The Obama Science Czar: Global Warming Justifies Eugenics

The Christian Science Monitor opined in late November 2008 that “Obama has pledged to ‘restore integrity’ to US science policy by making decisions informed by the best available evidence.”  They concluded that, “With Obama receiving so much input from so many sources, the next White House science adviser will best serve as his ‘options czar.’ He or she should sift through the blizzard of data and ensure that the president has before him viable choices based on sound science.”

This “integrity” is why the myth of global warming now threatens America’s economic stability with the potential tax burdens of cap & trade legislation.  And this is apparently why, at least in part, President Obama recently appointed John Holdren to be his “science czar”, formally known as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

That’s a huge title for someone who has built his career on the idea that “less is more”.  The choice of John Holdren also explains, in part, the President’s recent “health care reform townhall” remarks about the needless expense of end-of-life care, as well as his stance on things like abortion and stem cell research.  But let Professor Holdren tell us, in his own words, one answer he proposed back in 1977 to the “dangerous human disruption of the global climate” – population control.  Among the techniques suggested were:

• All illegitimate babies [must] be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors
• Single mother … obliged to go through adoption proceedings
• Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples
• Require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions
• Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods
• Sterilizing women after their second or third child
• Long-term sterilizing capsule … implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission

The discourse used to justify actually attempting to implement all this is what I can only call self-servingly twisted:

“To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated. For example, under the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

“It is accepted that the law has as its proper function the protection of each person and each group of people. A legal restriction on the right to have more than a given number of children could easily be based on the needs of the first children. Studies have indicated that the larger the family, the less healthy the children are likely to be and the less likely they are to realize their potential levels of achievement. Certainly there is no question that children of a small family can be cared for better and can be educated better than children of a large family, income and other things being equal. The law could properly say to a mother that, in order to protect the children she already has, she could have no more. (Presumably, regulations on the sizes of adopted families would have to be the same.)

“A legal restriction on the right to have children could also be based on the right not to be disadvantaged by excessive numbers of children produced by others. Differing rates of reproduction among groups can give rise to serious social problems. For example, differential rates of reproduction between ethnic, racial, religious, or economic groups might result in increased competition for resources and political power and thereby undermine social order. If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.

“Individual rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction. Some people—respected legislators, judges, and lawyers included—have viewed the right to have children as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce. Nor does the UN Charter describe such a right, although a resolution of the United Nations affirms the “right responsibly to choose” the number and spacing of children (our emphasis). In the United States, individuals have a constitutional right to privacy and it has been held that the right to privacy includes the right to choose whether or not to have children, at least to the extent that a woman has a right to choose not to have children. But the right is not unlimited. Where the society has a “compelling, subordinating interest” in regulating population size, the right of the individual may be curtailed. If society’s survival depended on having more children, women could he required to bear children, just as men can constitutionally be required to serve in the armed forces. Similarly, given a crisis caused by overpopulation, reasonably necessary laws to control excessive reproduction could be enacted.

“It is often argued that the right to have children is so personal that the government should not regulate it. In an ideal society, no doubt the state should leave family size and composition solely to the desires of the parents. In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

“Toward a Planetary Regime

“Should a Law of the Sea be successfully established, it could serve as a model for a future Law of the Atmosphere to regulate the use of airspace, to monitor climate change, and to control atmospheric pollution. Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus, the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and the oceans but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime should have some power to enforce the agreed limits. As with the Law of the Sea an other international agreements, all agreements for regulating population sizes, resource development, and pollution should be subject to revision and modification in accordance with changing conditions.

“The Planetary Regime might have the advantage over earlier proposed world government schemes in not being primarily political in its emphasis—even though politics would inevitably be a part of all discussions, implicitly or explicitly. Since most of the areas the Regime would control are not now being regulated or controlled by nations or anyone else, establishment of the Regime would involve far less surrendering of national power. Nevertheless it might function powerfully to suppress international conflict simply because the interrelated global resource-environment structure would not permit such an outdated luxury.

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

This reads like a bad B movie, but is directly from the book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, co-authored by Holdren with Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich (source:  zombietime).  It seems to tie together current events:  the stampede for governmental control of the free market, cap & trade, socialized medicine, support of dictatorships and wannabe-dictators.  It brings to mind the U.N.’s “Millenium Goals” and the ideology of transnationalism that now resides in American government in the form of Harold Koh, legal advisor to the State Department.

It is said that a man is judged by the company he keeps.  I simply can’t imagine that the majority of Americans would make the same choices as Barack Obama.  Terrorists like William Ayers, flaming racists like the Reverend Wright; and now appointments to his “inner circle” of advisors that include those who would support the elimination of U.S. sovereignty and would support the use of eugenics.