Twilight of the Culture

Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco 9/30/2007. Photo from Zombietime

What can we say about a culture that doesn’t want to reproduce itself? That’s what is happening in Europe, Canada, and now even in the United States - centers of Western Civilization all. What’s going on? Native-born European women aren’t bearing children at anywhere near a sustainable rate. Indeed, they’re having so few that their demographic will be reduced by half every generation. Meanwhile, Muslim immigrant women in Europe are having children at a rate that doubles their population in the same intervals. Should present trends continue, Europe as we know it will cease to exist in half a century. It will become Eurabia. A similar trend the United States is not yet so acute but it’s trending in that direction, and the immigrant population is predominantly Mexican. Our most populous state has been called Mexifornia by some.

Why have western women chosen not to reproduce as they use to? Maybe they’ve lost confidence in men as husbands and fathers. Maybe they think western culture is inferior and don’t want to bring children into it. Maybe they’re unwilling to make the physical, temporal, financial, and emotional sacrifices necessary to raise a child, or more than one child. Maybe the question doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s just a phenomenon of social Darwinism that if one demographic group chooses to make itself extinct, another takes its place.

A significant portion of my fellow baby boomers are worried that they may not become grandparents. Some have no grandchildren at all and others have only one or two because their children don’t want to bear children. I wrote about this recently and it seemed to touch a nerve. Some agreed with my suggestion that the dearth of grandchildren was due to one or more factors such as selfishness, indifference, or just plain laziness on the part of boomer offspring. Most responses, however were indignant attempts to refute those suggestions, or they were scornful declarations that it was none of my business whether people reproduced or not, that it was a private decision and should not be scrutinized by anyone, especially me. Others made Malthusian arguments that our planet cannot sustain any more people and their decisions not to reproduce were therefore morally correct.

America’s libido is certainly strong enough. That’s not the problem. We’re nothing if not sex-obsessed, but a critical mass in western culture disassociates sex from reproduction and family. After intense and prolonged pressure from leftist women’s and homosexual groups, certain non-reproductive versions of sexual behavior which used to exist only in the shadows were declared constitutional rights by activist judges. Abortion to further divorce sex from reproduction is also a constitutional right. Paradoxically, one of the euphemisms for abortion employed by women’s groups is “reproductive freedom.” They don’t mean freedom to have children. They mean they’re free to refuse children even when they’re pregnant - free to vacuum babies out of their wombs by the millions. They’re free to pretend that it’s nobody else’s business either - that nobody else in the culture should have a right even to voice disapproval. Europe and Canada have “Human Rights Commissions” and the like which are functioning to harass anyone who does so, as in the case of Alberta Pastor Stephen Boission who was convicted of “hate speech” for writing a letter to the editor critical of pro-homosexual propaganda in the province’s schools.

Reproduction is not the only function of sex, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not the most important function for any culture or society that wants to avoid extinction. If sexual minorities have “rights” to not only practice, but publicize their behavior using taxpayer money, other taxpaying members of that culture should at least be able to discuss the subject without legal harassment. It’s simply madness to muzzle them, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Now those groups redefine marriage and family to include homosexual couples - insisting by all these measures that western culture put its imprimatur on a scheme to dismantle itself. Some states and provinces and even countries have outlawed use of words like “husband” and “wife” as discriminatory.

Words follow thoughts. Orwell was right to warn us in his novel “1984” about Big Brother’s inclination to dispatch the Thought Police when thinking got politically incorrect. He was a bit premature by predicting his nightmare society would manifest in the late 20th century. The big-government left was just getting geared up then. They’re finding their stride in the early 21st, so watch what you say if you don’t want to be hauled before the tribunal. If you think it’s bizarre that your culture is more concerned about polar bears and trees than people, that it wants to protect bath house sex and abortion more than babies and then spoonfeed their propaganda to schoolchildren with your tax money, you better shut up about it or the Thought Police will be coming for you.