Ideas To Consequences

Today we have two items from diverse sources that are linked:

First, this from the Catholic News Agency on tensions between the Vatican and the UN and the EU about birth control policies:

The fiercely anti-life nature of both organizations, notes Magister, has been proven recently by a book published in Italy entitled, "Against Christianity: The UN and the European Union as a New Ideology," written by Eugenia Roccella y Lucetta Scaraffia.

Rocella, who is not Catholic, is "a prominent advocate of the feminist movement," while Scaraffia is professor of modern history at the La Sapienza University in Rome.

In his column, Magister offers an analysis of the book, highlighting among other things that Rocella and Scaraffia "identify the root of the new ideology as the 'separation between sexuality and procreation.'
..."

The "separation between sexuality and procreation"? It's more than even just that.

Sexuality has two purposes: bringing together two people and cementing their bond, and engendering children. Promiscuous sex for pleasure separates sexuality from both of its purposes.

It's a point of view, to be sure. But ideas have consequences.

Chuck Colson draws our attention to those consequences in this piece:

The "birth dearth" is what demographers call plummeting birth rates in most of the industrialized world. Throughout Western Europe and East Asia, the birth rate is well below 2.1 births per woman—which is the minimum needed to maintain a stable population.

Environmentalist dogma argues that plummeting birth rates are a good thing: People cause pollution, we're told. Well, officials in countries like Japan, Korea, and Germany now know better. In these and other so-called "advanced" societies, shrinking populations threaten their way of life and their cultural identity.

In Japan, for example, a birth rate that is barely half of "replacement level" has forced the closure of more than two thousand schools in the past ten years, with hundreds more closures to come. It’s left the government wondering who will support Japan’s aging population. These and other concerns, like the possible extinction of the Japanese people, have prompted older Japanese to call their childless children "parasite singles."

In Germany, the population of some villages has shrunk so much that "there are now too few people flushing for the sewage to properly flow." As a result, the government has had to spend scarce resources on retrofitting sewage systems.

Elsewhere in Germany and the rest of Europe, the emptying landscape provides an opening for an unlikely immigrant: the wolf. German biologists expect the growing packs to head soon toward Berlin.

It seems that nature really does abhor a vacuum.