Population Control Advocate Killed After Holding Hostages at Discovery Channel
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 1, 2010
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Maryland police shot and killed a population control activist who held several people hostage Wednesday afternoon at the offices of the Discovery Channel, a cable channel staple. James J. Lee has been protesting the channel for years because he said it was not doing enough to promote population control.
Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manger told WTOP that Lee held hostage three people at the building and hewas shot after a confrontation with law enforcement officers.
Police had been in negotiations with Lee for hours and witnesses on the scene heard popping devices that officials worried were some kind of explosive.
"He was wearing what appear to be metallic canister devices on his front and back. He also pulled out a handgun and was waving the handgun around," Manger said about Lee, who burst into the building about 1:00 p.m. local time.
Lee, 43, was arrested in 2008 for disorderly conduct concerning his protests at the Discovery Channel.
Lee is the creator of a web site that touts population control philosophies –advocated by some abortion proponents who claim the Earth is overpopulated and policies such as legalized abortion or, as is the case in China, ensuring families have limits on the number of children they can have are needed to reduce population levels.
“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions," Lee wrote on his web site. "In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."
Lee’s manifesto also calls on Discovery to “broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet.”
“Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed," he writes. "Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation.”
Jill Stanek, a pro-life blogger, says the complaints Lee posted sound "like an indictment against TLC programs like Kate Plus Eight and 19 Kids and Counting" where families or couples having large families are profiled.
Despite the claims over overpopulation, the latest stats from the CDC show the birth rate in the United States is under the replacement rate with 52 million abortions since 1973 and more than 1.2 million taking place every year.
With the National Center for Health Statistics showing the birth rate falling two percent in 2008, and below the replacement rate level of 2.1 children per woman, the U.S. doesn’t have the overpopulation concerns some clam.
"The 2008 preliminary estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) was 2,085.5 births per 1,000 women, 2 percent lower than the rate in 2007 (2,122.5),” the report indicated.
Saying that children are "the only future" a country has, Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, said he is not surprised by the numbers.
“Children are an expression of hope in the future. With the downturn in housing prices, and the upswing in the unemployment rate, it is not surprising that many couples decided to defer having children until the economic downturn had corrected itself. We will, I predict, see a bigger drop in the birthrate in 2009, when the unemployment rate closed in on 10 percent, 9.3 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics," he said.
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