“Concerning Race Suicide,” demographic warning from Puck (US), 1903. The posh upper-class people to the left are having too much fun to have babies, while the degenerate immigrant working-class mob on the right keeps the storks busy by screwing and spawning.
LGBT people are used to suffering from bad science. The versions are stale by now: the I-can-change-your-sexuality cliché, the you-can’t-raise-children chestnut, the majority-of-pedophiles delusion. A new kind of international bad science is afoot, though. It’s a Grand Theory that lets the right wing link many of its disparate but potent demons: its opposition to homosexuality and to women’s reproductive rights, its racism and its fears of immigration and Islam.
Myths about demography are the key. You can gauge something of what’s happening by the news that Paul Cameron, the lunatic American pseudo-scientist and favorite of the US religious right, will visit Russia this month. Cameron is famously extreme – so much so that even Russia Today, Putin’s pet TV channel, has made fun of him; he’s claimed that gay sex makes people “malevolent,” and urged quarantining practitioners, if not (well, maybe not) killing them. But his mad, bad rhetoric is taking a more mainstream direction, one specifically tied to what’s happening in Russia. There’s a story here.
Is that Kirchick over in the corner? Take off those rainbow suspenders, boy! Paul Cameron on Russia Today, 2012
I. Where the US religious right failed
The connecting flight from Vienna to Budapest lasts about an hour, but sometimes that’s enough to cross to a different hemisphere. I found myself on it back in 1994, when I lived in Eastern Europe—I was returning from Albania, where I’d documented the situation of LGBT people under one of Europe’s last sodomy laws. Sitting next to me was an 18-year-old boy from Texas, flying to Hungary to do missionary work for his church. For him, this was a passage to the legendary obverse of the Iron Curtain; for me, a foray into a geography I’d almost forgotten after I left Virginia at his age, the world of Christian fundamentalism. When I told him I’d inhabited Budapest, that satrapy of Satan, for years, he was full of questions: Do they still put Christians in concentration camps? Are there any church buildings left? He asked me to tell him when we crossed into Hungarian airspace, and when I surmised we had, somewhere above Visegrad, he leaned over to look down; “It’s so green,” he said. “I never knew a Communist country could be so green.” At the airport consternation seized him, and he grabbed my arm: “Do I need a passport to get in here?” Somehow he’d stowed his documents in his checked luggage back in the US, and now he had to go through passport control before he could reach the baggage claim. I’m afraid I left him in that Catch-22. Sometimes I dream he’s still there, almost 40 now, trapped forever in a stateless limbo like a Spielberg character or the Wandering Jew; except that Jesus is by his side as consolation.
There’s been huge attention in recent years to US evangelicals’ role in exporting homophobia to other countries. What we forget is how stupid and inept they’ve often been — and how much local conditions have determined their reception.
My poor Texan friend was part of a great explosion of evangelical energy in the 1990s. Two new fields for US conservative churches opened: the former Soviet bloc and Africa. Gorbachev and the 1989 revolutions pried the first ajar, of course. Paradoxically apartheid’s end made the second invasion possible. Most Christian fundamentalists in the US had supported the white South African regime, and were ideologically disinclined to visit its continent-wide opponents; many had telltale South African visa stamps in their passports, which made travel to much of independent Africa impossible. Now all that was out the window. They tackled the rest of Africa with a vengeance, as if inheriting the colonial mission that the white tribe at the continent’s tip had abandoned in surrender.
Missionary disposition: Higher, boys, higher, I’m praying for you
In Eastern Europe, missionaries were everywhere by the mid-‘90s. I ran into them in parks (which they didn’t know were cruising areas) passing out leaflets, in railway stations (ditto) singing hymns, sharing my train compartment from Baia-Mare to Bucharest (where a family from Alabama eyed me reading David Greenberg’s The Construction of Homosexuality, and rebuffed my attempts at conversation as if I planned to use that Jew perversion to drive nails in Christ’s cross). They didn’t seem to have prepared for the trip, beyond reading the Biblical passages about Gog and Magog. They always looked disappointed. Things were too green, the openings for martyrdom too limited, and despite what they assumed were decades of enforced atheism almost everybody already had a religious tradition, and felt no urgency to change. They longed to be triumphant emissaries of Cold War-winning America, but the America the locals wanted was Madonna and Melrose Place instead.
Only later, when I visited southern Africa, did I see the contrast. African Christianity had been a ferment of demotic, enthusiastic homegrown sects for decades. Locally powerful, they were still poor and isolated, looked down on by the mainline denominations, the Anglicans and Roman Catholics. They recognized American Pentecostals and other evangelicals as rich but sympathetic cousins, and potential sources of support. Your average missionary got treated like the hero he wanted to be in Zambia or Uganda. Moreover, these churches (far from being refuges for the down-and-out) were often vehicles for an ambitious, entrepreneurial middle class, lending evangelical outreach a dynamic social face.
In Romania or Hungary, however, the missionary was held at arm’s length. There were few upstart religious groups there to provide a base. The existing churches – Orthodox, Catholic, Uniate, and Calvinist – were centuries old, and believers rarely traded away loyalties they saw as key to communal identity. The prelates treated these Alabamans and Coloradans as competitors, not siblings.
All my children, I: Teoctist (1915-2007), patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, blesses a crowd
Where the missionaries found a role in Eastern Europe, it was usually as supporting players in the older churches’ scripts. Homosexuality was a big issue in Romania; by 1994 pressure from the Council of Europe was forcing the government to consider repeal of its sodomy law. That year some minor American evangelical visited –unfortunately, I forget his name – to lend his hand in the Orthodox Church’s campaign to keep the law. He brought footage of the horrors of Gay Pride in the US, and Romanian TV played this for days, the lewd women in leather, the musclemen in skirts. My gay friends stayed glued to the news every evening in excitement, because nothing like had been broadcast before – by the chaste standards of local emissions it was State-sponsored porn. Such spectacles recurred, but they were hardly what what the missionaries dreamed of when they debouched from their planes, passports (I hope) in hand. Playing second fiddle in somebody else’s campaign was a poor substitute for the great revivals, the salvation tents, the millions won to Christ from devil faiths where priests wore dresses.
This note of unfulfilled aspirations and unwilling compromise has been consistent throughout the missionary experience in Eastern Europe. In Africa, a figure like Scott Lively, marginal at home, was catapulted to rock-star status, even helping to write homophobic legislation. In the old Soviet bloc, the US evangelicals have pretty much followed where others led. Contrary to their image as all-powerful manipulators, it’s taken them a long time to get the message right.
All my children, II: Elena and Nicolae Ceauşescu playing parents of the nation
II. Putin as educator
Which doesn’t mean they haven’t learned things.
The US right wing and the evangelicals have been learning hard lessons from Eastern Europe — and especially from Vladimir Putin and his spiritual fathers, such as Nicolae Ceauşescu.
In 2006, in a famous “State of the Nation” address, Putin pointed to a “demographic crisis” as Russia’s gravest problem. Declining population posed an existential threat, he said, proposing measures to jack up the birth rate: higher benefits, better maternity-leave pay, an astonishing packet of rewards (including a gift of close to $US 10,000) for mothers who had a second child.
Birth rates, death rates, and population growth/loss in Russia since 1950
Russia’s birth rate had fallen precipitously since Communism collapsed, propelled downward by poverty and an uncertain future. Predictions of catastrophe were rife; Sergei Mironov, head of the Federation Council (and of a small political party focused on promoting “life”) warned the population could dwindle by almost two-thirds, to barely 50 million, within 75 years. Yet as the graph shows, the death rate was the other contributing factor. It had ticked up sharply since 1990, and stayed stubbornly high – up to 50% higher than Germany’s. Alcoholism, smoking, poor diet, and a miserable medical system were major causes. One lesson of demographics, though, is that while it may be easier to lower the death rate than raise the birth rate (people pretty uniformly don’t want to die, whereas they may or may not want to have children) governments like talking about the latter better. However pricey maternity benefits may be, they’re usually cheaper and more popular than health care for the unwanted old. Moreover, birth rates involve and invoke moral and political anxieties – about women’s freedoms and how sexualities are deployed – that call for State exhortation and intervention. Politicians who promote progeny both stand with tradition and expand their power. They like that.
Since Putin’s speech, the birth rate has spiked substantially, rising by about 10% after 2008 – though continued economic prosperity may rival his gift baskets as the reason. Indeed, Mark Adomanis , a regional analyst, suggests that the fears around population were always somewhat exaggerated. As the chart below shows, the vicissitudes of Russia’s birth rate differed very little from what happened in the onetime Soviet satellites, and over a thirty-year period settled around an average similar to Western Europe’s.
Chart by Mark Adomanis, Forbes, 2013
You could argue that Russia is experiencing its own crash version of the classic “demographic transition,” where both birth rates and death rates drop, usually as part of economic development; except the former is landing rather harder than the latter. Indeed, the genuine problem remains how often Russians die, not how seldom they reproduce. The death rate has inched down slightly, and now stands at 14.1 per thousand, against 11 in Germany. But this disguises the fact that Germany’s population is older, with lives prolonged by better health care – and older people die at higher rates. The truth is, German males live an average of 18 years longer than Russian males (the difference for women is around 9 years). An overall life expectancy of just 66 years, lower than India , Indonesia, Egypt: that’s Putin’s real crisis.
But Putin keeps talking about the birth rate; much nicer than discussing death, and more likely to rally the Orthodox to his side. “We need to continue to save the people of Russia,” he said in a pre-campaign speech in 2011, announcing some $50 billion in “demographic projects” to encourage childbearing. It’s a bonanza for PR and for his political machine. Kremlin-sponsored youth groups organize group weddings, and strut round in T-shirts reading “I want to have three children.” Last year, Putin personally urged moms to up the household numbers: “Demographers affirm that choosing to have a second child is already a potential choice in favor of a third … It’s important that families make that step.” This year, he summoned Boyz II Men to Moscow for a Valentine’s Day concert meant to set the mood for condom-free, procreative screwing. He isn’t just trying to seduce Russians into reproducing. There’s coercion behind the crooning. Putin is imitating Ceauşescu, who strove to make Romania great by making more Romanians. In the mid-1960s the dictator banned contraception and abortion and increased penalties for homosexual conduct, in a sweeping pro-natalist campaign. The longterm demographic impact was slight, but it massively strengthened the regime’s control over private life. This, too, may be Putin’s fantasy: State-sponsored horniness, a loudspeaker in every bedroom commanding heterosexual copulation, Barry White as Big Brother.
All my children, III: Putin with young Russian wombs, ready for use
Many non-Russian journalists and LGBT activists simply don’t understand where the recent homophobic panic comes from. To hear them talk, you’d think that a bunch of minuscule gay pride marches over the years somehow sparked Putin’s sudden, irrational decision to ban everything related to gayness. This is nonsense. There was a long buildup to the current legal moves; they grew out of the debate over the “demographic crisis.” And the crackdown started with moves against reproductive rights.
Lullaby, little fetus: Recent Russian anti-abortion imagery
In response to Putin’s 2011 call for “demographic projects,” the Duma that year passed the first major restriction on abortion rights since Stalin’s death. The new law barred abortion clinics from describing the procedure as safe, and required them to devote 10% of their advertising to detailing its dangers. The initial focus on advertising is suggestive: it prefigures the later “anti-propaganda” law which would prohibit LGBT rights advocates from publicizing their cause at all. MPs have pressed for even stronger restrictions, and anti-abortion propaganda spreads. Former First Lady (and now prime minister’s wife) Svetlana Medvedeva leads the movement in cooperation with the Orthodox Church, and her vanity “charitable foundation” spearheads campaigns with names like “Give me life!” Meanwhile, the government refuses to promote contraceptive use (never popular in Russia) as an alternative to abortion. Many family planning centers established in the 1990s have closed, stripped of funding.
Simultaneously, at the UN Human Rights Council, Russia sponsored and and passed a resolution subordinating human rights to “traditional values.” It was a way of taking their anti-reproductive rights agitation abroad. At home, Putin’s bill that stopped all adoptions to the US was a retaliatory diplomatic move, but had a ready demographic justification – rescuing Russia’s precious children from an alien culture. A Duma member warned that exported orphans might “be tortured, used for organ transplanting, or for sexual exploitation, given that there are 9 million same sex marriages in the United States.” From there it’s just a step to the bill banning any adoptions by foreign same-sex or unmarried couples. Then came the “anti-propaganda” law, protecting kids from all the blandishments of non-reproductive or “non-traditional” lifestyles. The explanatory note to that provision describes “Family, motherhood and childhood” as “the values which provide for the continual renewing of the generations” — as well as the way the “population of the Russian Federation is safeguarded and developed. For this reason they need the special protection of the State.” Amid a political and religious panic over reproduction, that’s all the rationale you need.
Children and caregiver in a Moscow orphanage, 2013
3. The new package
For some while, the US religious right has been flailing for arguments on social issues. It’s part of a broader syndrome across North America and Europe: for societies that are increasingly secular and increasingly diverse, pure appeals to religious opprobrium have lost their sway. Just repeating that homosexuality, abortion, contraception are wrong is not enough. They’ve tried grounding their case in scientific arguments, but these are sometimes hard to grasp and easy to discredit.
But when they look to Eastern Europe – a place where their conservatism should have fit but never quite did – they see something marvelous. There’s Putin, a powerful and successful leader, putting things together in a new package. He’s hit all the notes the US right has been straining for: morality, family, nationalism, cultural superiority, even economic independence. But he’s bolstered them with a demographic logic that‘s hard to argue down, and that links them all up in a new way. What an exciting model!
Putin with child: I won’t eat you if there are more like you at home
At least since the turn of the 21st century, arguments grounded in demography have been floating around on the right wing. The beauty of this science is that, unlike all those studies of child psychology or aversion therapy, it’s not technical or subjective. It seems mathematical, straightforward, and simple. The basic idea is this: societies that fall below a fertility rate of 2.1 – that is, 2.1 children born per woman – are doomed. This is called the replacement fertility rate, and the math is easy. To keep a society going at the same population numbers, every two parents must replace themselves with two kids. (The .1 is tacked on, more or less, to compensate for accidents of early mortality.) If you want population growth, you need an even higher rate, but 2.1 is the minimum for staying as you are.
Now, it’s actually more complicated. The replacement rate varies widely. Naturally it is higher in societies with high infant or adult mortality – 2.1 is usually accepted as a figure for developed countries, but in Nigeria or Swaziiand, for instance, replacement fertility stands at over 3.0. On the other side, in developed countries, postponing childbearing reduces population size even if people dutifully reproduce at replacement levels. (It pushes the replacement effect into the future, so that at any given time there are still fewer people alive). Immigration, of course, compensates for lack of population growth – the right-wing demographic argument against immigration treats it almost as an unnatural substitute for fertility, as creepily wrong as human cloning. The result is, though, that countries with fertility rates below 2.1 may not actually see substantial population loss.
We need more of these: Jan van Eyck, Lucca Madonna, 1436
Still, this doesn’t change the fact that in several developed European countries, fertility has fallen far below the replacement rate. Italy reposes at 1.4 children per woman, Germany, 1.41, Spain,1.48; Russia is better but still not growing, at 1.61. (The US is on the cusp of replacing itself, at 2.06.) It’s important to stress that this is not just a Western and Northern issue. In 2004, researchers found that half the world’s population now lived in below-replacement regions.
Below-replacement fertility is far from being restricted to the developed nations. Europe, North America and the other countries of the developed world make up less than half of the more than three billion people whose fertility is below 2.1.
Other areas included coastal China (1.5), Brazil (2.01), and Thailand (1.91). But it’s in Europe that the anxieties have been most acute. The BBC warned:
When the muscular superpower across the Atlantic continues to enjoy steady population growth [sic], old man Europe is in danger of becoming a shrivelled shadow of its former self. When will Europeans wake up to the implications of consistently low birth rates? Well, in the words of one European professor of population studies, probably not until they are all in their wheelchairs and they suddenly realize there is no one left to push.
Really? In what sense are below-replacement societies dying, “doomed”? You would think, from the apocalyptic rhetoric, that God or destiny dictated there be exactly 61.26 million Italians, and any falling-off triggers Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, there have been fewer Italians than that for nearly all history. So what’s the problem?
Contemporary right-wing analysis of demography has gone in two directions. There’s an economic approach, where below-replacement reproduction becomes a rationale for neoliberal policies. And there’s a cultural analysis, where it justifies xenophobia and racism.
Don’t ask me to push your wheelchair: Elderly home in Catalunya, Spain
On the economic side, the major result of a below-replacement fertility rate is that a larger percent of the population is older. This clearly puts strains on pensions, health care, and intergenerational relations in general, as a shrinking group of young people must help support more and more elders. One writer in Forbes, looking at Spain’s troubles (“What’s really behind Europe’s decline? It’s the birth rates, stupid”), explains they’re caused by “a change in values.”
A generation ago Spain was just coming out of its Francoist era, a strongly Catholic country with among the highest birth rates in Europe, with the average woman producing almost four children in 1960 and nearly three as late as 1975-1976. There was … “no divorce, no contraception allowed.” By the 1980s many things changed much for the better … Yet modernization exacted its social cost. The institution of the family, once dominant in Spain, lost its primacy.
You can’t get that old-time religion back, and it’s even hard to recover that old-time economics.
Essentially, Spain and other Mediterranean countries bought into northern Europe’s liberal values, and low birthrates, but did so without the economic wherewithal to pay for it. … an aging electorate is likely to make it increasingly difficult for Spanish politicians to tamper with pensions, cut taxes and otherwise drive private sector growth. …
Without a major shift in policies that favor families in housing or tax policies, and an unexpected resurgence of interest in marriage and children, Spain and the rest of Mediterranean face prospects of a immediate decline every bit as profound as that experienced in the 17th and 18th Century when these great nations lost their status as global powers and instead devolved into quaint locales for vacationers, romantic poets and history buffs. [emphasis added]
How awful. It’s hard not to draw the inference that, given low birth rates, upping the death rate a little wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Compañeros, the crisis in the pension system is now being solved
We don’t fully know what will happen as developed countries’ populations age. First, though, we must note that high-fertility, high-youth populations also strain economies intensely, but at the other end. They demand schools and jobs, and get angry if they don’t get them. (“Arab street” is one term for this, and means: Young Arabs scare me.) Second, while older people will at some point move out of waged, productive work, that doesn’t mean they will stop contributing to the economy — particularly if they’ve been paid enough in their lifetimes to invest, and continue investing. Meanwhile, an aging workforce will be less mobile, but more skilled – not necessarily a bad trade-off. Finally, the needs and dependency of growing numbers of the extremely old may actually strengthen intergenerational bonds of caring: a “conservative” effect that the conservatives neglect to mention. Society will change as it grows grayer, but that doesn’t point to breakdown.
On the cultural side, though, the doomsayers are even direr. Somebody has to replace all those missing Italians, and who will it be? Dark people. Aliens. Mordor. Fertility fears shade nicely into sheer racism.
The key article of faith is that declining population also means cultural decline and racial death. It’s “the end of the Italian race,” people proclaim, with pseudo-experts calculating the last Italian will be born in the year 3880. The immigrants will inherit the native earth. “If the Italian population declines quickly, the immigrants will arrive and Amen,” an Italian demographer said.
But we cannot stop at this. I study Mayan civilization and just as I regret their disappearance, I can regret it if the Italian or European culture were to disappear.
Reproductive terrorism: Which is worse, the burka or the birth?
Immigration and the threat of more dynamic societies with the capacity to grow: these are both staple fears of the modern right-wingers. They came to a head after 9/11, when the West felt itself facing both an overpopulated Muslim world full of anger, and the agents of rage inside our borders. In succeeding years demographic discourse started to take off. Popular post-9/11 books warned that Muslims would take over the West, if not by aggression, then through infiltration. Politicians picked up the panic. Relentless breeding in the Muslim world propelled emigration to Europe, they contended. Once there, migrants kept spawning. The result was reproductive terrorism:
Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, … Europe’s low white birth rate, coupled with faster multiplying migrants, will change fundamentally what we take to mean by European culture and society.
“Muslim Demographics,” seen over 14 million times on YouTube, epitomizes the Muslim-birthrate scare. Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana caused an uproar in 2012 by showing it at a Vatican meeting.
In his excellent book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Islam, Immigration, and the West, Doug Saunders sums up the research that debunks these war-cries. Population growth is uneven across majority-Muslim countries, but generally it’s falling. Dreaded Iran lies under the thumb of Lord Sauron himself; but the fertility rate is 1.87, and it can’t replace its orcs. Muslim migrants in Europe often appear to have high fertility, because families tend to have children soon after arrival; but the overall fertility rate across a woman’s lifetime is closer to European averages, and declining. Reliable projections show Europe’s Muslim population rising from 7% of the total now, to 10% at most. Some time bomb.
For the first half of the last decade, the demographic discourse mainly drew in neoconservatives: authoritarian and interventionist, forgiving of racism and xenophobia but disposed to a limited social liberalism. Several gay political figures embraced it, believing those multiplying Muslims were their enemies too. Peter Tatchell warned the gay press in 1995 that “Muslim fundamentalists are a growing threat to gay human rights in Britain. …There is no room for complacency. … homophobic Muslim voters may be able to influence the outcome of elections in 20 or more marginal constituencies.” Bruce Bawer, an American gay now living in Norway (and an intellectual influence on the mass murderer Anders Breivik) has shouted jeremiads about the Muslim threat for years, decrying ”a continent whose natives are increasingly being tormented by Koran-wielding tyrants, and increasingly in flight.”
White Power: Anders Breivik in court
The “demographic crisis” talk only fully merged with right-wing social issues around the time of Putin’s 2006 speech. That same year, Canadian conservative Mark Steyn published an influential essay, saying that “while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off.”
The medicine was garbled, but the message was clear: Islam could only get you after the “progressive agenda — lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism”— had done its work. That was “collectively the real suicide bomb.” Western politics lavished money on people’s selfish material needs, like food, but neglected “primary” concerns:
national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity —‘Go forth and multiply,’ because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare…. The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. …
Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone.We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
Here was the culture war in demographic terms. Another prominent conservative (now close to the National Organization for Marriage) amplified his warning: her response was headed, “It’s the sex, stupid.”
But behind the problem of the West’s below replacement fertility levels, lies the problem of sex. Babies come from sex. The modern view of sex has created the demographic collapse of the West, and the human void into which Islamic fertility is rapidly flooding. … The natural purposes of sex, both procreation and spousal unity, have become strictly optional…. I submit that this view of sex is at the root of the West’s demographic death spiral.
You can see how this fed into what Putin was saying. The “demographic crisis” can’t be countered by salving its aftereffects — giving the elderly health care, or damming up immigration. You have to fight the permissive policies that make people want not to reproduce.
Stop that. None of that here. (Engraving from Michael Maier’s Symbola Aureae Mensae, 1617)
It’s now a steady theme of demographic alarmism that sexual permissiveness paves the away for Islamic supremacy. Steve Mosher, of the Catholic anti-abortion group Population Research International, predicted that by 2100 Europeans would serve either beneath sex-mad secular dictatorships, or shari’a-ruled ones. “Either way, believers in once-Christian Europe … will be living under regimes that punish, even persecute, them for their beliefs.” Another conservative lamented ”lack of ideals, morality, and blatant debauchery among civilized society,” which meant that “Europe will eventually belong to Arabs and gypsies.” Philippe de Villiers, a right-wing French politician and sometime intimate of Nicolas Sarkozy, declared in 2009,
The reality is that we are headed for a crossover point [chassé-croisé] with, on one side, Europe and its mass abortions, its promotion of gay marriage, and on the other, immigration en masse … Europe refuses its own demographic future … In reality, there are two weapons being used by European leaders to kill Europe demographically: the promotion of gay marriage and mass abortions. And a third: the recourse to immigration that is 80% Islamic, in order to replace the people who are no longer there.
Farther east, Aleksei Ledyaev — who heads a Latvia-based Protestant church influential across the former Soviet Union, and who’s a close friend of Scott Lively –has written: “The first devastating wave of homosexuality prepares the way for the second and more dangerous wave of Islamization.”
Here’s where the World Congress of Families (WCF) started paying close attention to Russia.
Children of women: Sad times
The WCF is an offshoot of the caveman-conservative Rockford Institute, a think tank that achieved its greatest notoriety in 1989 when Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus broke relations, accusing it of anti-Semitism. Longtime Rockford president Allan Carlson left in 1997 to found the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society (these webs of interlocking groups remind one of Mafia fronts); the WCF was one of its first projects. On paper its main work is to hold irregular “World Congresses” assembling global “pro-family” advocates. In practice, as Kathryn Joyce wrote in 2008, it has been “a locus for heavyweight US conservative actors such as the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family — a Who’s Who of the American Christian right — to network with representatives from the Vatican, conservative Christians from developing nations and a smattering of Muslim groups seeking allies to fight gay and women’s rights at the United Nations.” As an anti-abortion organization with roots (through the parent Rockford Institute) in US nativist, anti-immigration, and racist tendencies, it found demographic thinking a natural match. It helped put together the 2008 documentary Demographic Winter, a horror film purporting to show humanity (with emphasis on nice white people) in numerical decline.
“Demographic Winter”: Be afraid, be very afraid
Like many other US right-wing groups, the WCF benefited from the door-opening, diplomatic support of the Bush administration. As that neared its expiration with no conservative renewal in sight, though, Carlson and his Congress began casting for other sponsors. They noticed, Joyce writes, potential new fields for “extremist patriarchal ideas to bloom: in Eastern European countries new to democracy and more accustomed to totalitarian traditions and an ultranationalism born of fear, poverty and porous borders.” She quotes Jon O’Brien of Catholics for Choice: “When you have someone powerful like Putin talking to people in these circumstances about the necessity of Russian women giving birth, then you have to worry about it — how that could be turned into policy.”
The WCF spent years courting Putin, but the climax was a 2011 conference they organized in Russia: the “Moscow Demographic Summit,” which brought together US, European and some global South right-wing and anti-reproductive rights activists to support Kremlin solutions. The spectacle of former American Cold Warriors praising a Soviet successor regime was not without irony, but “Russia is ground-zero for demographic winter,” explained WCF managing director Larry Jacobs. “If civilization is to survive, we must … devise family-centered solutions to this global crisis in the making.” Alan Keyes, a Reaganaut and former US presidential candidate, elaborated from his Moscow hotel:
When I left the U.S. on Monday, fresh in the headlines was the New York legislature’s vote to legitimize so called ‘homosexual marriage.” That event recurred to my mind again and again as I listened to speakers who impressed upon pro-life and natural-family representatives from 65 countries the sombre facts that document the enervation of natural family life in Russia … and the threat it poses to the very survival of the Russian people as such. … none of them failed to note that abortion and the breakdown of sexual mores were among the key factors contributing to the trend toward depopulation in their country.
With the US drifting into decadence while Putin purged his decks of perverts, Keyes wrote elegiacally that “America and Russia converge as ships passing in the night.”
Look, Ma, I made it to the Kremlin: US anti-feminist Janice Shaw Crouse speaks at Moscow Summit
Yelena Mizulina, chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children’s Affairs, and later a key sponsor of anti-LGBT legislation, praised the conference’s support for “consolidation of the family, raising moral standards, and studying all the factors contributing to a higher birth rate.” Surely much of the excitement for US participants, after three years of drought under Obama, came from feeling the warm endorsement of a powerful country. But the demographic arguments also gave the happy sense of having Science on one’s side. As Keyes intoned, “some Russians have apparently learned how to distinguish between intellectual integrity and intellectual cowardice in the application of scientific methods.”
It’s worth quoting from the Summit’s closing Declaration in detail. Significantly, it’s translated from the Russian — the main audience was domestic; but it also tried to reach beyond European constituencies. Some passages mimicked Kremlin language, echoing the “Traditional Values” resolution Russia was simultaneously pressing at the UN, with its crocodile tears for indigenous cultures:
Within next three decades, the total fertility rate will go down below the population replacement level all over the world. In reality, it can happen much earlier, thus making the whole world community face the unprecedented social and historical problem of humankind survival.
We express our deep concern about the dangers of the approaching worldwide depopulation. …. In the nearest historical period, the negative demographic trends can bring about extinction of whole peoples, destruction of States, and disappearance of unique cultures and civilizations.
But mostly it catalogued “social deviations” (including the simple refusal to marry or have children) demanding militant State intervention:
We are alarmed by the fact that the family institution is in a state of grave social crisis which consists in the destruction of universal family, conjugal and parental roles based on traditional family values; in the disruption of the reproductive function of the family; in an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, caused by the imposition of contraceptive thinking (in terms of safe sex) and destructive premarital and extramarital sex patterns; in widespread divorce; in the spreading of cohabitation without marriage; in increasing numbers of single-parent families; a wave of social deviations (abortions, homosexuality, pedophilia, drug addiction, refusal of marriage and childbearing (the child-free phenomenon), prostitution, pornography, etc.); disruption of the process of socialization of young generations; cutting of ties among relatives and alienation of different generations within one family, etc.
We call on the governments of all nations and on international institutions to develop immediately a pro-family demographic policy and to adopt a special international pro-family strategy and action plan aimed at consolidating family and marriage, protecting human life from conception to natural death, increasing birth rates, and averting the menace of depopulation.
Just like the good old days, gathering around the icon after the pogrom
The WCF followed up in 2012 by formally establishing a Russian affiliate, its only branch outside the US. “FamilyPolicy.ru,” an “advocacy group,” lists the WCF as its main founder (one of the two others, the “Family and Demography Foundation,” is a Russian group also nebulously affiliated with the WCF) – though I see no evidence that it’s been forced to register as a “foreign agent” under Putin’s repressive anti-NGO law. Its President, Aleksei Komov, is a former management consultant with his finger in many blinis. Late the same year, the Population Research Institute wrote that — after Putin’s administration held “discussions with pro-life and pro-family groups” — Komov had assembled “hundreds of pro-life and pro-family organizations, together with large families and activists from all over the Russian Federation” into a “National Parents Association (NPA)” with him as CEO. These weird pro-Putin front groups keep multiplying. Meanwhile, in Slavic solidarity, the WCF trotted the super-busy Komov off to Belgrade last month, to drive protests against a planned Serbian gay pride march. (”Russians also represent WCF as goodwill ambassadors to the UN and European structures,” the organization writes.)
But most of what the WCF’s Moscow affiliate does is political organizing for Putin. And here’s a big time irony: a US extreme right-wing group is busily doing its bit to build a Russian strongman’s political machine.
Aleksei Komov
The WCF’s Russia arm is all over the place. They organize spinoffs of their Moscow triumph: an “Ulyanovsk Demographic Summit,” “also a WCF regional event,” at which “the World Congress of Families and the Ministry of Labor and Social Development of the Russian Region of Ulyanovsk signed a historic Protocol of Intent pledging to work together to support the family and provide solutions to Russia’s well below replacement fertility rate.” These help motivate cadres of conservative Putin backers in the provinces: and almost certainly they’re a cover for Russian government money to fund the WCF. The hard-working minions also support the Kremlin’s international agenda in the near-abroad, drumming up “civil society” support in neighboring countries. Even before its incorporation, the FamilyPolicy.ru boys engineered a “Saint Petersburg Resolution on the anti-family trends in the United Nations,” with 126 pet NGOS from Russia and Ukraine condemning the “destructive aims” of “authoritative international organizations.” This June, they helped steer an “International Parents Forum” in Yalta, for groups from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova. The closing declaration took up Putin’s concern with defanging rights-based criticism: “We feel anger and indignation at the fact that the most fundamental and genuine human rights, the rights of family and parents, are being destroyed under the pretext of the protection of ‘human rights’” – adding, in a dig at Western kibitzers, “We are also concerned to see that freedom of believers is infringed in some countries of Europe.”
It’s a sign of how intimately they shelter under the Kremlin’s wing that the “World Congress of Families VIII,” the next big international confab, will be held in Moscow in September 2014. It’s like a cat proudly carrying a collection of international mice to its owner Putin. Larry Jacobs of WCF central says, “We’re convinced that Russia does and should play a very significant role in defense of the family and moral values worldwide, Russia has become a leader of promoting these values in the international arena.”
4. Putin as patron of the Right Wing 2.0
Americans are taking guided tours of Moscow all the time now. Brian Brown of the US’s “National Organization for Marriage,” it’s just been revealed, travelled there in June along with French right-wingers, to meet Duma members and express support for homophobic legislation. Scott Lively, of Uganda fame, was loping across Red Square last week. The lunatic preacher and Holocaust revisionist has longstanding ties to Russia — he serves a predominantly Slavic congregation in Springfield, Massachusetts. But what’s he doing there now? From his blog:
I participated in the planning meeting for the World Congress of Families VIII, which will take place September 2014 here in Moscow. There were representatives from several countries, all there to help the Russian planning group to ensure their conference is a success. About half the group was from the U.S., but Mexico, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Australia, New Zealand, Venezuela and France were also represented.
My European vacation: Scott Lively at St. Basil’s
It’s convenient for Americans to imagine that their right-wing compatriots are somehow running the show in Russia, as they may have in Uganda — laying out the basics of hate and telling Putin what to do. It’s a version that satisfies our narcissism.
But it’s not true.
Putin’s the patron here. He’s helped bring the demographic argument to the frontlines of right-wing thought. He shows how to mesh campaigns against feminism and sexual rights with xenophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant hysteria. He’s stepping in to provide State patronage that US social conservatives lost when Bush stepped down. He has money and power, and he doesn’t take directions.
I mentioned Paul Cameron at the outset. Cameron is crazed — but his rhetoric for decades was largely driven by wild theories about the individual homosexual. In recent years, though, he’s shifted. His discourse draws more and more on demographic fears. This was clear during a Moldova lecture tour in 2008. An Orthodox priest quoted him later:
It is necessary for every woman of a nation to give birth to 2.1 children, so that that nation may perpetuate, while in the Republic of Moldova, every woman gives birth to 1.3 children. In this way, the population of Moldova will be halved in 35 years. Among the factors that have brought us to this demographic disaster, it is so-called “woman’s emancipation” …
… and so on. Some time later he produced an extended tract, “Saving Society from Demographic Suicide.” It had his characteristic, charming overreach (“Does this mean that the voluntarily childless are stealing from their neighbors? Absolutely”) but otherwise it was indistinguishable from the Russian line: birth rates, fertile women, bad abortion, bad gay marriage, and all that. This language will meet a warm reception when the man makes it to Moscow at the end of this month, at the behest of a Russian Pentecostal group. (“How to Escape Demographic Murder?” Moskovskij Komsomolets headlines his junket.) If this synthetic rhetoric can penetrate a concrete bunker of a mind like Cameron’s, it can go anywhere.
I predict these arguments from demography will spread, and that women’s movements and LGBT movements everywhere will face them. It’s bad science, but — even more than conversion therapy and they-want-your-children — it’s seductive. And it lends itself to fertile new coalitions with other fear-based movements.
Come with me to the Kremlin: Whispering sweet nothings in infant ear
True, the approach, with its Islamophobic implications, may endanger the alliances with majority-Muslim governments that US conservatives painstakingly forged against sexual rights over 15 years. But Putin’s regime is far more powerful as a patron than Pakistan or Egypt. Seen from Rockford, Illinois, losing the latter to win the former isn’t a bad bargain. True, too, the origins of the argument are Eurocentric, and may prove off-putting in Africa or Asia. But Russia, with its “traditional values” rhetoric at the UN, is already trying to position itself to lead a socially conservative bloc of States in international venues. If you were Scott Mosher or Allan Carlson or Austin Ruse, you’d trust Putin with the hard work of getting Southern countries on board. Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin has already suggested this is a global duty for Russian diplomacy: ”Recent events abroad have shown us the acute nature of the issue concerning the defense of traditional values. We must assert our point of view in international discussions. After all, we’re speaking on behalf of the overwhelming majority of Russian citizens.”
In the New Right 2.0 that has Putin as patron, groups like the WCF are loud — but subordinate. They’ll make their noises, but they’ll do what they’re told. When Brian Brown or Scott Lively trek to Moscow, they more and more resemble minor Soviet-era satellite dictators, a Husák or Rákosi or Gomułka come to fawn over the top dog and do obeisance. They can strut and posture and piss over the territory back in their own back yards, but they know who leads the pack.
The population panic and the argument that demography-is-destiny aren’t new. We’ve seen them before — not least as a large component of Fascist ideologies in the ’20s and ’30s. Again these anxieties are stirring in a time of economic misery, social unrest, and fear. Again they have a Great Power propagandizing for them. And again they’ve collected a motley crew of fellow travellers, not in brown shirts but in black cassocks or suits and ties. It’s a dangerous time: not because humanity is dying out, as the woman-hating doomsayers claim, but because human values of diversity, cooperation, and understanding are yet again under threat.
Time to fight back.
Good motherhood; Cover from Frauen Warte, Nazi women’s magazine, 1937
