MARK STEYN on Birth Rates

LUCID AND CONCISE AS ALWAYS IN The strange death of the liberal West

In practice, a culture that thinks Terri Schiavo's life in Florida or the cleft-lipped baby's in Herefordshire has no value winds up ascribing no value to life in general. Hence, the shrivelled fertility rates in Europe and in blue-state America: John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birth rates; George W Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.

The 19th-century Shaker communities were forbidden from breeding and could increase their number only by conversion. The Euro-Canadian-Democratic Party welfare secularists seem to have chosen the same predicament voluntarily, and are likely to meet the same fate. The martyrdom culture of radical Islam is a literal dead end. But so is the slyer death culture of post-Christian radical narcissism. This is the political issue that will determine all the others: it's the demography, stupid.

If I were a fundamentalist Christian I'd put it another way:

It seems almost as if God has said to the Republicans: "Be fruitful and multiply," while Satan has winked at the Democrats and said, "Cut it out."

American Digest