Just when you think you've heard it all...

Following is a segment of the debate in the House of Representatives earlier this week on gun violence and youth. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-TX) applauded on the Paul Harvey radio program vilifying, among other things, contraceptives and small families as a cause of youth violence. Rep. Barney Frank's (D-MA) response is posted below as well.

CONSEQUENCES FOR JUVENILE OFFENDERS ACT OF 1999 (House of Representatives - June 16, 1999)

Mr. DeLAY. ...Mr. Chairman, I just want to say that the truth will make us free if we admit what the truth is. Every once in a while, I read something or hear something that blows away all that smoke that clouds a particular issue. A letter written by a Mr. Addison Dawson to the San Angelo Standard-Times is just such a statement. In fact, after I make this statement, I do not think anybody else needs to speak. We just need to vote.
The following is Mr. Dawson's letter, which Paul Harvey read on his radio show: `For the life of me, I can't understand what could have gone wrong in Littleton, Colorado. If only the parents had kept their children away from the guns, we wouldn't have had such a tragedy. Yeah, it must have been the guns... `It couldn't have been because we have sterilized and contracepted our families down to sizes so small that the children we do have are so spoiled with material things that they come to equate the receiving of the material with love. `It couldn't have been because our children, who historically have been seen as a blessing from God, are now being viewed as either a mistake created when contraception fails or inconveniences that parents try to raise in their spare time. It couldn't have been because we give 2-year prison sentences to teenagers who kill their newborns.

`It couldn't have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.'

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. ...[A]fter listening to the majority whip, I have to read [the bill] more closely, because I may have missed the part in which we ban the teaching of evolution. I know we have had a lot of discussion of what was causing the problems here, but I just heard the majority whip say it was Charles Darwin's fault...

I have to say, as I listened to him, I have not heard such an angry denunciation of the American people since SDS used to pick at me 30 years ago. I guess there is a degree of anti-Americanism here that I had not anticipated. It is the American people's fault. They are involved in family planning . They are teaching evolution. They are doing all these things."