RELIGIOUS FASCISTS SAY GOD WANTS MORE BABIES, BUT THIS MAKES FOR INCONCEIVABLE POLICY

 

For reasons unknown, certain Americans tried to fob off a National Day of Prayer on us this week. But we instead observe a National Day of Slayer; it’s basically the same thing, except we recite Skeletons of Society at the end.

Although it’s also Mother’s Day as we write this, so maybe we should switch to Drunk Drivers Against Mad Mothers instead? Which would be most orthodox?

Well we’d better decide fast, because it turns out we might not have many more Mother’s Days, since apparently Americans are dying out? Have you heard about this?

It’s not climate change or mass shootings or even our diets that’s doing it, evidently the problem is just mortality. Famously, there’s nothing anyone can do about that, but in this case it’s coupled with the additional hazard of people having fewer babies to replace those of us who are dying.

That sounds to us neither like a problem nor like something someone could solve even if it were. But apparently theocratic weirdos have gotten it into their heads to try anyway.

 

“Angels look majestic, but try asking one of them to change a diaper.”

 

We have a few Satanist parents at Satanic Bay Area, but we’d guess that the majority of our congregation are childless.

It is just a guess though, because we don’t go around doing any kind of very specific census, both because it’s none of our business and also because we remember what happened last time Satan fucked with a census, and who has time for that?

But some people can’t help throwing the baby out with the sabbath water, and for several years now there’s been a low-level freak out from America’s freak-right about an alleged natal crisis that, judging from the volume of noise about it, ranks somewhere between Super Bowl meatloafs and the Cracker Barrel guy in terms of how soon it’s going to expedite the collapse of the republic.

Elon Musk, the only man in history to be born already divorced, has been banging on about this for years now, declaring “low birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and insisting “if you don’t make new humans all the policies in the world don’t matter.” 

Which, again, sounds to us more like an excuse to knock off early than to dedicate ourselves to becoming human Xerox machines, but apparently this is not what he meant.

This is particularly a meme on the fascist right, which has convinced itself over the past five years that white people specifically are in danger of extinction from not churning enough new mayo. 

White House spokesnazi Stephen Miller–the only man in the world who, were he to undergo a Kafkaesque Metamorphosis into a giant insect, would probably not notice the difference–has spent decades of what amounts to his life pushing “replacement” paranoia–the fear that if white people don’t have more children then the children of immigrants will outnumber them, and then…well it doesn’t really matter honestly, but he’s worried about it all the same.

For many others, this is a weird religious/”cultural” thing. The Heritage Foundation, modern America’s equivalent of Operation Paperclip for US Protestants, complained in a 2024 opinion piece in Der Federalist that “birth rates are plummeting” and since “birth control is widely available and children are not needed to work on the farm.” Imagine.

The problem is apparently that American women are too educated. Oh, of course.

“They remain in school much longer before they feel equipped to pursue getting married and having children,” the beltway Gauleiters grouse, which, again, is a real crisis on account of…vibes? I guess?

It’s true that Americans are having fewer children. Johns Hopkins Medical School estimates that the US birthrate hit an all-time low in 2024. Although since birthrates are still outpacing death rates the population isn’t actually in decline, which does rather call into question all of this fretting about population decline.

If this trend continues then at some point the population will contract. But that’s like saying that if I continue to only sit in this chair indefinitely I will at some point die of dehydration. 

 

Charley Bates and Artful Dodger plead for clemency.

It’s worth pointing out that a significant part of this decline is the enormous generational drop in teenage motherhood, which plummeted 70 percent in the past 20 years according to Fox News Faux Doctor Marc Siegel.

Back roughly 10,000 years ago in the 1990s, American reactionaries considered this the major crisis of our times, wailing about single teenage motherhood in between bouts of wailing about abortion, condoms, sex education, and anything else that would prevent single teenage motherhood.

Turns out “single” was the only part of that equation they didn’t like. American conservatives want teenage girls as pregnant as possible rather than pregnant with possibilities, as we see from the baffling tableau that played out in Oklahoma this week, a state that barely managed to pass a law against child marriage over the objections of lawmakers who cited Genesis to argue that since god didn’t specifically tell them not to fuck children there shouldn’t be a law about it either.

If you really want people to have more kids in America, the solutions aren’t a mystery: Lower the cost of living, make housing more attainable, offer paternity leave and subsidized childcare, and in general just make people optimistic about both the future and the present.

You know. Commie shit.

Instead, the powers-that-beatitude have decided that divine and historical coercion is going to be their plan B (not to be confused with Plan B, which they of course are against). “Religion has historically been a pronatalist force,” Catholic University of America scholars(?) wrote in 2021, observing that it “fosters traditional gender role attitudes,” by which they of course mean relegating more than half the population to the role of ambulatory incubators.

But hey, guess what? We’re a religion, despite some people chronically overlooking this fact. And the only role we’re interested in for your gender and your body is…whichever one you want.

Having babies is a beautiful thing. So is not having them, if that’s what you’d prefer. Either way it amounts to roughly the same thing in our book, which is that it’s your body and your life and you can make your own decisions about both of them.

Religion needs to acknowledge, empower, and license ownership of your body. Otherwise, what the hell good is it?

It’s actually a little sad how obvious the desperate, sweaty misogyny and obsessive megalomania coming off the political, cultural, and religious agendas of forced natalism weirdos has become.

These people act as if they’ll shit their organs out and die if they have to even contemplate a world where they don’t make your decisions for you. And, honestly, we wish. 

But you’re never going to think and pray your way into a baby boom, because deep down people know that their bodies are their choice. Even when it comes to the kind of people who conveniently forget that about everyone else.

“McMartin parents alarmed by reports that Satan, St. Michael played Keepaway with younger children at the daycare.”