Europe As We Know It...

This article is reprinted with permission from Population Research Institute.



Europe as We Know It is Dying

What Will Follow the Winter of Western Civilization?

by Steven W. Mosher

It’s happened before.

Writing a century and a half before the birth of Christ, the Greek historian Polybius observed “nowadays all over Greece such a diminution in natality and in general manner such depopulation that the towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow. Although this country has not been ravaged by wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is evident: by avarice or cowardice the people, if they marry, will not bring up the children they ought to have. At most they bring up one or two. It is in this way that the scourge before it is noticed is rapidly developed.”

He concluded by urging his fellow Greeks to return to their historic love of family and children. “The remedy is in ourselves,” he wrote. “We have but to change our morals.” His advice, unfortunately, went largely unheeded.

The demographic winter of the Greek city-states led to economic stagnation and military weakness, which in turn invited invasion and conquest. After a century of increasing dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Rome finally annexed the Greek city-states in 146 B.C.

Will a Europe in the grip of a similar demographic winter come to a similar unhappy end? Certainly Europeans of today, like the Greeks of old, are barely having children. The birthrate across the entire continent is far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany have total fertility rates, or TFRs, of only 1.4 or so, while Poland and Russia languish at 1.32 and 1.2 respectively. The more or less generous child allowances these countries pay the prolific has scarcely caused these numbers to budge. The birth dearth continues to widen.

Meanwhile, adherents of pro-family sects such as Islam are moving in, having children, and repopulating historic Christendom. Is this process likely to continue? And to what end?

Most Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East have fertility rates two or three times as high as Europe. Afghanistan and Somalia, whose fertility rates are above 6 children (6.62 and 6.4 respectively), may be outliers. But other Middle Eastern countries with above-replacement TFRs include Iraq at 4.86, Pakistan at 3.65, and Saudi Arabia at 3.03. Even immigrants from the most Westernized Muslim countries such as Turkey and Tunisia average nearly twice as many children as the extant populations of most European countries.

While falling fertility may be humanity’s general fate, it is this differential fertility that will determine Europe’s destiny. Although the birthrates of Muslim immigrants to Europe are far lower than they were just a generation ago, they are still far more open to life than highly secularized Europeans. Moreover, these immigrants, once in place in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., tend to maintain their relatively high fertility for a generation.

As a result of this potent mix of immigration and procreation, the number of Muslims will continue to grow. Europe as a whole, some demographers suggest, will have a majority Muslim population by 2100.

What a strange twist of history! Over the centuries, various Muslim armies have repeatedly attempted to conquer Europe. Time and time again, at Tours, Vienna, at Lepanto, at Malta, they were thrown back. Yet now what their forebears were unable to accomplish by force, their distant descendants will achieve by peacefully winning the Battle of the Cradle.

Whether they will be radicalized or secularized Muslims is the central question. If they are radicalized, then we can expect efforts to impose Sharia law in country after country, along with the growing persecution of the Christian minority. Catholics in Germany, for example, may come to be treated in largely the same way that Coptic Christians in Egypt have been for the last few centuries, that is to say, as second-class citizens, to be maligned, taxed and beaten almost at will.

If, on the other hand, the second- and third-generation Muslims are largely secularized, then the Christian minority will be, presumably, treated somewhat better, though still subject to some level of discrimination. As everyone knows by now, the Secular Left preaches a tolerance that it generally does not practice.

Either way, believers in once-Christian Europe will probably find themselves living in what might be called a pre-Constantine moment. In others words, they will be living under regimes that punish, even persecute, them for their beliefs.

At the present moment, Europeans still control their own destiny. As Polybius, were he alive today, would surely remind them: “The remedy is in yourselves. You have but to change your morals.”

Steve Mosher on Obama and 'Gay Marriage'

This is an article reprinted with permission from Population Research Institute.

America’s First Gay President Embraces Same-Sex Marriage

by Steven W. Mosher

Newsweek magazine is so proud of Obama’s self-described “evolution” on the issue of same-sex marriage that it has anointed him “America’s First Gay President.”

America’s voters, at least those in key swing states, seem much less impressed. As I told friends at the Canadian March for Life, which took place in Ottawa last week, Barry’s latest flip-flop will almost certainly cost him North Carolina, Indiana, and my home state of Virginia. Other states, like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, are now in play as well. If these go for Romney, then Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage will have cost him the election.

If this particular evolution does result in the President’s political extinction, it may strike some as a kind of poetic justice. After all, the behavior that he is endorsing is an evolutionary dead end. I mean this in the literal, Biology 101 sense.

Leave aside questions of morality for the moment. Leave aside the question of whether homosexual acts dramatically shorten one’s lifespan because of the diseases that attend the homosexual act. (Even homosexual activists admit that this is so; they just quibble about the exact number of years that exposure to the blood and fecal matter of multiple partners shortens your lifespan.)

What I mean by evolutionary dead end is that each and every homosexual coupling is, by definition, sterile. No matter how many times they copulate, homosexual couplings —whether male on male, or female on female — cannot generate new life. Do not hold your breath waiting for Barney Frank to send out a birth announcement.

Homosexual activists say that the ability to procreate is unimportant. They likewise deny that an important function of marriage is to promote responsible childbearing and child-rearing. From an evolutionary point of view, however, such objections are complete, utter nonsense.

To illustrate this, let us do a simple thought experiment. Let us imagine that Obama’s embrace of homosexual marriage is wildly successful. So successful, in fact, that by the end of his second term, heterosexual marriage has fallen into desuetude, and everyone in America has entered into a homosexual union. (I know how unpleasant a prospect this may seem to some, but bear with me for a moment).

So what happens to the United States then? The first thing that would happen is that the birth rate would drop to effectively zero (not exactly zero because I assume that some few lesbians would continue to artificially inseminate themselves). Then the population of the United States would begin to die off, rapidly. By the end of the century, nearly every single American would be dead.

Population control enthusiasts have long promoted homosexuality precisely because they understand its inherent sterility. This is why Frederick S. Jaffe, for example, in his October 1970 article in Perspectives, suggested that one way to reduce the American birth rate would be to encourage homosexual behavior. Jaffe understood that gay and lesbian sex was barren.

But the population bomb has fizzled, and the recession has driven birth rates in the U.S. below replacement.

The only future a family — or a nation — has is its children. America will only continue to thrive if each generation replaces itself. The American experiment in self-government will fail without people, who are, after all, its first prerequisite.

President Reagan famously remarked about abortion that all those in favor of it have already been born. The same may be said about same-sex marriage: All those in favor of it have already been born.

To the extent that Obama succeeds in promoting same-sex marriage, even fewer babies will be.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute.