Two Scientists, Two Standards

Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

The New York Times recently warned its readers about a wacky scientist in the Obama administration. But the fish wrap of record let the real nut job off the hook.

Reporting last week on the president's choice to head the National Institutes of Health, Times writer Gardiner Harris noted that praise for Dr. Francis S. Collins "was not universal or entirely enthusiastic." The geneticist is causing "unease," according to the Times, because of "his very public embrace of religion." Stomachs are apparently churning over a book Collins wrote describing his conversion to Christianity.

It's called -- gasp! -- "The Language of God." Harris intoned: "Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught relationship, and some in the field complain about what they see as Dr. Collins' evangelism."

And … that's it. Yes, the mere profession of Collins' faith is enough to warrant red flags and ominous declamations. A quarter of all Americans identify themselves as evangelical Christians and "publicly embrace their religion." But to the Times, Collins' open affiliation with 60 million American believers in Christ is headline news.

The rationality police in the newsroom have not, however, seen fit to print the rantings of a radical secular evangelist now serving as the White House "science czar." John Holdren, Obama's director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-authored the innocuously titled "Ecoscience" in the 1970s with population control extremists Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

Earlier this year, Ben Johnson at the online publication FrontPage Magazine provided quotes shedding light on Holdren's embrace of "compulsory abortion" for American women "if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society." In "Ecoscience," Holdren and the Ehrlichs also outlined their desire for "a comprehensive Planetary Regime (that) could control the development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources."

Johnson outlined the book's ugly eugenics plan and neo-Malthusian vision of enviro-crats engineering the population. Yet, there was scant mention of Holdren's stomach-churning proposals during his confirmation hearings in February. Holdren's defenders might have comforted themselves by claiming that the quotes were taken out of context. But last week, another online investigative journalist scanned copious pages from the book to show that his words had been unedited and accurately transcribed. The disturbing documents can be found at http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/.

There, you'll find Holdren musing about how to infect the nation's water supply to make women infertile for the benefit of Mother Earth:

"Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. … No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: It must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets or livestock."

Holdren's planetary regime would also breed out undesirables "who contribute to social deterioration" and "insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption -- especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone."

Single mothers who wanted to keep their children would be "obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it."

If a conservative blogger or Republican political candidate had published such lunatic claptrap, the Department of Homeland Security would have him on a watch list. Instead, Holdren is Overlord of Science Policy. "Ecoscience" remains on his curriculum vitae. Obama is still perceived as the champion of reason. And the national media, so concerned about the dangers posed by a born-again Christian scientist, have responded to a secular extremist's wild blueprints for forced abortions and mass sterilizations with a collective shrug. Scary.