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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Hasn't it only been about 5 years now that society has been worried about population collapse?

My mother remembers Population Bomb rhetoric when she was younger. Google says China only ended their one child policy in 2016. The trends are probably just moving too fast. If you tell a whole generation they're destroying the world by having children, it surely takes some time to pull that back with "we didn't mean you, women who were already having 2.5 children! We meant the Nigerian ones having 7 children in desperate poverty! (But, also, global warming is a very terrible disaster, you should feel bad)"

I think the Christian perspective is something like that marriage is hard, but it's alright to ask hard things of people. Traditional cultures also ask people to do things like serve in the military, fast, and stand multiple hours for public ceremonies. Orthodox churches have crowns instead of vows, and one of the several symbols involved is "crowns of martyrdom." Is staying married to an angry, unpleasant man and bearing his children as hard an ask as fighting in a war? I don't know, I've never done either, but maybe it is! And if we have a norm of people in general never needing to do hard things, it isn't surprising that the same would be true of marriages.