Population decline in full swing.

Sofia -- The latest country to evince concern over its declining birth rate is Bulgaria whose Academy of Sciences has predicted that its population will decline from 8 to 7 million by 2020.

Population implosion--as Catholic Insight has reported a number of times (see e.g., the Index for 2004 under Population and also the news item above, "De-population ...)--has also been noted in most other countries of the "developed" world, e.g. Japan, South Korea, and Canada.

Despite repressive measures activated by the governments of such countries as India and China, most of the planet's new babies are coming from the "developing world," particularly from those countries with a Muslim culture.

American commentator Don Feder (ofGrassTopsUSA.com) dubs it a "demographic tailspin" in his article: "'Homophobia,' demographic decline, Islamic immigration, and the European death wish" (GrassTopsUSA Newsletter, Feb. 4, 2006).

Maintaining current population levels requires a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman of childbearing age. No European country--except Muslim Albania--can presently attain this level. Traditional Catholic nations like Spain and Italy currently boast replacement rates of 1.5 and 1.24 respectively; the Czech Republic stands at 1.18. Europe, Feder states, is pathological (see item above). "Healthy societies exalt the family. Sick societies celebrate perversion."

That is the background, says Feder, to understanding the acceptance by the European Parliament in January of a resolution denouncing homophobia (opposition to the "gay" lifestyle), passed by a vote of 468 to 149, with 41 abstentions. As examples of this "rampant homophobia," the supporters of the Resolution cited the following:

"1) Latvia has a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman;

"2) When he was mayor of Warsaw, Polish President Lech Kaczynski blocked a gay pride parade; and

"3) Poland's Prime Minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, once described homosexuality as a 'contamination of society.'"

Commented Feder: "I refuse to listen to another Polish joke. The Poles must be the brightest people in Europe. He added, "The EU's anti-homophobia crusade is less about protecting gays from physical abuse than persecuting dissenters from the reigning sexual orthodoxy"

Comment: That, of course, is precisely how it is in Canada today.

What are the causes of this demographic deficit in the West? They are to be found in the rejection of Christianity and its replacement by a self-centred, materialistic worldview that eschews marriage and children, advocates the acceptance of sterile lifestyles through abortion and homosexualism, and then--for economic reasons--"opens the floodgates" to Muslim immigration.

But that--as has been shown recently in France in the fall of 2005 and again with the recent "cartoon" protests--brings its own problems when the immigrants reject this hostile, selfish society with its disintegrating culture.