Campaign Against Birth Control, Opposition To Action On Global Warming Linked
Bruce Wilson printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Mon Oct 02, 2006 at 11:15:59 AM EST
In a little noticed story picked up by the Chicago Tribune in a September 28, 2006 story, a national meeting of antiabortion campaigners gathered recently for a new campaign against contraception in general.

CHICAGO - Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement's success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal group of Christian conservatives is arguing that it's time to mount a concerted attack on contraception.

Their voices were raised in Rosemont, Ill., last week at an unusual anti-abortion meeting that drew 250 people from around the nation to condemn artificial birth control. Experts at the gathering assailed contraception on the grounds that it devalues children, harms relationships between men and women, promotes sexual promiscuity and leads to falling birth rates, among social ills.

"Contraception is more the root cause of abortion than anything else," Joseph Scheidler, an anti-abortion veteran whose Pro-Life Action League sponsored the conference, said in an interview.

The apparently self-contradictory statement by Joseph Scheidler, above, may refer to the erroneous claim, made by many religious right groups, that birth control methods which prevent fertilization of human eggs are abortifacients. ( For more on this, see
 "Every Zygote Is Sacred", or "Can I have my BC already?"

The ideological roots of the newly minted campaign against birth control likely tie the new initiative to anti-environmentalism on the Christian right. The connection comes, in part, through Calvin Beisner, one of the leading proponents of Biblically based Cornucopian thought and also lately a major figure leading religiously based opposition to action on Global Warming.  

In a 1990 piece entitled "Population Growth as Blessing or Blight?", Beisner expounds on his view that the Earth is, if anything, underpopulated:

Are teeming cities gobbling up the world's land? Certainly not. One study in 1974 indicated that all human settlements--including everything from tiny tribal encampments to multi-million-person cities--took up only about 1 percent of the land surface of the earth.[27] The percentage isn't likely to have grown much since then....

...if all 5.32 billion [ of the world's population in 1990 ] were invited to a giant party in Anchorage, Alaska, each could stand in a ground area of nine square feet (a square with three-foot sides), leaving all the rest of the world empty.

.....In general, then, the world is not "overpopulated" in any meaningful sense of the word. Crowding exists in some places--mainly in inner cities--but it is not necessarily bad. For many people its advantages outweigh its disadvantages. Mankind is a long way from filling up the earth (Genesis 1:28; 9:1, 7).

....It is not the earth that provides what human beings demand. In fact, aside from a marginally adequate biosphere, the earth provides us with very little.

....It is man's mind operating through his body--both gifts of God--that provides most of what man wants and needs as he reshapes, reconstitutes, and recombines what he finds in nature. In an important sense, the earth has no resources; it has only raw materials, materials that man, by applying knowledge and muscle and machine, turns into resources.

Beisner's 'environmentalist' views appear to be rooted in his longstanding association with many of the leading figures of Christian Reconstructionism, and displays little of the grounding of historical environmentalism in ecology and research in the life sciences.

As a stark contrast, in A Christian Agenda for Environmental Protection,  Beisner cites - for the first mandate of his advocated "Christian Agenda... ", the mandate of human 'Dominion' over the Earth - with 'Dominion' apparently taken to mean the numerical maximization of humanity.

Calvin Beisner is also the founder of the new Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a coalition that minimizes the threat of Global Warming and opposes concerted government action to mitigate the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the Earth's atmosphere.

The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance ( ISA )  appears to have been formed to galvanize political opposition to a growing movement with the National Association Of Evangelicals ( NAE )  to advocate for concerted action to confront Global Warming. ISA's first major initiative came in the form of a letter ( link to Pdf file of letter )  written to the NAE as a response to a statement  concerninf Global Warming written by members of the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

In August 2006 Ethics Daily released a report, by Brian Kaylor, that revealed substantial financial links between signers of that ISA letter and  Exxon-Mobil, a corporation that has recently been challenged by the British Royal Society for funding groups that have:

"misrepresented the science on climate change, either by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying misleading impression of the potential impacts of climate change."

The Ethics Daily / Kaylor report detailed extensive financial links between Exxon-Mobil and the signers of ISA's "Open Letter":

A recent statement by evangelical Christians downplaying the potential problems of global climate change includes eight signers whose six organizations have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.

Released by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) on July 25, the statement was signed by 113 evangelicals and 19 non-evangelicals in response to a February statement released by the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI)....

In all, ExxonMobil's gave $715,000 in 2005 to organizations with singers of the ISA document. Following is a list of organizations, the amount of funding they received from ExxonMobil in 2005, and the individuals from the organizations that signed the ISA statement.




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