And since Obama famously referred to the unborn as it might apply to his daughters as a "punishment" there is a disturbing similarity.
Thank you so much for sharing all of these insights, dearest sister in Christ!
It seems that, to Rousseau, children were indeed a punishment:
Twice in [the Confessions] he defends himself about [abandoning] the babies, and he returns to the subject in his Reveries and in various letters. In all, his efforts to justify himself, publicly and privately, spread over twenty-five years.... They merely make matters worse, since they compound cruelty and selfishness with hypocrisy. First, he blamed the wicked circle of intellectuals among whom he then moved for putting the idea of the orphanage into his innocent head. Then, to have children was 'an inconvenience'. He could not afford it. 'How could I achieve the tranquillity of mind necessary for my work, my garret filled with domestic cares and the noise of children?' He would have been forced to stoop to degrading work, to 'all those infamous acts which fill me with such justified horror'. 'I know full well no father is more tender than I would have been' but he did not want his children to have any contact with Thérèse's mother: 'I trembled at the thought of entrusting mine to that ill-bred family.' As for cruelty, how could anyone of his outstanding moral character be guilty of such a thing? '...my ardent love of the great, the true, the beautiful and the just; my horror of evil of every kind, my utter inability to hate or injure or even to think of it; the sweet and lively emotion which I feel at the sight of all that is virtuous, generous and amiable; is it possible, I ask, that all these can ever agree in the same heart with the depravity which, without the least scruple, tramples underfoot the sweetest of obligations? Never, for a single moment in his life, could Jean-Jacques have been a man without feeling, without compassion, or an unnatural father.'Jeepers, this dude is a nut-job! Whatta bunch of double-speak. Johnson points out that "one modern academic" [I. W. Allen] lists Rousseau's "shortcomings" as follows:
he was a 'maochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latent homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissist introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable and miserly'.An "interesting madman," indeed!
But back to the President's seeming to regard children — at least pre-born ones — as possibly being "punishments." Which brings us to the horror of the Hopital des Enfants-trouvés — the State-run orphanage of Rousseau's day, and all the abandoned infants in its "care," with such poor nurturing and survival prospects.
A Progressive Leftist would say that this is the very situation that abortion-on-demand obviates. So if a woman feels "punished" (in whatever way she can justify to herself) by the child in her womb, it is just perfectly "rational" to abort it — it helps her, it helps "society."
Of course, the Progressive Left is rooted in Rousseaean "thought." And as such it is motivated, bottom-line, by selfishness, envy, cruelty, contempt for life and liberty, hypocrisy....
Seems to me Obama's rhetorical style (and probably his morality) closely resembles Rousseau's....
Thanks so much for writing dearest sister in Christ!