The Religious Right Would Like to Wish You a Happy Halloween With Their Latest Misogynistic, Xenophobic Horror Flick

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

I'm starting to get nervous. Halloween is fast approaching and I still haven't thought of a costume. But earlier this week I did come up with a fallback option: I could always be a demographic bomb. After all, what's scarier than a "major social and economic upheaval not seen in the Western World since the Dark Ages?"

Such is the warning from Demographic Bomb: Demography is Destiny. The hour-long "documentary" is a sequel to the "movie" Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family, released in February 2008 by Family First Foundation and described by Kathryn Joyce (author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement) as a re-branding of the "old-fashioned race panic as low fertility among white 'Western' couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe." The movement calls itself "pro-family," but it seems focus on a specific type of social organizing unit called the "natural family."

The little blond girl in the ad (pictured to the right) with her skin color being turned all kinds of unnatural colors does kind of set one into a panic, no?

Basically, both movies contend that there is some sort of shady international movement afoot to bring the world's population down to catastrophically low levels, beginning with Europe and the U.S. (incidentally, they don't really explain why someone would want that, except to insist that some people would benefit from the chaos, and that back in the 1960s it was thought of as the only way to continue to thrive on the shrinking planet).

This new sequel, promoted in an e-mail sent out by America's Conservative News Tuesday afternoon, tries to renew interest by capitalizing on the fear and dislocation caused by the economic meltdown, which they call "just a birth pang" and an ominous sign of the turmoil yet to come. I suppose Goldman Sachs is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse?

Joyce interviewed proponents of the movement for her article published in The Nation last year, and it seems they felt betrayed, judging by the reaction to her article circulated in Tuesday's over-bolded and -italicized e-mail blast:

Of course, such idiotic accusations ignore the facts... mainly that many non-European countries are also experiencing below replacement level birth rates, and that Europe is drawing heavily upon the developing countries to replace laborers they are not producing, socially and economically impacting these countries severely.

Moreover, such accusations also turn the obvious premise of the documentary on its head — namely that all societies must work to promote policies which will bring birth rates above the replacement level.

According to the most recent estimates by the CIA, though, of the 25 countries with the lowest birthrate worldwide only five -- Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan -- are non-European. And the top 25 in terms of birthrate? All of them are in Africa except Afghanistan. Four of the top five in terms of birth rate are majority Muslim countries. So while racism may not be the defining factor, it may be the fear of non-Christian religious hegemony.

Indeed, Joyce's investigation in 2008 left her with the feeling that anti-Muslim sentiment was closely tied with this movement, imagined by some as a "new phase of holy war."

What was a conservative drumbeat about Europe's death has become mainstream media shorthand, complementing ominous news items about Muslim riots in France; Muslim boycotts in London; Muslim "veil" debates in Denmark; and empty European churches transformed into mosques, with calls to prayer replacing church bells...

Despite the lip service the profamily movement gives to uniting all the "children of Abraham" against common enemies, the sense of a more tangible foe -- Muslim immigration -- bleeds through their cooperative rhetoric. Farooq Hassan, a Harvard law professor and one of the few Muslim representatives in this profamily movement, chastised his colleagues for their transparent appeals to nationalism: "The rest of the world doesn't have the same problems as Europe. The Western world wants more people in Europe, but you don't care if there are more families in the Third World. You want less families there." 

More than a year and a half later, the religious right's fear-mongering about Obama as a Muslim is only the most visible reaction to what they see as an attempt to "Islamize" America. And the backlash against Muslims having a public day of prayer last Friday is merely the latest evidence of the growing acceptance of Islamophobia in this country.

Of course, the natural family proponents are also militantly against the women's rights movement. In the e-mail they sent out, they equated making family planning and contraceptive resources available to women with "genocide" and "eugenics," charging that feminism is merely a cover for the "population-control movement."

In the United States, abortion and birth-control are promoted under the banner of "women's rights" — that's not by accident — but in much of the world, abortion and birth-control are promoted through coercion... abortion and birth-control are mandated by the state.

Right. Because Gloria Steinem is also a soldier in the People's Liberation Army.

The sheer ridiculousness of women's lib pioneers forcing people to have abortions aside, the word "eugenics" didn't make it in there by accident. Though the e-mail charges the family-planning movement with promoting it, eugenics is found in the roots of "pro-family" movements like this one. Joyce points to the writings of historian Claudia Koonz for a connection between wartime Europe and the natural family movement (emphasis mine):

Under Fascism's extreme gender divisions and the escalating sense of crisis pervading the country, early eugenic motherhood schools and rewards for fertile women morphed by war's end into the brutalizing demographic demands of the Lebensborn breeding program. Designed to mass-produce more Aryan soldiers and factory hands as part of the "motherhood crusade," Lebensborn castigated "selfish" women who weren't doing their part to guarantee the increase and preservation of the race.

The implication of current pronatalist policies, that women are the source of population problems, may be less extreme... but it is still deeply troublesome.

Such language as found in the e-mail blast seems to be too harsh for the trailer for the new movie, however, which is floating in vague apocalyptic warnings and scientific-looking graphics. The video is replete with charts and diagrams that flash onscreen so quickly and with so little explanation that they function as mere technical window dressing. But in the e-mail, they do go into greater detail about one factoid from Demographic Winter that they seem particularly proud of.

In the movie they interview Harry Dent, an investment manager who is portrayed as the genius who foresaw the Japanese economic downturn in the 1990s and the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassing 10,000, predicting "approximately when both events would happen."

His next great achievement is taking the U.S. annual birthrate and the year-to-year fluctuations of the Dow Jones and laying them on top of each other, sort of. He couldn't get them to match up just right until he shifted them 45-50 years apart. Here's what the folks behind Demographic Winter had to say about that miracle:

And presto, the above picture appears to show a direct relationship between the birth rate and the future Dow Jones.

In other words, fluctuations in the birth rate appear to directly correspond to fluctuations in the Dow Jones... 45-50 years into the future.

Now, here's the bad news: If Dent's graphical comparison is valid... what does the above picture say when it comes to the future of the Dow Jones and the market in general?

Oh. My. God. Call your stock broker; half of us are going to die between 2053 and 2058! The e-mail warns of birthrates spiraling down, euthanasia and a "culture of death" (whatever that means) as a result.

What could have possibly caused this terrible downward spiral? Thankfully, these intrepid filmmakers know exactly how we got here:

As we promoted a culture of population-control abroad and devalued the status of the natural family here at home... through no-fault divorce, abortion-on-demand, birth-control, radical feminism, the promotion of sex-education to the very young in our public schools and the celebration of behaviors that were considered perverse and unnatural throughout history, we forced birth rates below the replacement level at home and abroad. And in doing so, we may have condemned ourselves and the rest of world to a hell of our own making.

Is it possible that we have been failed by the progressive ideas we thought would save us?

I knew it! I'm the demographic bomb! As the pro-choice, feminist defender of sex-ed in school who has no earthly desire to have children, it is my "celebration of behaviors that were considered [by religious zealots and cultural fascists] perverse and unnatural throughout history" that has damned us all to hell. I mean come on, you knew dirty progressives like me were behind this, didn't you?

Well, that settles it; I know what I'm going as this Halloween. But how to pull it off? Of course, my mother's hand-me-down "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" T-shirt will have to emerge from the closet. And maybe I'll pick up that button that says "equality" in Arabic that I've been eyeing. I'll carry around a banana with a condom on it and hand out business cards for lawyers offering quickie divorces.

Eh, that sounds like a lot of work. Maybe I'll just stay in and watch fantastical right-wing snuff films. After all, both Demographic Winter and Demographic Bomb can be mine to own for just $34.95!

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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