A vast number of forces were at work when Teddy Roosevelt penned the following excerpts from a paper he wrote in 1911. Social Darwinism was rampant, as was Neo-Malthusianism (the modern eugenics movement); and the modern Birth Control movement was well on its way to social prominence (all of these having their quasi-religious proponents, who were willing to slice and dice the Bible in a manner that would yield arguments favorable to their respective cause). Far from a neutral observer (or religiously orthodox for that matter), the former President Roosevelt unsurprisingly had strong words for a country, and its countrymen (and women) for whom he had fought and served for his entire life. His message? Willful sterility in marriage is a “cardinal sin”…
I though it was quite an interesting social commentary.
What do you think?
‘BH
“The American stock is being cursed with the curse of sterility, and it is earning the curse, because the sterility is willful. It is due to moral, and not physiological, shortcomings. It is due to coldness, to selfishness, to love of ease, to shrinking from risk, to an utter and pitiful failure in sense of perspective and in power of weighing what really makes the highest joy, and to a rooting out of the sense of duty or a twisting of that sense into improper channels…
…Our forefathers were the heroes of the tremendous epic that tells of the conquest of a continent. The conquerors, the men who dared and did, with hearts of steel and thews [sinews] of iron, looked fearlessly into the eyes of the future, and quailed before no task and no danger; are their sons and daughters, in love of effortless ease and fear of all work and risk, to let the blood of the pioneers die out of the land because they shrink from the most elemental duties of manhood and womanhood?…
Many willfully sterile people actually regard themselves as good citizens, and even look down on what they stigmatize as “vice.” But in reality, willful sterility inevitably produces and accentuates every hideous form of vice. Nor is this all. It is itself worse, more debasing, more destructive, than ordinary vice. Every decent citizen must abhor vice; I rank celibate profligacy as not one whit better than polygamy; yet after all, such vice may be compatible with a nation’s continuing to live; and while there is life, even a life marred by wrong practices, there is chance of reform. But the cardinal sin of willful sterility in marriage means death; and for the dead there is no reform…
…In the partnership of man and woman, the woman risks most, and for that reason we should hold in peculiar abhorrence the man who fails to realize this and to be gentle and tender and loyal in his dealings with her. The birth pangs make all men the debtors of all women; and those men have indeed touched the lowest abyss of brutality and depravity who do not recognize something holy in the names of wife and mother. No man, not even the soldier who does his duty, stands quite on the level with the wife and mother who has done her duty.” - Theodore Roosevelt, “Race Decadence,” The Outlook, April 8, 1911.
As was noted in the article, there was an observable rise in the number RU486 abortions in the past few years. What was not documented is the rise in the use of abortifacient contraception techniques, such as Plan B and other over-the-counter birth control pills. Such drugs kill countless tiny human embryos, which never make the statistics because they have been redefined as something other than human; and their death something other than abortion, namely, contraception…
Did you know that W.A. Criswell (two term SBC President) was 
“For Luther, writing in his 1521 treatise on The Estate of Marriage, God’s words in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” represented more than a blessing; even more than a command; they were rather “a divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.” Addressing the celibate Teutonic Knights, the Reformer also emphasized Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper who shall be with him.” Setting himself squarely against the Papacy and the Church Councils here, Luther declared: “[w]hoever would be a true Christian must grant that this saying of God is true, and believe that God was not drunk when he spoke these words and instituted marriage.” Except among those rare persons—“not more than one in a thousand” Luther said at one point—who received true celibacy as a special gift from God, marriage and procreation were divinely ordained. As he wrote: “For it is not a matter of free choice or decision but a natural and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.”
