As a result of this antipopulation propaganda from America’s elite institutions of politics and ideas, the public funding for population control here and abroad exploded. But though the message was taken to heart by the First World wealthy and middle class, it was largely ignored by the Third World poor, at whom it had been targeted. We can see the results today: a birth dearth among the affluent nations, and baby booms across the Third World.
(D) Feminism. To be “pro-choice” on abortion is today almost a defining mark of the “modern woman.” To many feminists, the phrase “women’s liberation” means liberation from the traditional and, in their view, narrow and constricting roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. But among the founding mothers of feminism it was not always so. Writing on the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in The New Oxford Review, Catholic columnist Joseph Collison observed:
Early feminists had been fiercely antiabortion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the first women’s rights convention in 1848, called abortion “a disgusting and degrading crime.” … And Susan B. Anthony, early crusader for the women’s vote, wrote that “No matter what the motive … the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul in death.” It was in fact the 19th century feminists who campaigned to pass the laws that criminalized abortion.26
Collison adds that in early editions of The Feminist Mystique, Betty Friedan’s seminal work, abortion went unmentioned. It was not a feminist issue in the early 1960s.
Back before World War II, when Margaret Sanger, birth mother of Planned Parenthood, wrote that “the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it,” she was a radical socialist far outside the American mainstream.27 But the Sanger animus against big families has since become a central feature of the new American feminism that was mainstreamed in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the perception that marriage is human bondage has become a hallmark of movement militants.
Marriage, writes Andrea Dworkin in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, is “an institution [that] developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use but possession of ownership.”28 Pure Marx. And a logical conclusion follows. “The nuclear family must be destroyed,” said the feminist Linda Gordon. “Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests.”29
In 1970, Robin Morgan, now the nanny of Gloria Steinem’s love child, Ms. magazine, called marriage “a slavery-like practice. We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.” 30 That same year, Ms. Morgan edited Sisterhood Is Powerful, containing an essay by Valerie Solanis, president of the Society for Cutting Up Men. “It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males … and to produce only females,” wrote Ms. Solanis. “We must begin immediately to do so. The male is a biological accident … . The male has made the world a shitpile.”31 Not a lady to be trifled with, Ms. Solanis established her bona fides by going out and shooting Andy Warhol.
By late 1973, Nancy Lehmann and Helen Sullinger had circulated a new manifesto of the movement they titled Declaration of Feminism, which was broadly reproduced and widely praised:
Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women … . We must work to destroy it … . The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men … . All of history must be rewritten in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft.32
Among feminists, the slavery simile competes with the prostitution metaphor. “Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession,” wrote Vivian Gornick, Penn State professor and author, in 1980. “The choice to serve and be protected and plan toward being a family-member is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.”33
“I can’t mate in captivity,” Gloria Steinem told a Newsweek reporter in 1984.34 In a 1991 Wall Street Journal piece, Christina Sommers quotes legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon as saying: “Feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage and sexual harassment.”35
To the militant feminist, marriage is prostitution, and the family is at best a failed institution and at worst a prison or slave quarters. A decade ago, novelist Toni Morrison told Time, “The little nuclear family is a paradigm that doesn’t work.”36 In 1994, the Chicago Tribune quoted Judith Stacey: “The belief that married-couple families are superior is probably the most pervasive prejudice in the Western world.”37 In the Jewish World Review in February 2000, in a piece titled “NOW: Pro-Fatherhood Funding Is Unconstitutional,” Sheila Cronin was quoted: “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women’s movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.” 38
Now, most American women do not harbor so bitter and hostile a view of marriage and family. If they did, there would be even fewer children and the Death of the West would be imminent. But millions are influenced by feminist ideology and its equation of marriage with prostitution and slavery, and that ideology has persuaded many to put off marriage and not to have children. If the preservation of peoples of European ancestry, and of the Western civilization they have created, were up to the feminists, Western Man would have no future.
Ideas Have Consequences is the title of the late conservative Richard Weaver’s famous little book, and the success of feminist ideas has had consequences for our country. They may be seen in the 1,000 percent increase in the number of unmarried couples living together in the United States, from 523,000 in 1970 to 5.5 million today.39 The 2000 census also reports that, for the first time in our history, nuclear families account for fewer than one in four households, while single Americans who live alone are now 26 percent of all households.40 Marriage is out of fashion.
Back in 1990, Katarina Runske, an author far less famous than the American feminists, published in Britain a book called Empty Hearts and Empty Homes, in which she addressed the inevitable result of all this antimale, antimarriage rhetoric. Feminism, she said, is
a Darwinian blind alley. In biological terms, there is nothing that identifies a maladaptive pattern so quickly as a below-replacement level of reproduction; an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril.41
In short, the rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West. Oddly, that most politically incorrect of poets, Rudyard Kipling, saw it all coming back in 1919:
On the first Feminian Sandstones, we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.”42
(E) The Popular Culture, in its hierarchy of values, puts the joys of sex far above the happiness of motherhood. The women’s magazines, the soaps, romance novels, and prime-time TV all celebrate career, sex, and the single woman. “Taking care of baby” is for Grandma. Marriage and monogamy are about as exciting as a mashed-potato sandwich. That old triumvirate “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” not only has all the best tunes, but all the best ad agencies. How many TV shows today tout motherhood? How long ago did The Brady Bunch go off the air? Paul Anka’s signature song, “You’re Having My Baby,” is now “We’re Having Our Baby,” but “I Am Woman” is still around. It is a sign of the times that Ozzie and Harriet is not just behind the times. Like Amos ’n’ Andy, it has become a metaphor for what was wrong with the times.
“Any human society,
” wrote anthropologist J. D. Unwin, “is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom. The evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation.”43 What is now called the Greatest Generation came of age in the Depression and World War II. It displayed great energy and gave America a position of unrivaled preeminence. The baby boomers and Gen-Xers, by and large, opted for “sexual freedom.” Soon we shall see if Unwin was right. The early returns suggest that he was, that the West will not survive its experiment in sexual liberation in recognizable form. As the conservative columnist Jenkin Lloyd Jones observed, “Great civilizations and animal standards of behavior coexist only for short periods.”44
(F) The Collapse of the Moral Order. What people truly believe about right and wrong can better be determined by how they live their lives than by what they tell the pollsters. If so, the old moral order is dying. As late as the 1950s, divorce was a scandal, “shacking up” was how “white trash” lived, abortion was an abomination, and homosexuality the “love that dare not speak its name.” Today, half of all marriages end in divorce, “relationships” are what life is about, and “the love that dare not speak its name” will not shut up. The collapse of marriage and marital fertility, says Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, is due to a long-term “shift in the Western ideational system” away from values affirmed by Christianity—sacrifice, altruism, the sanctity of commitment—and toward a militant “secular individualism” focused on the self.45
When, in 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical against contraception, Humanae Vitae, the almost universal hostility with which it was received, even among many Catholics, bore witness to the sea change in society. Yet the late pope has proved prophetic. As Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver writes, in Humanae Vitae Pope Paul predicted four consequences of man’s embrace of a contraceptive mind-set: (1) Widespread “conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.” (2) Women would no longer be man’s “respected and beloved companion,” but serve as a “mere instrument of selfish enjoyment.” (3) It would “put a dangerous weapon in the hands of public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.” (4) The treatment of men and women as objects, and unborn children as a disease to be prevented, would result in the dehumanization of the species.46
With rampant promiscuity and wholesale divorce, the explosion of pornography and the mainstreaming of the Playboy philosophy, taxpayer funding of abortion, and a day in America when we can read about teenage girls throwing newborn infants into dumpsters and leaving them out in the snow, the world Paul VI predicted is upon us. Indeed, the new world takes on the aspect of the old world of pagan Rome, where unwanted babies were left on hillsides to die of exposure. Life is no longer respected as it was by the Greatest Generation, which came home after seeing how life had been so disrespected in a world at war. As the pope predicted, the beneficiaries of contraception and abortion have turned out to be selfish men who use women and toss them away like Kleenex.
Nowhere is the overthrow of the old moral order more evident than in how homosexuality is seen today, and yesterday. In World War II, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who wore the “old school tie” of FDR, was forced out of office for propositioning a sleeping car porter. LBJ feared that the arrest of aide Walter Jenkins, caught in a police sting in a men’s room at the YMCA, might cost him millions of votes. Rising GOP star Bob Bauman lost his House seat when caught soliciting teenagers in the tenderloin district of D.C. That was then; now is now.
The turning point came when Gerry Studds, who seduced a sixteen-year-old male page, defied House sanctions and was reelected in Massachusetts, a Catholic state. Barney Frank easily survived House chastisement for fixing parking tickets for a live-in male lover who was running a full-service whorehouse out of Barney’s basement, and, in the Clinton era, he began to bring his boyfriend to White House socials. In 2001, John Ashcroft was lacerated during his confirmation hearings by former Senate colleagues for having opposed the nomination of homosexual James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel, broadcasting the San Francisco gay pride parade, had laughingly welcomed the transvestite “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” who mock the pope and Catholic nuns. Truly, the world is turned upside down.
When America’s most public lesbian couple, actresses Anne Heche and Ellen DeGeneres, broke up, the president of the United States called to offer his sympathy. Hillary Clinton became the first First Lady to march in the New York City gay pride parade. Did the New York Times, the good Gray Lady of Forty-third Street, editorially question the wisdom of America’s First Lady parading with drag queens and men in thongs? Not at all. As Times national political correspondent Richard Berke told colleagues at the tenth-anniversary reception of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, “Three quarters of the people who decide what goes on the front page [of the Times] are ‘not-so-closeted’ homosexuals.”47
Nine months after marching for gay pride, Mrs. Clinton refused to march in the 240th St. Patrick’s Day parade, once a must for all New York City politicians. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, the fraternal Roman Catholic group that runs the parade, does not permit the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization to march as a unit; and Mrs. Clinton had been chastised by gay rights groups for marching on St. Patrick’s Day in 2000. That Senator Clinton would appease the homosexuals, even if it meant affronting Irish Catholics, testifies to the new balance of power in the Democratic party and the new correlation of forces in the culture war.
Were she a real rather than a fictional character, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, instead of being up on that scaffold having a scarlet “A” pinned to her blouse, would be on Rosie, exposing Dimmesdale as a deadbeat dad and telling a cheering audience what Dr. Laura could do with her advice.
Even the children of Middle America now do tours of duty in the sexual revolution. “Do your own thing!” is now a moral norm. Every American woman of childbearing age has had abortion as a fallback, and millions will not give it up. They want it there for themselves and their daughters and will vote against any politician or party that threatens to take it away.
Euthanasia has come to Europe and is coming to America. Upon what moral ground do we any longer stand to stop it? Dr. Kevorkian, a ghoul in an earlier age, some of whose victims were just depressed, not dying, gets a sympathetic profile on Sixty Minutes. In the Age of the Individual, people believe in this life, not the next; in the quality of life, not the sanctity of life; and no one wants to be told how he should live his life. “Americans are not going to lead 21st-century lives based on 18th- and 19th-century moral ideals,” writes sociologist and public intellectual Alan Wolfe: “Any form of higher authority has to tailor its demands to the needs of real people.”48 After a millennium and a half, paganism is the “comeback kid.”
THE AMERICA MANY of us grew up in is gone. The cultural revolution has triumphed in the minds of millions and is beyond the power of politicians to overturn, even had they the courage to try. Half a nation has converted. The party of working-class Catholics is almost 100 percent “pro-choice” and pro—gay rights. The party of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition has thrown in the towel on the social issues—to go out and do the Lord’s work growing the Department of Education. Young people are not concerned about their souls; they’re worried about the Nasdaq. Most of the intellectual and media elite are fighting allies of the revolution or fellow travelers, and many conservatives are trolling for the terms of armistice.
What a tiny band of secular humanists declared in a manifesto in 1973 has become the moral compass of America and is becoming the law of the land. Americans have listened, absorbed, and embraced the values of a revolution that scandalized their parents and grandparents, calling to mind the insight of Alexander Pope:
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.49
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sp; Only a social counterrevolution or a religious awakening can turn the West around before a falling birthrate closes off the last exit ramp and rings down the curtain on Western Man’s long-running play. But not a sign of either can be seen on the horizon.
What force can resist the siren’s song of a hedonistic culture that is so alluring and appealing and is promoted by almost all who speak to the young—Hollywood, MTV, the soaps, prime-time TV, the hot mags and the hot music, romance novels and bestsellers? How do parents compete when even teachers and preachers are handing out condoms? What is going to convert American women to wanting what their mothers wanted and grandmothers prayed for: a good man, a home in the suburbs, and a passel of kids? Sounds almost quaint.
In Caesar and Christ, Book III of his Story of Civilization, historian Will Durant argues that “biological factors” were “fundamental” to the fall of the Roman Empire:
A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian … . A law of Septimus Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men. In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time [250 A.D.] been halved. He mourned to see “the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.” Only the barbarians and Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.50
The Death of the West Page 5