Family values includes valuing family - Republicans outbreeding Democrats

NewsMax.com: Inside Cover Story:
"David Brooks, one of the few voices of sanity at the New York Times, summarizes the issue: 'They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.'"

Carl Limbacher of NewsMax.com notes that the latest scary idea the Dems have to deal with is that the Republican heartland is growing faster than the Democrat urban corridors of the Northeast and West Coast. He reports that Brooks' article in the NYT noted a finding by Steve Sailer writing in The American Conservative that Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates while Kerry took the 16 lowest.

Limbacher also offers this interesting fact: "USA Today notes that President Bush won 474 of the nation's 573 fast-growing micropolitan areas (places too urban to be rural but too small to be metropolitan)."

Demographics is too often overlooked in politics because of unfortunate associations with racism and ethnocentrism. But it played a key role in the collapse of the power-sharing agreement between Christian (mostly Maronite Catholic), Muslim and Druze communities that allowed Lebanon to flourish for a generation after WW2 as the banking and cultural center of the Middle East. I have written elsewhere on the role of differential fertility rates between Arabs and Jews within Israel (not Palestine, just the present borders of Israel proper) in supplying a motivation to negotiate peace now rather than later. The rapid rise of the Muslim population in Europe is only partly a result of Muslim immigration per se, but also of the differential fertility rates of Muslims and Christians (in several EU countries, the overall fertility rate is as low as 1.3 or 1.6 which is well below the replacement rate of 2.1).