FREE SEX DEMOGRAPHIC DISASTER
Free
Sex is a Demographic Disaster
Friday,
June 22, 2007
By Tristan Emmanuel
ECP Centre President
I
remember when I was in high school and we had elections for student council. One
of the candidates for student body president employed a very crass but effective
campaign strategy.
He
made huge posters and wrote the word "SEX" on them in enormous red
letters. You could read that word from the other end of a long hallway - and
that's all you could read.
Of
course, we, as teenagers were drawn to these posters like vultures to a carcass.
When you got up close to the notices, there was some very fine print across the
bottom.
Just
a single line.
The letters were so small that you had to get your nose to within just a few
inches of the poster to read them. And the line was, "Now that we have your
attention, vote [John Smith] for Student Council President."
Like I said, crass, but he got his message across.
I was reminded of this campaign as I was reading some statistics on Canada's
declining birthrate the other day. As a nation, we are not producing enough
children of our own, and we're relying more and more on immigration to fill the
growing void.
School Boards in districts across this country are struggling with projections
from demographers which say that up to 30% of their schools could be sitting
empty within 6 to 10 years. Schools from Vancouver to Halifax are closing as our
society realigns itself to the coming demographic reality.
But it won't just be schools that feel the effects; everything from social
security, to the labour force to the housing market will be impacted by the
declining birthrate. And if you look at it in these economic terms, it's
surprising that so few people seem to be getting the point.
Well some have - like those at Macleans news magazine. But even they danced
around the issue in a recent lead story they published on the problem.
You see, unlike the candidate for Student Council President back in my
highschool days, who only used the word "sex" as a marketing ploy to
get our attention, the looming demographic crisis in Canada - and indeed around
much of the Western world - has a direct correlation to our view of the issue of
sex and very few want to talk about it.
Basic biology, of course, tells us there's a connection between the birth rate
and sexual activity.We don't need to explain that. But we do need to explain the
huge connection, in fact, intimate connection - between our society's obsession
with free sex, and our declining birthrate.
The more "sexually liberated" we have become, the fewer children we're
having, and this means that, as we exercise our libidos, we are exorcising our
future.
Ironic isn't it? The very act that creates life and that is to be enjoyed in the
proper context is largely contributing to our death as a culture and a people.
It wasn't too many years ago that Canadian society - and by this I don't just
mean Christians or the church - but society as a whole, had a common
understanding that marriage and family were institutions that were created,
primarily to provide a place for the legitimate expression of sexuality, with
one of the purposes of that being human procreation and, with that, the
perpetuation of civilization.
But ever since the so-called 'sexual revolution' of the 1960's, sex and sexual
relationships have become all about self-fulfillment, and the increased interest
in sex has come at the expense of a commitment to family, children, inheritance
and the future.
We see this self-centeredness and present-oriented mentality everywhere: our
high divorce rates, multiple sex partners, STDs and abortions among younger and
younger teens, and the list goes on.
The courts haven't helped either.Their redefinition of parenthood from something
biological to something legal, as in "legal parents" - which can also
include homosexuals or even single-parent adoptions - has gutted the entire
definition of marriage and family
As researcher Seana Sugrue has written in the context of the discussion about
Canada's homosexual marriage laws, "marriage no longer serves the interests
of children. [And] without marital norms, adults have little reason to believe
that they owe duties to the children they beget. Children become chosen, not
begotten.They are thereby treated as appendages to a marriage, as commodities,
and as problems" affecting our autonomy, our independence and our careers.
If we wonder about why we're having fewer babies, we need look no further than
the fact that as a society, we've fallen for the trap of that three-letter word,
written in huge block letters on the far wall of the school.
SEX. In capital letters.With no strings attached, no responsibility, and
especially no inconvenient consequences.
Of course the fine print is unmistakably there: Sex with no strings and no
responsibility equals a Society with no children and no future.