“It’s up to you — no more than two.”
This dystopian command was posted by staff inside an Indiana high school as a warning to students that if they grow up to have large families, they are contributing to overpopulation — a pseudoscientific hoax pushed by some liberals.
The message was posted on a banner above lockers at Northview High School in Brazil, Indiana. It read in full: “Zero population growth. It’s up to you — No more than two.”
The banner also has bunches of smiley faces representing tens of millions of people. The faces sit in boxes that mark the passage of time, and the implication is that in the future, there will no longer be room for more smiles.
Fr. John Hollowell, a Catholic priest and blogger, noticed the banner when he walked down the hall. He posted a picture of it to his blog.
“We might as well have Nazi flags hanging in the hallway,” wrote Hollowell. “What does that say to kids from families bigger than two kids? Reproduction is a problem?”
Historically, irrational fears of overpopulation have been used to legitimize various authoritarian governments’ forays in eugenics and forced sterilization. The Nazis used these tools to control the Jewish population during World War II. Today, China is the only modern nation that attempts to control its population growth by prohibiting couples from raising more than one child.
Actually, the birth rate in the United States and the Western world is generally declining, since more affluent, educated couples tend to have fewer children.
The banner was taken down after some media outlets drew attention it. Still, Hollowell wrote that he was worried the message was being taught in public school classrooms.
“Now begins the difficult task of looking at the curriculum and asking the hard questions about whether or not this ideology is being passed on to our children in classrooms or not,” he wrote. “Some of my parishioners who are students have told me that it currently is, so I stand ready to work with the principal and whoever else gets involved in such things.”