While the polls tell us that Americans are increasingly warming to the idea of same-sex marriage, the idea that marriage should be anything other than a union of one man and one woman continues to be trounced at the ballot box.
Last week, North Carolina became the 30th state to ban same-sex marriage, and did so in the strongest possible terms: with a constitutional amendment. In fact, the North Carolina ban went even further, outlawing not just same-sex marriage, but also the recognition of any and all same-sex unions such as domestic partnerships and civil unions.
Attempts to typify North Carolina’s strong action against same-sex marriage as predictable bible-belt behavior, collapse, given that same-sex marriage was also constitutionally banned in the very un-bible-belt state of California and banned by referendum in similarly secular Maine. In fact, same-sex marriage has been rejected wherever it has been left to a popular vote and has only made advances through progressive judges and legislatures.
So what’s going on? The Media and most of our academic and major social institutions would have us believe that the universalization of same-sex marriage is inevitable, that, like the President, we will all get around to “evolving”. But the electoral stomping same-sex marriage is increasingly receiving at the ballot box tells us that something quite different is in fact “evolving”.
Perhaps the comments of the out-going president of the nation’s largest pro-abortion organization give us a clue. In announcing her intent not to continue as president of NARAL, Nancy Keenan cited her desire to have more time to address the growing “intensity gap” as her reason for stepping down. By “intensity gap” Keenan means the lack of interest among younger generations in the advancement of abortion rights.
(Of course, It is the height of irony that the leader of an organization which has helped oversee the destruction of more than 53 million young people (yet in-utero) would bemoan the lack of young people to take up the cause of the continued slaughter of more young people.)
However, a later comment by Keenan actually betrays her despair and signals that she knows the gig is up: “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young”, she told the Washington Post. “There are so many of them, and they are so young.” Keenan was responding to her shock at seeing such a large number of young people at a recent pro-life rally in Washington DC, young people she normally doesn’t see at pro-abortion events.
Keenan’s concern over a lack of a next generation to take up the banner of the Culture of Death is a clue to the growth of the “Quiet Revolution” which is simply this: for the last 40 years or so, cultural conservatives have been having more babies than cultural liberals.
It’s simply demographics. Age and death comes calling for all. And the self-imposed sterility of the Liberal Left for the last several decades has left them a decreasing number of heirs, both biologically and ideologically, while the Traditionalist Right has simply been making more babies.
Eric Kaufman, of the American Enterprise Institute, documents this trend in an article entitled “The Future Will Be More Religious and Conservative Than You Think”. Kaufman predicts that “population change is reversing secularism and shifting the center of gravity of entire societies in a conservative religious direction.”
Demographic change also explains the decline of religious vocations in some quarters and its increase in others. Traditional Catholics have been “making more babies” than their contracepting Catholic counterparts. There are simply more children being born to and brought up in families that adhere to the traditional (conservative) practice of the Faith, and thus there are more traditionally oriented vocations.
So while the political, academic, and media elite blame some sort of Tea Party ideology for the looming collapse of their much longed for Utopia, biology is the real culprit. One group has been doing the “be fruitful and multiply” thing, and the other has been sterilizing themselves out of existence. Guess who will inherit the earth...and how they will vote?
