Demographic Winter-The Rise of the Deathers

If you belong to a religious tradition that has existed for two millenia it's tough to see how you can reduce that religion to a position on homosexuality. But it seems alot of people are certainly trying among Christian fundamentalists.

But it's best if you wrap this into an all-encompassing concept or ideology. For the Religious Right and many political conservatives, the new catch-all concept is "demographic winter" or "birth dearth". It is the ultimate culture war battle, literally the fight over Armaggedon, which is rooted in the rise of feminism, legalized abortion, the acceptance of homosexuality, illegal immigration and the growth of minority populations. For example, the legal arguments of the anti-gay marriage lawyers literally don't make sense unless you buy into the notion that these changes have undermined "natural law" and the "natural family" and therefore Western civilization is at stake.

Declinism has a venerable tradition. In the last century, Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, originally published in 1918, sparked a wave of hysteria which caught the idea of Nazi theorists. Before his death in 1938, Spengler finally rejected Nazism. Perviously, Gibbons' Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire had inspired the British and later American conservatives to opine about the problems of morality and immigration in precipitating the fall of the Roman Empire. Of course, it helps if you don't consider the Byzantine Empire as the continuation of the empire because then you might conclude that a 1,000 year run with plenty of ethnic diversity might be a fine thing.

Declining birth rates and aging populations will affect the fate of nations in this century but the lessons are far from clear. For conservatives, there is concern that white women are slipping below the 1.3 child range, which demographers believe is necessary for the replacement of the population. But people like Pat Buchanan in his 2002 book Death of the West warns that Muslims are reproducing faster than Christians and Europe will be eclipsed by Islam. So we can meld good old nativism and Islamophobia with concerns about white procreation and heterosexuality.

The "demographic winter" plays into all the themes of the rising hard right in this country. Stephen Baskerville, a political scientist at the evangelical Patrick Henry College and author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family blames the women, calling "women's liberation, the boldest social experiment ever undertaken in the Western democracies" and it is "responsible for a massive restructuring of the social order (and) demographic trends that threaten the very survival of Western civilization..." The Family Research Council, the D.C.-based Christian conservative lobbying group, blames bad ideas and misguided policies for creating this "demographic winter", which will result in the collapse of the world economy because declining birth rates are affecting those countries responsible for 80% of the world's economy. Don Feder, the President of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defemation and the Vice President for the World Congress of Families, a coalition of religious right organizations,says that we are in the "terminal stage in the suicide of the West."

To counter all this is the Ruth Institute, which was created by Maggie Gallagher's National Organization for Marriage, which is one of the most significant organizations leading the charge against same sex marriage. The NOM has started a national bus tour starting in Maine to promote heterosexual marriage this summer. The Ruth Institute wants to avoid a Euoprean-style "demigraphic winter" and advocates policies that would be at home in Margaret Attwood's great dystopian novel A Handmaiden's Tale.

The group wants to promote "an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage." Part of their strategic plan is to decrease the divorce rate, increase the marriage rate; increase the number of children who grow up with both married parents; reduce the time between sexual initiation and the age of first marriage. And ,of course, with all these groups, you must "cure The Gay". That's why President Obama's Father's Day speech where he acknowledged that some children have two fathers sent the entire religious right into an uproar.

For the European and American economies to survive and flourish and maintain a stable work force they must allow immigration. Once the crowning ideal of America, immigration now is viewed as coming from countries with darker hued people. This was actually a theme among American nativists before. The Irish, the "Mediterranean" peoples of Italy, Greece and Spain, and later the East Europeans were not considered "white" until the late 19th century and early 20th century. Somehow I believe with their Christian roots, ultimately Hispanics may become honorary whites. But certainly not now because their birthrates exceed white Americans.

Gays, lesbians, feminists,illegal immigrants, Hispanics and Muslims wound together in a seamless ideology. Very clever. And very dangerous.

(Background for this post was provided by Bill Berlowitz's "Right-Wing Groups use Decline of White Birthrates to Stoke Fear of Homosexuality, Feminism and Abortion" at www.alternet.org )