QOTmonth:

[theweaselking]

"If someone has a cat, I believe they like cats.

If someone has five cats, I believe they love cats.

But if someone has 19 cats, I’m no longer convinced they love cats. I’m suspicious, rather, that they’re some kind of hoarder.

Someone who needs 19 cats and counting, rather than settling for just the five cats of the cat-lover, is someone who apparently could not find satisfaction with those first five cats and acquired the next five in a desperate, but apparently unsuccessful, attempt to fill some aching need.

And then, finding even 10 cats still insufficient to satisfy this need to derive whatever it is they’re attempting to take from these cats, they were then compelled to acquire five more, and then to acquire four more after that.

Such compulsive, insatiable acquisitiveness does not suggest that this person loves cats. It suggests, rather, that this person has been unable to give and receive love with those first 18 cats, and that their prospects for being able to give and receive love from the 19th also seem pretty slim.

Perhaps such a person somehow needs cats. Perhaps they desire to control cats or to possess cats. But it does not seem likely that they love cats.

And that’s pretty much my take on the “Quiverfull” movement."

-Fred "Slacktivist" Clark, baptist preacher and perennial territory non-recogniser.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

He doesn't understand -- I do love cats, but that's not why I must literally have every cat ever. I must have them so as not to offend the Great Cat Spirit who watches me from his dread cat bed on Jupiter and judges my every move with his terrible all-seeing cat eyes.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

And then she adopted Paws, Miffy, Shadow, Max, Mittens, Toxoplasmosis, Cat #7, Cat #8, Cat #9, Get Off The Damn Table You Furry Spawn of Satan, and Aaarrgh.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"Sometimes I contemplate life without toxoplasmosis. It's frightening, so I hug a cat until I feel better."

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Or perhaps they've got all those cats around to save their lives, because there's always way more cats than there are shelter spaces. :P

It's not a cut-and-dried situation.

-TG

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

In the metaphor, they personally gave birth to the 19 cats.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Ah, I missed that. I was just going from the OP.

-TG

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Fred Clark's point is at not, at any time, in any way, about cats.

And also: He SUSPECTS perhaps you do not love cats. As opposed to concluding that you cannot possibly love cats.

[endotoxin.livejournal.com]

TIL about the Quiverfull movement. And because I cannot help myself, I charge that a single child from a Quiverfull family be now termed a "Milli-quiver."