Ted Turner always seems to be able to grab the headlines. Speaking at the 27th annual meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, Turner called House Majority Whip Tom DeLay "dumb" and said the Texas Republican should "get his resume ready." And that was one of the least controversial things he said!
He said that environmentalists and population control activists need to elect "people who get it" if they wish "to succeed in saving humanity." He then went on to make fun of Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Ten Commandments. Other than that is was a fairly tame Ted Turner speech.
He called on activists to "defeat those congressmen and senators who are standing in the way of progress." Although he fathered five kids by the time he was 30, Ted Turner called for limiting the population. He believes that overpopulation is a major problem, and cited Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb. Never mind that the book predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of global overpopulation.
By the way, Ted Turner asked Paul Ehrlich and his wife what the ideal world population would be. Ehrlich said about 2 billion. The current population is nearly 6 billion. Turner argued that everyone should adopt a one-child policy for the next 100 years to achieve this so-called "ideal" population.
All of this of course comes from a man who said the Ten Commandments are out of date (especially the one on adultery) and used an ethnic joke to slur the Pope. While it's tempting to shake your head and roll your eyes, you have to remember that Ted Turner is serious and has pledged a $1 billion to support U.N. efforts on population control.
I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion.