In which I spend a lot of time online, reading stuff. And then I write about it!

It’s important that we all become aware of, and defend against, the “natural family revival.”

There are some batshit crazy Xians out there, and they’re all banding together – some even with (gasp!) Muslims – to bring back the “natural family” (patriarch, baby machine wife, and offspring only: no non-traditional family structures allowed) because it’s the ‘natural basis of society’ and its loss is directly responsible for all kinds of terrible moral degradation.

They dislike the rights individuals within families have been slowly accumulating in the past few generations, and are, essentially, against women’s or children’s rights where they conflict with the family’s (read patriarch’s, I assume) goals.

Scripture

According to this article at The Nation, this coalition wants to increase birthrates. (Well, white birthrates.) How they rationalize this in terms of the earth’s available resources, I don’t know, but they’re really taking the old biblical injunction to multiply very seriously.

They’re even making movies about it. Behold the pseudo-science of Demographic Winter:

The bottom line, essentially, is that heathen brown people are breeding too fast and we gotta keep up in order to preserve our way of life, and our women had best be making babies, and don’t even start on the whole gay thing, please, and the best way to do that is to keep girls out of higher learning and build a culture that celebrates their womanly duties: pregnancy, lactation, and, one assumes, cooking.

Due Diligence

Because I believe that most people are essentially good and that no one is really that crazy, I went and found a rebuttal to the Joyce article.

The author claims that global birthrates are falling alarmingly and that we’re going to run out of people to drive the trains by 2050.

Really? Is that true? Are birth rates really that low? Is contraception and abortion really that common?

I googled ‘birthrates worldwide’ and as far as I can tell, yeah, birth rates are dropping from where they have been, but world population is still increasing and there are no serious trends indicating that it will stop.

In fact, the Wikipedia article linked above states that the world’s population increased by 220,980 people every day in 2009, and that only one of the UN’s multiple estimates indicate a growth rate of zero:

“In 2006, the United Nations stated that the rate of population growth is diminishing due to the demographic transition. If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero, concurrent with a world population plateau of 9.2 billion, in 2050. However, this is only one of many estimates published by the UN. In 2009, UN projections for 2050 range from about 8 billion to 10.5 billion.”

I’m religious. I believe in God. I even pray. I understand from experience how a person can believe in and even fight for something they don’t understand: I’ve heard my own Guru speak against the genetic engineering of food crops, and I’m inclined (although I haven’t sided yet) to be against it too even though I don’t know why. (When people are starving it’s hard to be against a strain of rice that produces in difficult conditions; it just is.) But I cannot understand how an otherwise rational person can possibly move forward with a “go forth and multiply” world view just because it’s in the Bible: the world simply cannot sustain 1960s-level birthrates infinitely. It just can’t.

Which indicates a whole ‘nother motivation for the “natural family revival,” and that freaks me right the hell out.

Population

The research seems to show that poor and uneducated people have more children. (They also lose more children so birth rates don’t necessarily equal population.) When people get access to education, they quit having as many children. And very educated, urban people tend to drop the birthrate to less-than-replacement levels.

Maybe that’s the plan, huh? When you get a bunch of us all together thinking about stuff, we stop breeding like animals and start acting more… human?

Jesus was way cool. Religion is good. The Old Testament is a lovely historical document. I think it’ll be awesome when the world’s all brown. Because seriously: white people just don’t look that cool in comparison.