Missing: The 'Right' Babies (Page 3)

The WCF is just one channel for this goal: a locus for heavyweight US conservative actors such as the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and James Dobson's Focus on the Family--a Who's Who of the American Christian right--to network with representatives from the Vatican, conservative Christians from developing nations and a smattering of Muslim groups seeking allies to fight gay and women's rights at the United Nations. The result is the spread of US culture-war tactics across the globe, from the Czech Republic to Qatar--where right-wing Mormon activist and WCF co-founder Richard Wilkins has found enough common cause with Muslim fundamentalists to build the Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development.

Arguably, the greatest impact profamily efforts such as the WCF have is in helping conservative European leaders hone a common message about the "natural family" as a necessary counter to demographic anxieties.

The fourth conference of the WCF, in Warsaw last May, provided much of the commentary for the Demographic Winter film. And little wonder: besides Carlson, Family First Foundation's board of directors is composed entirely of WCF leaders and speakers, all of whom gathered in Warsaw's grand Palace of Culture and Science, the old Polish Communist Party headquarters, with more than 3,000 other religious conservatives, to hear predictions about Europe as a sinking ship, a Titanic nearly lost to the repercussions of the sexual revolution. But for the first time in a long time, the "natural family" has a white knight in Europe: brave Poland, the anti-Sweden. Following Pope John Paul II's philosophy that particular countries can change the course of Europe, Poland has been heralded in US profamily literature as the likely salvation of the continent: a heavily Catholic bastion of conservatism amid the gay-friendly EU. Under the leadership of the Kaczynski brothers--extremist twins in office as president and prime minister--the country has shifted far to the right, embracing a social conservatism that aggressively targets gays, Jews, women's rights and foreigners, and that in 2006 went so far as to propose that Jesus be named honorary king of Poland.

To Carlson, this proves Poland is "an island of profamily values" amid the tides of "Christo-phobic" "population-control types" who dominate the rest of the continent. Poland, he says, could provide an important counterbalance to European modernity and become a launching point for "a profamily resistance," and thereby "save Europe again": a not-so-coded reference to the Battle of Vienna in 1683, where Polish King John III Sobieski led a "Holy League" army of Christian soldiers against the Ottoman Empire, culminating in a decisive victory for Christendom over the invading Muslim troops. The profamily movement's bald reference to this ancient holy war informs new conservative foot soldiers who see today's immigration conflicts as "a new phase of a very old war." And so the WCF chose Poland as the site of last spring's massing of the troops, drawing thousands of leaders from across the spectrum of religious-right activism: from US evangelical and Catholic nonprofits to Eastern European Catholic and orthodox antiabortion and anti-gay rights groups, to bureaucrats from European, EU and US governments, taking policy notes to bring back home.

The architects of the WCF have persuaded traditionally isolationist American conservatives to care about the fate of secular, impious Europe with two main arguments: one, that Europe is a bulwark against a Muslim "invasion" of America--"If Europe is lost to demographic winter and radical secularism, much of the world will go with it," Carlson warns--and two, that global trends, such as the normalization of gay and women's rights, can impact life at home.

If Europe has a "sickness of the soul," the WCF claims to have "the cure." Specifically, that cure is a version of the practice of American women living Allan Carlson's "natural family" vision of having "full quivers" of children. These are families of eight, ten, twelve or more children. It is a vision packaged for popular culture: encouraging families to become "Great Families," with three to four children each, enough of an increase to stave off the winter [see Joyce, "Arrows for the War," November 27, 2006].

"The new view is that in order to create and defend a profamily culture, we also have to have a friendly international environment," says Carlson. "So you see something fundamentally new: the social conservative movement going global."

Austin Ruse, head of the ultraconservative Catholic UN lobbyist group C-Fam and organizer of Washington's National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, says the WCF is just one expression of an ever-growing conservative coalition. Its hatred of liberalism, feminism and the sexual revolution outweighs theological differences, and it is branching out worldwide. C-Fam is opening offices in Brussels to lobby the EU directly.

Ruse's goals for EU activism are likely in line with his accomplishments at the UN, where he gained notoriety for his incendiary rhetoric (his lobby is a plague of locusts descending on women's rights) and political theater, which, even with few allies, effectively stalled progress on a number of women's movement initiatives. Christian-right watchers agree that demographic winter appeals to struggling new EU countries in devout Eastern Europe could have "serious" results. Ruse himself, not given to understatement, imagines the global Christian profamily alliance is "unlike anything we've seen since the Reformation." A bloc like this, he boasts, is capable of mayhem: "Picture the documentaries about Africa: the hyenas going after the wildebeest. You're just surrounded. We are everywhere, doing everything."

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