http://stevereuland.blogspot.com/2006/03/one-baby-two-baby-red-baby-blue-baby.html

As much as it seems fishy to me, though, I can’t pretend to have the background to really examine it…

Longman anticipated your first point. In the third to last paragraph of the article, he wrote

“To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.”

To be sure, the young voted overwhelmingly for Obama last fall, so that fact weakens Longman’s thesis. But their support for a culturally liberal candidate may well be the exception not the rule. After all, until 2008 the youth vote never really delivered for Democrats, as its original supporters acknowledged later.

But as Mark didn’t even seem to bother viewing the film and seemingly only read a review in the Wash Post… I’m not sure what the point of this article is. Did you even watch the trailer Mark?

I’m terrified what your book on “the breakdown of the American Family” is going to be like. But I’m sure you’ll somehow blame it on the cinema and probably ‘the gays.’

Go back to the Wash Times and leave teh interwebs to people who actually read and watch what they review.

Why did you feel the need to pull the Middle East into a completely unrelated subject? You went from a very accurate and intelligent critique of the point raised to completely discrediting yourself by spouting off some ignorant BS. I mean, if you don’t like the Middle East I am totally cool with that. Don’t get me wrong. But come on…really?

First, there’s his assumption that children monolithically adopt the values of their parents, or conservative religious parents always give birth to conservative religious kids and vice-versa. If fertility rates equaled religious growth rates, Amish, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others would dominate the American landscape. But the defection rates are very high, and just because patriarchal parents have more kids, it doesn’t follow that they’re popping out more lovers of patriarchy.

Second, he flatly states that population equals power (even in the modern world) more than other factors. Well, obviously since countries like Rwanda, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Rwanda with the highest birth rates are clearly poised to rule the world and conquer slack breeders like Japan, the US, and the UK, he’s right on the money there. Not to mention the inevitably of Utah and Alaska overtaking New York, etc.

Also, his thesis relies on a time when patriarchy was violently secured as the ruling value, an advantage it had over more egalitarian states. You can’t force patriarchy anymore, except in the Middle East, and aside from security issues, I don’t think we have to fear fundamentalists overtaking us. They’d have to get out of the stone age first.

I have more to say about your grafting all of these assumptions onto a lighthearted comedy, but right now, dinner’s on.