In the San Francisco Chronicle, the mother of three children writes an op-ed about the hostility she gets from people in the San Francisco Bay Area because of her “over-large” family: three children!
My favorite story is this one: When I was getting physical therapy when I was six months pregnant (after falling and breaking my wrist), the therapist asked me whether I was pregnant with my first child (she had already told me that she had one child and planned to have only one). When I said, no, this was actually my third child, she immediately asked me whether I was going to have my tubes tied after the birth.
After my baby was born, the hostile looks and mutterings continued. While I was waiting in line for coffee one day with the kids in tow, one woman offered to me that she thought three children constituted a big family. When I told her it really isn’t considered a large family in many other parts of the country, including the Midwest town I had recently moved from, she asked me with disdain, “Where was that, a religious community?” Then there was the woman who said to me as she pushed by my stroller, “Three? Don’t you think you have enough?” It’s not like I was asking her to contribute to their college fund! I was just taking my kids to the bathroom.
She also relates that at the Berkley Bowl, which I guess is a kind of farmer’s market in ultra-liberal Berkley, Calif., where “Volvos are plastered with bumper stickers that say ‘Wage peace,’” she experiences the angriest, rudest people with no patience who think the rules of the road don’t apply to them. Angry Lefties? Sounds familiar.
And that characterizes most liberals I encounter. They’re not satisfied with changing their own lives to suit their vision, but they must impose that on others. They love to meddle in other people’s lives, tell them how to live. Hence, the Nanny State that bans smoking because we’re too dumb to make that choice, and provides all our health care because we’re too incompetent to get our own, and on and on.
Yet their disdain for so-called “breeders”—the term itself is dehumanizing and offensive—goes a step further. The sight of a child offends them, because it convicts them. It is testimony to their own selfish, empty lives filled with material things, but empty of what matters most. What person could look at their child and say, “I wish you’d never been born”? What person thinks that they would rather have a bigger house or a bigger TV than their youngest child? What depravity must lurk in you to descend to that depth.
Can you imagine walking up to a stranger in a store and telling her that she’s had too many kids? These are the same people, by the way, who will fight you tooth and nail to claim that a woman has a right to choose. Choose what? Evidently, they don’t have the right to choose life. In their minds, there is only one choice, which isn’t a choice at all, and that’s abortion.
The columnist in the linked article goes on to relate that in the Bay Area, where there almost uniformity of ideological thought, the idea that even a single conservative columnist is allowed to express herself drives them to foaming-mouth madness. She relates that in overwhelmingly white, liberal neighborhoods, the residents say they don’t need a diverse commuity—i.e. minorities—because their liberalism is so pure.
It’s just all so hypocritical. And it’s not confined to the Bay Area. Some areas of Boston can be just as bad.
