This is the direct consequence of our submission to the “sex ed” push that started decades ago.
They boiled the frog and now its time to throw it into the frying pan.
The sexualization of children used to be one area where the Left dared not go, after some brief forays in the 1970s and 80s. But now they’re going full-throttle to normalize the abnormal, and weak liberals, who fear above all things ‘offending’ any member of their client groups/base, are stilent.
This should be an opportunity for us. The broad middle of America – that 30-40 percent who are neither consistently Right nor consistently Left – should react with revulsion to this stuff.
We need to be smart about how we play it. Over the last few decades, Americans have arrived at a sort of consensus with regard to sexual deviance: so long as it’s between consenting adults, in the privacy of their own bedrooms (or cellars or wherever they get up to what they get up to), it’s none of my business and certainly none of the government’s business.
But the Left was not happy with that. Now they want to disintegrate the very idea of sexual normality – and their real target is the traditional family.
We need to avoid looking like fundamentalist Christians. We want to win over, or at least keep ‘neutral’, people whose sexuality and/or sex lives is non-standard. The libertarian streak in conservatism is exactly right here. But we want to insist that the tricky area of teaching about sex to children – beyond elementary ‘sex education’ for teens, at most – is NOT an area we are going to let the ‘woke’ crowd into. We ought to find a good response among the broad middle of America on this issue … so long as we avoid looking like bigots.
Yes, the real target is the traditional family.
They’re happy to destroy children in order to destroy the family along with them.
The sexualization of sub-teen children is evil. It is the destruction of innocence. And the “transgendering” of them is a monstrous crime.
The question of the family, in our times, is the question of women. The last century has seen an enormous social change, even more fundamental than the end of colonialism – the emancipation of women, or at least the elevation of women to the same civic rights as men.
This has meant that young women now no longer consider staying at home and raising children as the normal option for women. They want a job, a career, just like men have.
Whether this is 100% good is irrelevant. It’s irreversible. Conservatives have to think about how to deal with it, because it for sure has impacted the traditional family. For one thing, wherever women get an education, they stop being baby machines. The birth rate falls below replacement level. This has happened even in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We need to think about how to respond. I believe the ‘libertarian’ response – do nothing, it’s not the state’s business – is totally inadequate here.
How would a truly conservative national government deal with the falling birth rate?
You think there is a government solution to the falling birth rate? Isn’t government always the problem, never the solution?
Why do you think the libertarian response - I’d describe it as “leave it to the individual” - is “totally inadequate”? Would you have some kind of pressure brought to bear on young adults to have children? Stick? Carrot? Both?
There is a widespread passion for not having children. Abortion is immensely popular. Belief in there being two sexes both of which are needed for reproduction is denied. Children who survive abortion attempts are sterilized with drugs and surgery to pretend they can be “transgendered”.
THEY even admit ONE of their puberty blockers is dangerous:
“Sex ed” does not apparently include telling girls what causes pregnancy and how to avoid it.
Feminism was a manipulation of women orchestrated by the Left in order to destroy the family and society, also.
Women were persuaded that they didn’t need men, marriage, or children, and instead should try to be exactly like men.
The consequence has been generations of unhappy, unfulfilled women, and the decline of functional families.
Jill: No, I don’t think there is a government solution to the problem of below-replacement-level birth rates, not realistically.
Not a complete solution. The Scandanavian countries have tried various means of subsidizing the expenses of having children, with some effect, but not a dramatic one.
I would certainly try that, and also anything else I could think of in the ‘carrot’ field: free high-quality day care [but how to insure that it’s ‘high quality’?], forcing companies to make bring-your-child arrangements for women at work [although not forcing them to bear the costs – again, I’d subsidize it.]
I suspect these would have some effect, but very likely not enough to get the birth rate back up above replacement level.
And … this is a touchy subject here, so I will just say this and then be silent … we want near- at- and above-average IQ women to bear children, not the low-IQ ones, you cannot realistically discriminate there, and it’s probably the low-IQ women who would take up these subsidies the most.
Going in the other direction is what the ‘Clinton Welfare Reforms’, responding the Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, were about.
As for coercion, the stick as opposed to the government carrot, it’s not realistically on the cards, not in the US. But in principle, when literally existential issues are at stake, I don’t rule out anything in principle. Very few conservatives – as opposed to libertarians (whom I as a conservative consider my well-meaning but too-idealistic cousins) – opposed conscription, when it came to fighting the Nazis. But it’s not going to happen, not in the US, so no fear. If we are replaced by others and become a fusion of Guatemala and Kenya, at least the libertarians looking down from heaven can say, ‘Thank God no one was subsidized into having babies.’ [Let me say here that I am all for ‘brain-drain’ – let us take carefully-selected intelligent Guatemalans and Kenyans by all means. But these aren’t the people swimming across the Rio Grande.]
And yes, you’re right about the popularity of abortion and the unpopularity of having children. A consequence of the emanciplation of women, which was a Good Thing. But there is no God, nor any mysterious genie guiding human history, which says that we will only go forward. Some things which looked like progress, turned out to have two sides. (Wouldn’t the poor Africans be better off today if the whites had not just walked away and turned them over to their murderous kleptocrats? Wouldn’t a slow, phased, transition to self-rule, with heavy investment in education from the previous colonialists, have been more humane?)
But progress is seldom without alloy. When Leo Szilard walked back to his apartment, after watching the first successful test of nuclear fission [controlled in this case, but proving the viability of a nuclear bomb], he said that he knew ‘mankind was headed for sorrow’.
No fire without ash.
I should also say that, if we can just avoid a big stupid war, progress in biology and especially in genetics, means that in a few decades, we’ll be making our babies to order. You’ll just go online, check out the available genomes with which to merge your own, spit into a test tube, send it off … and in nine months FedEx will deliver your baby. With a very realistic robot-nurse to take care of it while you … do whatever it is people will be doing then.
So long as we don’t have a big stupid war.
I enjoyed reading those comments, musings, conjectures of yours, Doug1943.
No, they apparently don’t include that, or a basic discussion of when life begins…
Bless you! (So to speak.) I’m so glad I found this site! There are other sites where patriots exist but they tend to be rather low level. I am very interested in hearing the comments, musings and conjectures of everyone else.