My brother has posted quite a collection of troubling comments from discussions on the Fresno Bee Opinion Talk blog. Here are some excerpts from his excerpts:
- If you promote homosexuality and are in favor of abortion won’t you render society to extinction. Now that’s regressive. You’ll have to count on the social conservatives to further civilization and that is ironic. You need us or there can be no you.
- [C]onservative values on social issues promote reproduction (necessary to sustain a society) while the lefts do not.
- If it were not for modern medicine, the AIDS epidemic may have well put homosexuals close to extinction. What is the message here: Homosexuality is against nature! Homosexuality is an unhealthy lifestyle.
- [T]he degrading of our Judeo-Christian culture affects us all. It makes us no better than a beast!
- While the Judeo-Christian culture may not be your culture, it is the collective culture of America courtesy of our Founders. It is deserving of your respect even if it offends your “delicate sensibilities.”
- Sexual perversion is not something I want our country to embrace, which is what homosexuality is. I consider it no different than other sexual perversions, which are self-destructive physically, mentally, and spiritually to the offender, and the offended. The evidence is irrefutable that this is true with homosexuals.
- [T]he American culture . . . is based on Judeo-Christian values, written by men who were Christians (their writings are proof of this—check it out for yourself). Throwing this all away will put our country in peril.
No matter how well I convince myself that I live in a modern and inclusive society, people like these continually present themselves and batter my confidence in American ideals. Who are these people?
One of the one’s that baffles me the most is number three. Apparently, homosexuality is against nature and therefore bad, but if you really think about it, modern medicine is against nature too.
They’re all baffling.
#1 and #2 have a bit of logic to them, inasmuch as a low birth rate does lead to a reduction in the population. I think we could probably agree that GLBT folks, on average, have a lower birthrate and have fewer children (though of course technology and adoption make children possible for many). And a declining population can be incredibly detrimental to a country. Witness Russia, most of western Europe, and Japan, struggling mightily with these issues. Russia, for example, is paying women thousands of dollars to have children — and last year was the first year in a very long time that the birth rate exceeded the death rate.
But a reduced population doesn’t necessarily equal extinction, and extinction of the population doesn’t necessarily follow from legalizing gay marriage/adoption/whatever, because not everyone is going to be GLBT, and not everyone (whether GLBT or not) is going to eschew having children.
#1 and #2 do, however, raise some interesting questions about where the birthrate in the United States is headed. We’re one of the few countries in the West that has a birth rate at or above the replacement rate. Is this a good thing? Bad thing? Neither? Both?
I think analysis should have started with the second half of your second paragraph because that is where the critical fact comes into play: “[N]ot everyone is going to be GLBT, and not everyone (whether GLBT or not) is going to eschew having children.” Recognizing the validity of same-sex relationships through legal marriage will not likely have have much of an impact because the percentage of people involved in those relationships is so small.
So when you suggest tying the recognition of GLBT people into our general birthrate, you make a pretty wide leap of logic yourself. And the general question of whether people, whether GLBT or not, want to have children, is not necessarily even implicated in the second statement above.
For example, the claim that “values” from the Left on “social issues” do not promote having children does not necessarily represent a causal relationship. It may represent a correlative relationship, in the sense that the reasons why people move to the Left ideologically may be the same as the reasons why people choose to have fewer children. I see nothing in the content of mainstream social ideology from the Left that discourages having children (except for a few lunatics on the fringe who advocate human extinction). Instead, it seems that young people who choose to pursue educational and professional goals in their 20s and early 30s, before having children—and then only having one or two, instead of four, five, or six, tend to hold views that lean toward the Left. In other words, I don’t think being ideologically toward the Left will cause someone not to have children. Furthermore, my experience tells me that many people who forgo having children in order to establish themselves educationally, professionally, and financially, are acutely aware of the “biological clock.” It’s not that they don’t want children; they just struggle with how to be successful members of modern society and have children.
And, unfortunately, I don’t have time for further research on the topic right now.
“So when you suggest tying the recognition of GLBT people into our general birthrate, you make a pretty wide leap of logic yourself.”
Did I do that? I was actually trying to agree with you.
That’s why I said you should have started in the middle of your second paragraph. The first paragraph sounds more like you’re agreeing with the statements above, by saying there is any logic to them at all. But in the second paragraph, you get to the real issue, which shows that there is no logic to those statements. So it was a little confusing.