"They should not be allowed to breed..."

[fpb]

Anyone can say anything in a fit of anger. But to make such a claim in deadly earnest shows that you want to be God, deciding who lives and who doesn't - and that is the Devil's posture. Plus, on the practical side, you are postulating a state bureaucracy to decide who is allowed to breed and who is too - moronic, diseased, drugged, whatever - to have children. One doesn't have to be a state-hater to see that this is a very bad idea indeed.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is at the heart of what I am saying. I have seen the old fallacy that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" disproved dozens of times.

[verity-forsythe.livejournal.com]

As have I--well, not dozens, but disproven, and quite decisively.
And I suspect that there are some traits which, though capable of producing hellish effects in some people, can be expressed in a completely different way in their children. The sensitivity and slight impatience that might make one person a surly alcoholic could find its proper compassionate expression in his son, for instance. (I have actually known one person of whom this was true--he was, in many fundamental ways, just like his father. But his father was an angry bastard; the son wasn't.)