IDS Column: It’s a vagina, not a clown car

“TLC” has stood for many different things.

In the ’90s, it meant female hip-hop with condom wrappers used as fashion statements. For 50-year-old women baking pies, it means tender loving care. What we’re focusing on today is its other meaning: The Learning Channel, or as it should be called now, “Woah, Look At That Weird Family Channel.”

What once contained programming only a home-schooled kid could love has now become a circus of strange family setups. The tent pole of this carnival is the Duggars. Like some twisted Dr. Seuss book, the Duggars have 18 children.

That is not a typo. We’re biologically driven to make sure our genetic code carries on, but here we’re looking at insect-brood numbers of offspring.

Part of the Quiver Movement, which celebrates having families big enough to play full baseball games, the Duggars raise the question of when it’s appropriate to forcibly remove a person’s reproductive organs. It’s hard not to sound insensitive, as the reason for their multitude of moppets is faith-related, but at what point is a person’s right to practice their religious beliefs overridden by common sense?

I don’t want to physically stop these people, but someone needs to sit the Quiver families down for a nice chat. Dr. Phil, why aren’t you on this?

Michelle Duggar home-schools her kids, somehow teaching 7-year-olds as well as 17-year-olds. The quality of their education is doubtful, as even trained teachers can’t give adequate attention to every student in the classroom.

There’s only so much time two people can share with their kids. If the Duggars don’t sleep, that gives each kid a maximum of 80 minutes a day to be alone with their parents.

If nothing, the law of averages guarantees that one child in a huge family will be emotionally messed-up or at least develop an affection for music by Marilyn Manson.
“Octomom” became famous earlier this year when the single mother became pregnant with eight children in addition to the six she already had. While she became generally reviled in the media, she still became a media focus and developed her own reality show.

Any rational person would observe these related stories and learn from it, but there are unbalanced people who will look at these events and think that’s their ticket to becoming famous.

I can only imagine what the next eccentric family setup will be. Cannibals who eat one of their kids every year? A pastor and his demonically possessed family? How about “Brother, Brotha,” a show about minority kids with different dads?

It’s hard to champion a giant family like this. It’s offspring gluttony, as our world is already overpopulated. England has started to run out of places to bury bodies, and some American women are turning their ovaries into Sam’s Clubs.

China might be onto something with their one-child policy, which has reduced population growth by 300 million people in the past two decades. Well, except for that trend of abandonment happening with female infants.

We’re having trouble not screwing up kids with one or two siblings. Maybe President Obama can stimulate our medical economy by giving tax breaks on vasectomies.

Originally published in The Indiana Daily Student on August 24th, 2009