Breeding Like Drunken Ferrets

Pro Ecclesia links to another high-larious opinion rant by SFGate columnist Mark Morford titled: "Stats say the GOP is dying. But red-staters are breeding like drunken ferrets. Who wins?"

Sometimes the title says it all, doesn't it. Morford is worked up over statistics that say social conservatives are significantly out-reproducing social liberals, while other stats show that children generally retain the political affiliation of their parents, and that this trend is accentuated among conservative religious groups. (He even hurls out, curse-like, the word "homeschooling" as one of the sources of all this trouble.)

From the horse's mouth (or some orifice of the horse at any rate):

According to another set of data, for the past 30 years or so, conservatives -- particularly those of the right-wing red-state Christian strain -- have been out-breeding liberals by a margin of at least 20 percent, if not far more.

It's true. The reason? Why, God loves babies, of course. White American babies, most especially. Also: issues of space, religion, sexual orientation and, of course, conscience. Or, you know, lack thereof.

One theory goes like this: Libs are generally more socially conscious and hence tend to actually give a modicum of thought to what it means to pop out a brood of children in this modern overstuffed age. Also, many other liberal bohos are (admittedly) happy selfish suckwads who want all the modern booty for themselves and won't want to give up the Ducati and the plasma and the biannual trip to Cinque Terre for the sake of a pod of rug rats and 15 grand a year (each) for private kindergarten. Translation: Libs just aren't procreating like they could/should be.

Conservative Christians, of course, have no such conscience. Among the right-wing God-lovin' set, there is often little real awareness of planetary health or resource abuse or the notion that birth control is actually a very, very good idea indeed, and therefore it's completely natural to worship at the altar of minivans and SUVs and megachurches and massive all-American entitlement and have little qualm about popping out six, seven, 19 gloopy tots to populate the world with frat boys and Ford F-150 buyers and food court managers.

Nice to know there's no classist prejudice involved, eh?

Now, if this were just another pathetic rant from a hateful person, it wouldn't really be worth commenting on (goodness knows the capacity of humans to hate is not news at this point in history) but it strikes me there's something a bit interesting about this in that the very absurdity of its excess underlines one of the persistant problems with the way that many of us in the modern world have come to think about ourselves.

Pick your starting point: the ancient Greeks, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Romanic Era -- whatever the starting point people have come to see themselves first and foremost as individuals. Now, this is not without truth. We are individuals, possessed of a unique and immortal soul as well as a unique set of DNA. But we are also and at the same time animals, members of class mammalia just like anything else warm blooded, furry and, in the case of females of the species, to one extent or another endowed.

To the extent that we are individual, intelectual, and spiritual creatures, we have purposes in life such as self realization, knowledge, wisdom and discerning and loving the truth. However, in that we are also a species of animals, we have the purpose (as a population, though not necessarily each one of us individually) of bearing and rearing children. This doesn't necessarily mean breeding like rats, but it does mean breeding -- at as an annoying necessity, the effects of which to be shoved off upon daycare workers, nannies and schools as soon as possible, but as one of the central purposes of our lives. Species exist to reproduce themselves, not to own nice condos, have ocean views, own expensive cars and foster bleeding-hearted but generally condescending political opinions.

Not only is an ideology or lifestyle which scorns reproduction doomed to extinction, it is also fundamentally at odds with what we are as members of the human species.


But all other things aside: Have you watched ferrets? Can you imagine drunken ferrets? If we conservatives are going to breed, let's definately do it like drunken ferrets.