Yep, there really is a Stop Having Kids movement. There is a strong death cult thread in contemporary Leftist. We see this most clearly in the pro-abortion movement, extreme environmentalism and not so subtle attempts to normalize pedophilia. Belloc saw it all coming over a century ago:
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk In that ancient and solemn truth, ” Sine Auctoritate nulla vita.”
In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last. Yet there is one real interest in watching the Barbarian and one that is profitable. The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom. It is not he in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great and ancient body of Christendom, but if we come to see him triumphant we may be certain that that body, from causes much vaster than such as he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming for him a congenial soil—and that is as much as to say that we are dying.
Hilaire Belloc, This and That and the Other, Chp 32, p. 281-83, (1912).
It is easy to understand contemporary Leftism if one comprehends that, first and foremost, most of it is simply a death wish for Western Civilization. I am betting on God and Western Civilization.
They are more than welcome to stop having kids. They won’t tell me what to do, or otherwise I’ll tell them to stop holding up signs with their opinions on it. And call it “the stop shoving your opinions down my throat” movement. Fairs is fair.
Same garbage since at least the 60s. They get folks to feel mildly embarrassed about having kids, and get to preen for being lazy and selfish, and they still can’t manage to make it spread well.
/shrug
As with many things, my response is “You first.” In a couple generations there won’t be anyone left that follows that nonsense, they’ll all be dead.
@ Ezabelle & @Foxfire: Well, The memo certainly didn’t get out to a very red western state(s) (I am near the border of 2) where I live now— about young people needing to reject being married and to not have children. Everywhere here there are large LDS and Evangelical Christian families—a horror to the Left. And there is a fierce movement to fix the public schools, because even here the Hate-America and “Sustainable Growth” meme has crept into some of them.
The Catholic Church? MIA. Well, we all know they are joined at the hip with the most radical elements of the Democratic Party, and are trying to mug agreeably with Pope Peron (That hasn’t worked out very well for Bp. McElroy of San Diego, who has been marooned there for 7 years with no awarded archepiscopacy candy bar, despite shamelessly saying all the right things; or Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles, who desperately wants that red hat —mimicking P. Peron every day—and likely will never get it. Sellouts). However, traditional Catholic parishes, FSSP, SSPX, and CMRI are thriving in places like Post Falls (ID), Coeur d’Alene and Spokane—large families and full churches.
Hope on the horizon: By now everyone has heard that US collegiate enrollment has dropped since prepandemic levels by at least 5%, nearly 1,000,000 students (NPR, WaPo, NYT). They are gone, and not coming back for a worthless online education the costs well into 6 figures and teaches futurist nihilism. If the collegiate bubble bursts, and it looks like it has, the indoctrination camps may continue to wither away and become irrelevant as—NPR or the NYT.
Steve – it’s good to see evidence of the tide turning. I think people are fed up with the Godlessness of leftist ideology. Always telling society what they should say, think and do.
“The Catholic Church? MIA” – only when it wants to be. The Pope did recently label people who choose pets over having children as selfish. But then again, he’s put a golden figure of 3 children per family as being “about right” because we mustn’t breed like “rabbits”. He’s pretty skilled at insulting all sections of society- the childless and those with children equally. I can’t keep up.
These Leftist people’s self hatred is sick. Why they think their opinion should matter to me, I have no idea. Their nonsolutions the nonproblems they create in order to be agitated, which they appear to use to make their lives seem meaningful to themselves, are down eight hilarious. The human body was created to procreate. Again, these folks are rebelling against their Creator & His purpose for them—and their rebellion will have the predictable results of needless suffering & death.
The left looks down on people having children, and they are rabid about defending killing children in utero.
But their own hostility to having and raising children doesn’t mean the left will inevitably die out. It just means they have to recruit the children of others. And they seem to have been doing that rather successfully, with their stranglehold on the education and entertainment industries…
I think that success is overstated Clinton. The Republican party is stronger on the state level than it has been since the twenties of the last century. I think what was has been called the Roe effect is just beginning to be felt.
Part of the illusion of success is that they make it very hard to have the entire pack out at once, and then they don’t see any groups of kinds– so poof, there aren’t any kids.
…. meanwhile, I keep the horde to times and places I know are at least not opposed to the existence of children, though the last two years have been rather nasty.
When we started homeschooling the Princess, about one in ten kids was strictly home-schooled– that means not even doing public school sports or clubs. By the time the Kung Flu came around, it was roughly one in five.
Now?
We don’t even have the stats to know, but several schools have been caught claiming that home schoolers have to register as if they are distance learning for the school, and I know that the Des Moines public schools (the ones that were forcing masks) actually had enrollment shrink, even before the recent shooting.
Related to the drafting-other-folks’-kids rather than having their own thing:
https://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com/2022/04/03/sex-in-school-boundary-violations/
I’m encouraged to see woke school boards challenged by parents more often these days, and the shrinking enrollment in universities, especially among young men, might make higher ed reappraise the toxic woke environment it’s created on campus. Let’s hope such trends continue.
As Art Deco and others have pointed out here repeatedly, the state legislatures have the power to rein in “woke” public education. They must do so. The schools will send their lobbyists to the state capitals to beg for even more public money to offset the losses of students. Instead they should have their funding cut drastically. It wouldn’t be hard. What’s hard is for spineless Republicans to gather courage to exercise the power they have in those numerous states where they hold majorities in the legislatures. If that forces Dem governors to veto bills, so much the better. Those governors can then be targeted. If this is the hill they choose to die on, let’s help them along.