If only the damn liberals will have babies!

I read the NY Times column that had a polemical title: Are Liberals Against Marriage? 

I got ticked off.  I am a damn liberal and I have nothing against marriage.  I don't care if it is a heterosexual or same-sex marriage.  If people want to marry, fine.  If they don't want to, fine.  Isn't the whole point of conservatism to leave people alone and not interfere with their lives?

Conservatives want to interfere when they want to.  And, oh boy, there are lots of instances when they love to tell the rest of us what to do!

So ... I emailed the paper a version of the following:

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Ross Douthat argues that the downward trend in the fertility rate can be reversed if only the population were religious and conservative. Mr. Douthat assumes that conservative and religious societies favor higher fertility rates, and his entire column is woven around that assumption.

Evidence does not help his case, however. 

In the southern part of India from where I immigrated a long time ago, fertility rates have been considerably below replacement--at 1.6 to 1.7.  This region is not “liberal."  Instead, the more than 250 million in the five southern states, have high levels of religiosity, and with significantly low divorce rates. Yet, very few kids! 

The explanation for decreasing fertility rates comes down to a simple phrase that the conservative pundit Milton Friedman popularized--”Free to choose.”  If women, in particular, are free enough to choose, then, on an average, they choose to have fewer kids, or even forego motherhood entirely.

Ross Douthat should stop chasing the red herrings of liberalism, “out of wedlock”, and LGBTQ activism.

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If this topic interests you, here are a couple of posts from the past:

This from 2013, in which I wrote:

Tamil Nadu, where my people hail from, has fertility rates that are lower than the rates here in the US.  Americans, who are long used to images of too many babies in India, might find it a shocking revelation that we in the US have, on an average, more children than women do In Tamil Nadu, or in Kerala, or in Karnataka, or in .... These are not states with small populations either.  As this Wikipedia entry helpfully points out, Kerala's population makes it a Canada-equivalent. Tamil Nadu is like Turkey. With its low fertility rate, Karnataka is really like Italy!

From 2017, in which I argued that immigration will help counter low fertility rates:

As reported by the Pew Research Center, “were it not for the increase in births to immigrant women, the annual number of U.S. births would have declined since 1970.” While immigrants accounted for only one in seven Americans in 2015, a quarter of all the births in America were to immigrant women. “Births to women from Mexico, China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Honduras, Vietnam, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico accounted for 58% of all births to immigrant mothers in the U.S. in 2014.” Even here in Oregon, births to immigrant mothers have offset what would have otherwise been a decrease in births from 1990 to 2015.

From 2009:

The fascinating aspect to this story of decrease in fertility rates is that it has happened without strict government mandates. While public health messages do advocate for smaller family sizes, there is no strict government-imposed one-child policy, a la China.

All the more why I think that it is a lazy political argument that Douthat has written!

The caveman speaketh!

One of the many charming, charismatic, aspects of M.K. (Mahatma) Gandhi was that in both still and moving images he always had a smiling and welcoming appearance.  Something rare for the culture in which I grew up where, at least in the old days, people did not smile when photographed.  I suspect that Gandhi's pleasant demeanor was no accident--that was his real persona.

Gandhi was one heck of a force that the militant white supremacists had to reckon with, and yet he comes across in the images as a soft dude.  A dude with a wonderful sense of humor.  One of my favorites about him is this: Gandhi was asked by a reporter what he thought of the western civilization.  Always quick on the draw, Gandhi replied, "I think it would be a very good idea."

Here we are seven decades after Gandhi was shot dead, and living under a different kind of a dark threat, with white supremacists boldly out in the open, and right in the White House.  The Oval Office occupant re-enacted his awful "American carnage" theme but this time in Poland, where he presented the world as a clash of civilizations in which he worried that the West did not have the will to survive.

In that international carnage speech, he said:

We write symphonies.  We pursue innovation.  We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

I suppose the "others" do not celebrate ancient heroes.  The people who are not from the West do not embrace their timeless traditions and customs.  What do people from Iraq, Iran, China, know about timelessness, right?  After all, it was only a few years ago that they barely crawled out of their caves, dragging women by their hair, and beating each other with clubs!  What does the Subcontinent know about music when all they do is clang stones together to create noise!

It is one thing for the fuhrer to engage in such awfulness.  It is another when a NY Times columnist pretty much offers similar arguments but cloaked in sophisticated language.  He seems to equate the white supremacists nationalism of this president and his voters, with the nationalism of the once colonized brown-skinned!

What a mess that 63 million voters have created!  If only the fuhrer understood his own words: "Words are easy, but actions are what matters."

More on South Park, the prophet, and Islamism

Continuing with previous posts (here, and here), this one is from Ross Douthat's column in the NY Times (BTW, this is the first time I am linking to a piece by Douthat; I am not sure if he has earned his place as a columnist yet; he was a great blogger though)

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.
In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.
Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

I catch up on South Park only every once in a while.  of the episodes I have watched, including the Superbest Friends, well, I have watched better ones.  The two that stand out in my mind are the one about the smug factor in the SF Bay Area, and the Scientology piece with Tom Cruise in the closet .... those two were hilarious :)