The Return of the Child Catcher of Vulgaria
Why Christian Homeschool Families Are Being Targeted for Public Censure
by Douglas W. Phillips, Esq., April 23, 2009
Aha! They are here somewhere, I can feel it in my bones. There are children here, somewhere. This nose of mine has never failed me. And if there are children here my friend, you will die. . . . ha, ha, ha, ha!
I remember the first time I heard these words as a little boy. They came from one of the creepiest bad-guys ever to grace the silver screen — the famous Child Catcher of Vulgaria from the family classic, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Vulgaria was a land for the self-indulgent. It was a place where adults could freely roam, unencumbered by the annoyance and burden of children. The leaders of Vulgaria had grown so comfortable in their anti-child policies that the very sight of children — the very mention of them — could incite furor, rage, and terror with the governing elite.
That is why the Child Catcher was such an important figure in their society. With his net, hook, crooked black hat, odd funeral clothing, and protruding snozzola, he was the stuff of nightmares. As the principal henchman of the corpulent monarch Baron Bomburst, the pale and spindly child catcher had one simple mission — to locate and expose excess children lurking in the country.
Thankfully, you and I will never have to meet such a character. Right?
“There Are Children Here Somewhere”
Welcome to the newly-formed “United States of Vulgaria.” All are welcome — except Christian, homeschool families with a “quiverfull” of children. Here politicians seek to fix their runaway spending policies by banning babies; television personalities gasp at the sight of “too many” children; and journalists target fruitful mothers for public ridicule and censure.
The most dangerous people in the U.S.V. are Christian parents who talk about children as “blessings” and seek a quiverfull of them. These parents are scary — very, very scary. (The word on the street is that such individuals are part of a racist, fundamentalist conspiracy.) Of course, the most dangerous segment of this growing pro-baby conspiracy are Christian ministries that encourage families to embrace the gift of life as a means of subjugating women to a state of practical slavery.
Of course, the elite leaders of the U.S.V. are not opposed to religion — just as long as it is a politically-acceptable religion. They often remind us that they themselves are people of faith. Their god is a man called Darwin. He taught them that the strong should survive and the weak die out.
These new Vulgarians also have patron saints. Thomas Malthus and Margaret Sanger are two of them. They taught the people of the U.S.V. about the many problems associated with too many children (especially the “wrong kind of children”) and the many scientific and political techniques which are efficient at making the problem go away.
It’s a strange new twist on the old story from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but it’s not as far from reality as you might think.
Since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the enemies of the Christian family have been launching their own quiver of arrows and pointing them at children.
They sound like Vulgarians.
Attack of the Vulgarian Child Catchers
During President Barack Obama’s first week in office, he pledged millions of dollars to fund the murder of children through abortions worldwide. On March 9, he signed the Stem Cell Executive Order that authorizes researchers to vivisect living human embryos for scientific experimentation. During the signing ceremony, he told the American people that that he was “a person of faith” and that it was his desire to “ease human suffering” which motivated him to legalize these life-taking human experiments.
The week of Obama’s inauguration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi boldly advanced the idea that, in order to stimulate the economy, mothers should have fewer babies. Pelosi defended her plan to make tax-payer subsidized child prevention an important part of the $825 billion economic stimulus package, explaining that “contraception will reduce the cost to the states and to the federal government ... no apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.”
Sometimes, the anti-family, anti-child spirit of the age takes the form of open ridicule for Christian parents and fruitful mothers, like the obvious scowls and look of consternation coming from Barbara Walters during a recent television interview with Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, Christian homeschool parents to eighteen natural born children. It was as if Walters was summoning up all her strength just to resist the temptation to say” — All of these children! What is the matter with you people? Ick!”
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The bottom line is that the spiritual children of Margaret Sanger are in charge. They know it, and they are gloating. Now they have turned their fury against Christian home educators who desire children for the glory of God — and Vision Forum Ministries in particular.
“And the Award Goes to...”
But the winner of the “2009 Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award” goes to Kathryn Joyce and Beacon Press for a little book which sets new standards in tabloid journalism entitled Quiverfull:Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
In the world of Kathryn Joyce, scientists and professional demographers who warn about the serious consequence of an imminent birth dearth are really bigots with an agenda to perpetuate white Christian babies; prolific Christian homeschool mothers and their daughters are mindless doormats to domineering patriarchs; and Christian ministries like Vision Forum with a pro-family theology are dangerous subversives that threaten the modern culture of reproductive freedom, women’s liberation, and abortion on demand.
The first mission of the book is to warn the radical left about America’s real threat — pregnant mothers who quote Psalm 127 and submit to their husbands. The second mission is to paint certain ministries and Christian parents as intolerant racists with a penchant for spousal abuse, and other even more unconscionable crimes (Message to Barack Hussein Obama: “Fearless Leader — forget, the fundamentalists in Iraq; these prolific Christians are the real bad guys!”) The idea here is to throw blood into the water and whoop the press sharks into a feeding frenzy.
Joyce aims her arrows at individuals ranging from John MacArthur and James Dobson to Michael and Vicki Farris, but her principal darts are for yours truly and Vision Forum. Her un-footnoted work draws from the bizarre and inflammatory testimonies of a former homeschool mom turned lesbian-feminist activist; from a disgruntled excommunicant with an exposure “ministry” whose personal behavior led her to be criminally cited, cuffed by police, and ultimately lose custody of her children; to pseudononymous individuals operating anti-pastor hate sites. These “reliable” sources help Joyce to present a case that some “quiverfull” families are made up of fathers who abuse their wives, enslave their daughters, or worse. (Frankly, some of the other charges and insinuations are too repulsive to mention.)
Not surprisingly, Joyce’s book is full of numerous half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods. She not only plays fast and loose with the facts concerning the work of Vision Forum and other pro-family organizations, but (in a separate article) she seeks to soft-pedal Margaret Sanger’s radical eugenic philosophy — rooted in Darwinian theory — that compelled her to found Planned Parenthood in order to “weed out” inferior races and other weaker members of society that Sanger thought should no longer be allowed to procreate.
None of this should surprise us, because Beacon Press, Joyce’s publisher, is well-known as a purveyor of ultra-radical, pro-homosexual, feminist, anti-Christian propaganda, including such books as: The Female Man; Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions; and Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality as well as other titles too vile to name.
But to really understand the genesis of Joyce’s obsessive passion to debunk patriarchy and prolific parenting, one needs to understand her philosophical origins. Joyce was personally mentored and trained to become a cultural revolutionary by one of the most significant radical feminists of the 20th century, Ellen Willis. Joyce and Willis were both at NYU, where Joyce was a student and Willis served as head of NYU’s Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism. A founder of the ultra-fringe Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Willis would later state that “Redstockings’ dominant political tendency was a kind of neo-Maoist materialism” and that her personal politics were a “blend of cultural radicalism, populism, and Marxism.”
Like the book that Joyce has just authored, Willis’ mission was to destroy biblical patriarchy and the Christian family. “In my view,” Willis wrote, “radical feminism did exactly what its opponents accuse it of: it played a key role in subverting traditional values and destabilizing the family...” She expressed her hope that the debate over marriage would result in “an implicit revolt against the institution of marriage into the very heart, further promoting the democratization and secularization of personal and sexual life.”
Predictably, feminist leaders and “child catchers” of many stripes have rallied to Joyce’s side. Gloria Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood, praised her book, noting that those who embrace Psalm 127 “twist religion” to leave “women barefoot, pregnant, and powerless.” Barbara Ehrenreich, a radical, pro-marxist feminist who writes for the New York Times, also endorsed it, stating that the Quiverfull movement seeks to “reduce women to the status of slave breeders.” Other endorsers of Joyce’s book refer to the rising number of couples who embrace the blessing of children as “disturbing” and “terrifying.”
Lest you think that books from pro-homosexual publishing houses like Beacon are being ignored in the Christian press, none other than Christianity Today offered a positive review of Quiverfull, after recently publishing an absurdly favorable puff piece on the radical pro-homosexual film, Milk. The fact that both of these revisionist histories were advanced by individuals and organizations who thrive on viciousness to Christianity and God’s Word mattered not to the editors of Christianity Today. The point is this: Homeschool parents who seek the blessing of many children need to be prepared for the very real possibility that, in the years to come, the key segments in the increasingly-liberalized evangelical world may look more favorably on the anti-family movement than the pro-family movement.
As to Joyce, she is riding a wave — the wave of anti-family sentiment accompanying the most liberal political administration in history. But she is doing more than this. She is preparing the liberal media elite to target for widespread censure and persecution those men, women, and ministries committed to historical Christian notions of male leadership, biblical femininity, and the importance that parents “be fruitful and multiply.”
Joyce writes that those who have a “quiverfull” of children are part of a “movement we ignore at our peril.” In sum, prolific moms are dangerous! Parents with too many children are the great threat to society! Something must be done! The spirit of disdain toward children that characterized the fictional world of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is among us. The Child Catcher of Vulgaria has returned. And the “arrows in the war” (Joyce’s term) are pointed at us.
The apple does not fall far from the tree. Joyce and her ilk may sanitize their presentation, but she and the anti-patriarchy movement she hopes to advance are the true spiritual progeny of the founding mothers of some of the most vicious, life-destroying branches of radical feminism — whether that is Joyce’s hero, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger; or her mentor, Redstockings’ founder, Ellen Willis.
Conclusion
... all they that hate me love death. (Proverbs 8:36)
Christianity is inherently pro-life. Feminism of all stripes is implicitly anti-life. That is one reason why the dark, anti-family mockery coming from feminists sounds increasingly like the rantings of the Child Catcher of Vulgaria.
Within Christianity, the single most pro-life group is the homeschool community. The Christian
homeschool movement is a work of God made up of diverse individuals, many of whom share certain basic commitments about the Bible, the family, the role of men and women, godly education, and the preciousness of life. For many of these families, the same spiritual revival which led them to turn their hearts to Christ, and then to their children, has also given them a
biblical desire to reject a selfish, feminist vision of life by returning to principles of biblical manhood and womanhood.
One of the most beautiful distinctives of Christian home educators with a commitment to
these biblical principles of patriarchy is the high regard they share for the blessing of the fruit of the womb. This is why you can attend homeschool conferences from Florida to Washington and meet thousands of families — small families, medium-size families and large families — that deeply love children. You can find families that are “white”, “yellow”, “brown”, and “black.” One of the most notable distinctives of this special work of God is the growing number of families adopting children of diverse melanin count and ethnic background. There is a reason for this — these families love life, they love children — lots of children, and all different types of children.
It is precisely this self-conscious commitment to life that threatens feminists. And that is why modern child catchers have aimed their poisoned pens at home educators, proponents of biblical patriarchy, and those parents who desire many children for the glory of God.
With Barack Obama as President, we should expect the roar of anti-child rhetoric to continue.
This means that pro-child families will increasingly be targeted for censure and ridicule. Feminists and liberal radicals of many stripes (including some who profess to be Christian, evangelical and even home educators) will join in the hate-fest. They will likely continue their efforts to marginalize faithful Christian parents by claiming victim status (as the opponents of Christianity have always done through the use of caricature, fear-mongering, and false witness). While Christians need to be aware of these tactics, they need never fear the rantings of the Sanballats and Tobiahs of the world.
The emerging “United States of Vulgaria” may not succeed in all of its anti-child aims, yet we must be ever on guard and vigilant in defending the preciousness of life. And — while the world may scoff at fruitfulness — we must continue to glory in the blessing of children as precious gifts of the Lord. In the end, life trumps death; hope trumps selfishness; and multi-generational thinking trumps radical individualism.
Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. (Psalm 127:3-5)