Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  In America, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and early proponent of “positive eugenics,” also cited Darwinism to promote her “religion of birth control.” She believed the theory of evolution provided grounds for eliminating the “unfit.” In her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, she advocated the elimination of “weeds … over-running the human garden”; the segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted”; and the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.” She was not oblique in identifying the “weeds” of humanity. In a 1939 manifesto titled “Birth Control and the Negro,” she noted that “the poorer areas, particularly in the South … are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations.” Sanger recommended birth control to lessen the financial burden of caring for such weeds, “destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation.” Undoubtedly, she would be delighted to know that today (1) Planned Parenthood is the leading provider of abortions in the United States, and (2) about 36 percent of our aborted babies are black, almost three times their percentage in the American population. Mission accomplished, Margaret!

  Hitler’s embrace of Darwinism is not a random fact, unrelated to the reason we know his name. It is impossible to understand Hitler’s monstrous views apart from his belief in natural selection applied to races. He believed Darwin’s theory of natural selection showed that “science” justified the extermination of the Jews.

  In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:

  [E]veryone who believes in the higher evolution of living organisms must admit that every manifestation of the vital urge and struggle to live must have had a definite beginning in time and that one subject alone must have manifested it for the first time. It was then repeated again and again; and the practice of it spread over a widening area, until finally it passed into the subconscious of every member of the species, where it manifested itself as “instinct.”

  Hitler said that the “general evolution of things” had indeed “placed the best in the position that it had merited.” I guess when you’re the dictator, a theory that says the fittest always rise to the top is easy to believe. In Mein Kampf Hitler explained that the races have higher and lower values and that his goal was “to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker.” This, he said, was in accordance with “the eternal will that rules this universe.”

  The Nazis were constantly producing charts to demonstrate how Germany’s population was declining, especially compared with the rest of the world. Hitler offered all kinds of monetary awards, Hero Mother medals, and other blandishments as incentives to increase the “Aryan” population. Once the war began, those with large families were promised land in the colonies. But not just any Germans were encouraged to thrive. A big theme of the Nazis—demonstrated in charts, posters, pictures, and even newsreels and movies—was that too much money was being squandered on keeping “idiots” and mental defectives like princes in ivory towers, while healthy, hardworking Germans were starving on the streets.

  This is why Hitler hated Christianity: It filled people’s heads with silly, sentimental notions about helping the weak and infirm. Like Dawkins and Dennett, Hitler believed that the “heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.” He rejected the idea of an ethical idea existing “if this idea is a danger for the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethics.” Hitler denounced Christian charity as Jewish propaganda designed to hold the Germans back and help the Jews get an unnatural leg up. Otherwise, he believed, the “Aryans” would easily and naturally win the struggle for survival. The Holocaust was merely rushing along the natural process of evolution. Hitler said, “The Jews formed a sub-human counter race, predestined by their biological heritage to evil, just as the Nordic race was destined for nobility.”

  Liberals love to cite the fact that Hitler was anti-abortion and anti-gay, suggesting that he would fit right in with Christian conservatives in America. In an upbeat little piece on “Christian fascists” in Harper’s magazine, Chris Hedges cited his ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, James Luther Adams (an official with the Massachusetts ACLU), who “told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933.” (One wonders if, in his ninety-three years on earth, the Harvard Divinity professor ever saved one soul.)

  In 2004, Gloria Steinem cited Hitler’s opposition to abortion in order to compare him to President Bush: “Among the first things [Hitler] did when he came to office was declare abortion a crime against the state.” In a column titled “Hitlers Great and Small,” Ellen Goodman said prolifers “surely know that Hitler was a hard-line opponent of abortion.” (Did that make him prolife?)”

  Hitler also loved dogs—that doesn’t mean we should beat the little creatures. Still, it is puzzling that the author of the Holocaust should have scruples about homosexuality, much less abortion. Hitler’s apparent “family values” don’t make sense—until you realize that Hitler’s worldview was based on Darwinism, not God. He didn’t op-pose abortion because he believed in the human soul. In fact, and needless to say, he didn’t oppose abortion for everyone—only “Aryans.” As Weikart explains:

  Hitler’s ethical views do not comport well with traditional morality, since he based his morality on an entirely different foundation than did most conservatives. Hitler’s morality was not based on traditional Judeo-Christian ethics nor Kant’s categorical imperative, but was rather a complete repudiation of them. Instead, Hitler embraced an evolutionary ethic that made Darwinian fitness and health the only criteria for moral standards. The Darwinian struggle for existence, especially the struggle between different races, became the sole arbiter for morality.

  With all the books, essays, and Ph.D. theses that have been written promoting various theories on the rise of Nazism—the humiliation Germans felt as a result of the Versailles Treaty (which is the opposite of the truth; the problem was we didn’t crush them sufficiently the first time), the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic, the bad economy after World War I, the German character, Hitler’s pain at being rejected as an artist, the immense popularity of the “Hitler mustache”—you would think the powerful influence of Darwinism on Hitler, as well as the pervasiveness of Darwinism among the German intellectual class preceding the rise of Nazi Germany, would merit a small mention in college classrooms.

  Liberals get upset with people like Hitler and Stalin who apply Darwinism in ways they don’t like, but they can’t quarrel with the underlying philosophy. Certain patterns of behavior and beliefs flow naturally from the idea that man is an accident with no greater moral significance than a stalk of corn. Eugenics is a logical application of Darwinism. Indeed, if Hitler hadn’t given eugenics a bad name, public school students would be taught eugenics as a hard science in high school biology class right after watching Inherit the Wind.

  Tenured bioethics professor Peter Singer at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values represents the contemporary efflorescence of the Darwinian belief that man is just an animal like any other. Recognizing the bad name Marxism acquired in the twentieth century, Singer argues in his book A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation that liberals should drop Marx as their demiurge and make Darwin the center of their cosmology.

  Embracing a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, Singer says parents should have the right to kill newborn babies with birth defects, such as Down syndrome and hemophilia, because killing a disabled child, the Princeton professor says, “is not morally equivalent to killing a person.” Magnanimously, Singer allows that he “would not require it.” Singer says there would be nothing morally wrong with parents conceiving children in order to harvest them for spare parts for an older child—or even for society to breed children on a massive scale for spare parts. It goes without saying that Singer supports abortion rights, explaining in his book Practical Ethics t
hat “the life of a fetus is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person.”

  While newborn babies are fair game, Singer says it is wrong to kick a mouse, which “does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is.” Needless to say, if we can’t kick a mouse, Singer also frowns on eating animals.

  Singer believes apes deserve a legally protected right to life, liberty, and due process. He has even issued a demand that the United Nations adopt his “Declaration on Great Apes,” which refers to chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas as our “community of equals”:

  Members of the community of equals are not to be deprived of their liberty, and are entitled to immediate release where there has been no form of due process. The detention of great apes who have not been convicted of any crime or who are not criminally liable should be permitted only where it can be shown that the detention is in their own interests or is necessary to protect the public. In such cases there must be a right of appeal, either directly or through an advocate, to a judicial tribunal.

  I vote for “directly.” I would like to see a baboon deliver a scorching summation to a jury. If the ape throws his own excrement at the judge, you could sell tickets.

  Bringing joy to white supremacists everywhere, Singer compares the liberation of apes to the black liberation movement, saying we must “extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species.” And if you don’t understand the trouble apes are having, put on a gorilla suit and try to get a cab to stop for you in Manhattan. Liberals didn’t want us to depose a brutal dictator responsible for mass murder, rape rooms, and human torture, but now they want us to protect the entire animal kingdom from assault.

  Oh yes—Singer also believes sex with animals is acceptable. That’s what gets you tenure at Princeton these days. He has no objections to necrophilia, provided consent was received when the love object was still alive. For pronouncements that ought to land Singer in an institution for the criminally insane, he has been hailed by the liberal clergy at The New Yorker as “the most influential living philosopher.” The New York Times says of Singer, “[N]o other living philosopher has had this kind of influence,” and regularly publishes his ramblings. He is also published in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and fun-sounding journals with names like Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy— in other words, all the places that would never publish a conservative. The New Scientist credits Singer with creating “a moral framework for the modern animal rights movement.” And of course, Singer is rewarded with a prestigious professorship at Princeton, the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at the university’s Center for Human Values. The only accolade more shameful than that would be a Nobel Peace prize.

  In Slate magazine, William Saletan tried to construct a liberal objection to Singer’s argument for bestiality, happily settling on the absence of “consent” from the animal as the missing ingredient. And thus was bestiality narrowly averted as a plank in the Democratic platform!

  But this is preposterous. Saletan is still imputing humanity to the animal. It is only through a quirk of its species that the poor mute goat is unable to communicate its consent, and man and beast are forever condemned to being star-crossed lovers, like Tristan and Isolde. I gather if the donkey were somehow able to grunt its permission to a sexual tryst, Saletan’s objection would disappear. In the worldview of a liberal, it is wrong to have sex with a donkey because, absent the animal’s consent, it would be rape. (Remember: Whinny means “no”!) If consent is the only objection to bestiality, then why are animals allowed to have sex with one another? And if sex is permissible between animals because neither one is capable of granting consent, then there is no logical objection to infants having sex with one another. How about this: Any person who wants to have sex with an animal should be in a straitjacket?

  Liberals occasionally get huffy with Singer, just as they get huffy with Howard Dean. Like Dean, Singer says out loud what all liberals secretly believe. Liberals may quibble with Singer’s conclusions, but his beliefs are logically unassailable if humans are no different from animals. By contrast, Christians are embarrassed by bad Christians, but they never say, “Oh well, adultery, thievery, and murder are perfectly logical extensions of Christianity.” This is why liberals make such a big deal out of Christian “hypocrisy”—they can’t complain about the underlying theory, only about Christians not living up to it. The worst a Darwinist can say to Peter Singer is “Shame on you for drawing logical conclusions from our shared premises!”

  Once man’s connection to the divine is denied, you can reason yourself from here to anywhere. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” Christians and Jews believe God gave us dominion over the Earth and all the plants and animals. That’s not a license to abuse the Earth, but it does mean animals are subordinate to man. Showing mercy doesn’t make them our equals. But for liberals, as soon as they conclude it’s bad to torture animals, they think they should be able to marry them. Why not? If horses and donkeys can have sex with one another, why not Dick Durbin and his German shepherd? What’s the difference? Why should Dick and his faithful companion be denied the same basic right to marry the rest of us enjoy?

  This is why liberals have panic attacks in response to any science that reveals differences in humans—differences in acquiring AIDS, IQ, mathematical abilities, and so on. If there really is a genetic component to IQ, what arguments do atheists have against sterilizing, enslaving, or killing the stupid among us? What if porpoises are as smart as humans? Do they get Senator Dodd’s preschool care, too?

  No science is ever frightening to Christians. Religious people don’t need the science to come out any particular way on IQ or AIDS or sex differences any more than they need the science to come out any particular way on evolution. All humans were created in God’s image, and we don’t have a right to dominate or kill them even if they are fetuses, have disabilities, can’t do math, look like Peter Singer, or have low IQs and refuse to release their SAT scores, like New York Times publisher Punch Sulzberger. God exists whether or not archaeopteryx ever evolved into something better. If evolution is true, then God created evolution.

  But with the secular crowd, their political ideology keeps shutting off open scientific inquiry. Over and over again, they can only accept one answer: AIDS doesn’t discriminate, IQ is an artificially contrived social construct with no genetic component, there are no innate differences between the sexes, and the human soul was created by random mutation and natural selection. Their religion prevents them from engaging in honest discussion because science without God leaves them with no arguments against barbarism—like bestiality, abortion, slavery, and eugenics.

  The only lesson liberals learned from Hitler is: Don’t discriminate! Not that human life is sacred, but that we must never say people are different. Girls are the same as boys, and homosexuals are the same as heterosexuals, and blacks are the same as whites. That’s their plan for nipping any aspiring Hitlers in the bud. Stripped of a belief in God, they have no coherent philosophical argument against genocide. Rather than defending human life, most of the time liberals are manufacturing excuses to kill it. So we all have to waste money and do pointless things—like letting girls try out for the fire department and the Navy SEALs—because the alternative would be to discuss the undiscussable.

  If, as Darwin says, humans are just an accident of nature with no greater moral significance than a horsefly, it’s perfectly logical to equate owning a pet with slavery and eating a hamburger with murder. And why not treat humans like beasts? Why not cannibalism? Humans: The New White Meat! Abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, assisted suicide—humans are just animals, so who cares?

  Of course, most animal rights kooks would sooner abor
t an unborn human than an unborn tortoise. After Palestinians strapped explosives to a donkey and sent the donkey to a group of Israelis at a bus stop in Jerusalem, Ingrid Newkirk, the cofounder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), addressed a stern letter to “Your Excellency,” Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat: “We have received many calls and letters from people shocked at the bombing.” They were upset that the donkey died. “If you have the opportunity,” Newkirk wrote, “will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of this conflict?”

  Even when liberals are trying to show their moderate, country music-loving side by claiming to oppose having sex with the family dog, they can’t formulate a logical argument to explain why not. The idea of objective truth handed down from the God of Abraham makes them squirm. So they just assert that what they assert is true because they assert it. It’s no wonder liberals’ default argument is to throw food.

  Thanks to people like Peter Singer and the animal rights wackos, these aren’t hypotheticals. PETA posted a slide show on its website with graphic images of blacks being lynched, beaten, and burned alive—and compares their suffering to the treatment of chickens and elephants in a zoo. Another PETA billboard compares Christ to a pig, proclaiming under a giant photo of a pig, “He Died for Your Sins. Go Vegetarian.” So at least the folks at PETA aren’t a bunch of raving lunatics, like those Methodists Chris Hedges’s Harvard professor warned him about.