The Supposed Horror of Demographic Winter

…and the utter incoherence of the Christian prolife witness is on full display with the Party of Trump’s new move to strangle legal immigration.

Recall that a few years ago, full of paranoia about our Kenyan Muslim President and the War on Terror and all that, the Right was freaking out about Demographic Winter. The Mooslum Hordes were outbreeding us Christians! If Americans didn’t heed the call to get busy in the bedroom, we’d be hip deep in this foreign religion! It was all proof that Humanae Vitae was right, that we needed to have larger families, that life truly was being affirmed and that the judgment of God was falling on a contracepting United States.

Fine and dandy. Let’s keep America a predominantly Christian nation. As a Christian and as somebody who thinks the Church’s teaching on the sacredness of life from conception to natural death is true–and who even supports and practice Humanae Vitae‘s teaching–I’m all for it!

Oh! And look! What a wonderful blessing and mercy from God! 20 million Christians–hard-working, family oriented, and even Catholic–are here and have been here for decades. Reagan thought it was crazy to think we could just rip them out of our economy. Common sense says you find a way to integrate them as citizens. And Demographic Winter panics du jour suggest that this is a way to help with supposedly conservative concerns.

But no. It turns out the problem is not so much with the Mooslum Menace as with being brown. So the Demographic Winter brigade shouts “Precious sacred paperwork matters more than destroying families! And it matters far more than that Demographic Winter Panic we were trying to sell you five minutes ago to gin up fear of Muslims! Get rid of these illegals! It’s fine if they want to immigrate legally, but man was made for paperwork, not paperwork for man!  Let us encourage legal, not illegal, immigration!”

So the Righteous denounce the bogeyman of supposedly “open borders Catholics” (though none exist) as a bunch of greedhead bishops whose real interest is in profiting financially (as John Zmirak, doing one of the best imitations of a 19th century Know Nothing Nativist wrote for Breitbart). Zmirak’s talent for below-the-belt attacks has only gotten more proficient since his famous “Amnesty Equals Abortion” piece for Crisis. No dichotomy is too false, no analogy too ridiculous, no smear too low (voting third party is like masturbation!), no statement too patently false (Catholic social teaching is a myth!) that Zmirak will not say it to hold aloft the standard of Republican rite doctrine against the actual teaching of the Church and make war on the Magisterium whenever it conflicts with conservative culture of death dogma.

And so we are to believe that even conservative bishops like Chaput are just in it for the sweet sweet pesos that “illegals” (not human beings) bring in tithes and the Church can be safely ignored when it calls for mercy to the stranger. Sacred, precious paperwork is our god and we must drive out these Christian foreigners, demographic winter or no. Let them come here legally and we will welcome them with open arms!

Okey doke. Fine. Let’s destroy the lives of as many innocent families as we can for the sake of paperwork, deporting mothers and father who have been here all their lives. But still, doesn’t the terrible horrible awful threat of Demographic Winter mean we should indeed welcome these people, if for no other reason than to shore up them Christian numbers the Right Wing Noise Machine was telling us to panic about a minute ago?

Apparently no, since the Party of Trump now wants to throttle legal immigration too.

Very well then. It looks like we are back to breeding our way out of the imminent threat of a sharia takeover of America. So let’s reiterate that contraception is a mortal sin and that Catholics are obliged to eschew it.  The Righteous like that part, since it means tying up heavy burdens for others.

But then comes the part about lifting a finger to help those others.  Which the Righteous don’t like at all.  And so, when people do try to obey the teaching on openness to life and are, duh, often poor and trying to feed a large family, the Righteous condemn them for using food stamps and do everything to punish them as parasites for obeying us.

And when people can see with their own two eyes the incoherence and hypocrisy of what we say and do, let’s call them “liberals” and make clear that it is only their spiritual blindness that accounts for why they flee us and the Faith we claim to represent.