings of a regime rule that violates any meaningful concept of human dignity and freedom, a rule that resulted in millions of forced abortions and mandatory sterilizations, our professor praises the worthiness of the goal as “the environmentally right thing” to do. Come, let us worship the slugs and the snails, come let us condemn the human race. It is simply the right thing.

The professor has strange ideas about what should be “allowed” by our masters. I have a countervailing idea—leave us alone. We are quite capable of ordering our own lives in our own ways and we do not need our presumptuous betters in the academy or in government telling us what is to be “allowed."

Perhaps the professor has an exciting new bureaucracy in mind---a modern version of the Registry of Motor Vehicles where couples can go to get their Learner’s Permits for having a baby. The professor sees a need for state approval of this most human desire as well as a need to punish those who do not conform to her wishes. Will the walls of her Registry of Allowed Babies be painted in pastel hues or simply plastered with “VERBOTEN” posters? Stay tuned for more details as the always creative culture of death rests quite comfortably in the faculty lounges of America.

The professor should read a) the Declaration of Independence, b) the Constitution, and c) Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb”. The first two documents charter the proper order of things, elevating each person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and subordinating government’s ability to dictate our lives according to the whims of overbearing bureaucrats. It’s bad enough that our light bulbs and toilets are now regulated under the guise of national security and environmental protection. Heaven forbid that government agents should soon invite themselves into our bedrooms in order to approve certain activities.

Regarding Paul Ehrlich’s rave publication of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I must confess that I undertook a diligent read of his apocalyptic book. Professor Ehrlich foresaw total depletion of natural resources, of carbon fuels, of potable water, and of basic food supplies, all leading to massive global starvation. It was a dramatic prediction, based on “settled science” which has been proven dramatically wrong over the past fifty years. Question: do these learned professors ever announce that they were wrong? Do they go back and examine their assumptions, almost always negative, about the genius and creativity of the human race? At least in sports, we get to examine the box score which tells us the performers from the non-performers. Can we get box scores on the academics who wish to re-order our lives?

As was the case with Professor Ehrlich, Professor Conly foresees devastating harm on the horizon—climate change, overcrowding, resource wars, etc. Her sense of this “devastating harm”, quite subjective to be sure, apparently extinguishes your right to have a child. Behold the tyrant and her decree---you have no moral right to have more than one child.

Needless to say, this ideological daughter of Stalin takes on those religions that oppose methods of birth control, equating those quaint beliefs as the equivalent of human sacrifice and thus to be outlawed. The irony here is staggering, even for an academic---having brandished her morality by decrying human sacrifice, she goes on to endow government and government agents with the power to exterminate human life.

Put me down as being in need of Professor Conly’s re-education camps. You see I put babies above bugs.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.