The reason most people don’t raise huge families today are our modern cultural values. Benjamin Franklin once said that the fastest way to get rich was to marry a widow with seven children. This was actually true in a preindustrial society where children worked almost as soon as they could walk. It can still be done today if you are willing to live a heavily regimented family life in which everyone does chores, you substitute housework for money wherever possible like cooking from scratch and sewing your own clothes, and you forego things like cable TV and trips to Disneyworld. In fact, the lifestyle of raising huge families is a perfect match to what conservatives and fundies champion, the demographic benefits aside.
Indeed. There was a family with something like 8 kids in my k-8 school when I was young. After a certain point more kids aren’t much more of a hassle because the family becomes like an army for taking care of the household and family. Everyone chips in and does stuff so that it doesn’t matter how many there are, because the more there are, there more there are to take care of them.
Really it just comes down to the price of food. And food is pretty cheap.
I know families with a ton of kids now and it’s not as easy as you two seem to be claiming. Money is a huge issue for the families, as is time.
Granted, these are Catholic families, not fundamentalist Christian, but it’s current.
I’m not saying it’s easy, except in a humorous sense, making fun of the people who try it. But that still doesn’t negate the fact that in modern day American it should be possible to outdo China by a bit. Trusting to sanity as a block isn’t really a factor when the whole discussion is about nutballs.
Fred Phelps has 13 kids. The Duggars have 20.
Actually looking for a statistic, it appears that the current average for Quiverfulls is around 8.5 kids per family. Taking that out to 4 generations, starting with 100,000 people, that comes to 32,625,391 children.
Edit: It says there are 10,000 families (or roughly 20,000 people), so really the number should be about 1/5th of what I calculated.
Of course, A: the more older brothers in the family, the more likely one is to be gay.
And B: they are going to probably marry each other… no, not relatives, I mean other Quiverfulls.
And C: eh, let’s see how long it lasts before it all explodes. I don’t think it’s sustainable.
All true points, but still not really addressing the key question of whether or not counter-measures should be taken. Whether a ballot stuffer succeeds at it isn’t really relevant to whether or not he gets taken to court.
Prosecuting large families is of course difficult, though. So really the only two feasible counter measures is to take people who advocate high birth rates as a method of subverting democracy to court as attempted ballot stuffers, or start capping family sizes to something reasonable.
There is currently no law which could be used to prosecute someone for “attempted ballot stuffing” due to having a large family. How would you formulate one and please remember it has to pass constitutional muster.
There is also no current restriction on family sizes. What would you consider reasonable, why, and how would you formulate such a law? Please keep in mind that this one will also be strictly scrutinized as family planning decisions have been ruled as fundamental human rights in both the US and international law communities.
Enjoy,
Steven
That would be a reason to not go in that direction. However, incitement of criminal activity or behavior that is a danger to American society has been held to be a crime by the Supreme Court:
Advocating for people to attempt to subvert democracy and deprive people of opposing beliefs of representation via vagina rather than via speech is a danger to the basic, democratic existence of the US.
If a person spreads pamphlets on socialism and encourages people to elect representatives who will move the country towards socialism via proper legislative votes and constitutional amendments and so on, that’s entirely protected under Free Speech. But, I don’t think that it’s protected to advocate for people to start assassinating any legislators who are anti-socialist. Free speech doesn’t carry over to advocating nefarious things.
But so the specific law would be something like:
A person may not advocate for others to influence the future landscape of political ideology of the nation through any means other than the spread of thoughts and ideas. Attempts to artificially increase votes by intimidation, assassination, mass-breeding, or otherwise circumventing the natural process of the course of political change in the nation is illegal.
That law would not change a single thing. Voter intimidation and assassination are both illegal now. Having children is not “artificial”, but rather natural, as has been pointed out several dozen times. You apparently think that you can ignore this and make it go away. There is no “natural course of political change in the nation” other than people choosing to vote as they choose. Hence it’s you, rather than the fundamentalist conspiracy that exists only in your imagination, which seeks to “circumvent the natural process of the course of political change”. Lastly, the state the obvious, your law violates amendments 1, 9, and 10, and is therefore unconstitutional.
Better try harder the second time.
It’s not natural to bear children to swamp out political ideology.
Think about the type of people who would have children in order to swamp the ballot box. Think about how they’ll raise and treat those children.
Think about the childrens’ reactions when they find out that they’ll essentially biological ballots. If it was me I might just decide to purposely vote the opposite of the way my parents tell me to. Keep in mind how much rebellion occurs among children who are raised in religiously strict families.
Is this really a viable plan?
As I’ve mentioned earlier in the thread, ~75% of kids stay within the religion and religious denomination as their parents, and 80% join the same political party. Your assertion that children rebel isn’t born out by statistics. And as I’ve also mentioned, ones success at hatching a nefarious plot doesn’t much matter in the eyes of the law. If you try to stuff ballots, your aptitude at it doesn’t factor into your sentence.
Do you not see the moral quandary within such a law? It is one thing to advocate the elimination of an unwanted child birth. It is quite another to impose that line of thinking onto someone else.
Perhaps that’s why you’re unable to find any person on earth who’s doing so.
You don’t get to decide what’s “natural” and outlaw other things. I could easily say that the levels of paranoia that you exhibit are unnatural–and I’d be right–but it wouldn’t be a basis for outlawing your posts.
For that matter, let’s expand to point out that you don’t get to decide what anybody else does. That’s the great thing about living in a free country: no one has to care what anyone else thinks about their personal decisions. So you want it to be illegal for Christians to have children? Tough luck. We’re going to continue having children and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Good day.
Yes, but aren’t those statistics for the general population, where, for the most part, religious and political adherence is somewhat lackadaisical? I’d guess that, for most children, many of their neighbors and playmates are similar in their religious leanings, or at least not very fervent about their differences, so there’s little to draw them away.
Would that be true of the types of extremists we’re discussing? What happens when their children encounter playmates of different, and less extreme, beliefs? What happens when they hear about movies and TV shows, and video games that they have no access to? Wouldn’t they be more likely than the general population to drift away from their parents beliefs?
Don’t the extremes in any population over time tend towards the middle?
The extremists could, of course, try to physically group together and isolate themselves, thus keeping their children away from moderating influences, but then they wouldn’t be very powerful politically other than in the unfortunate community or communities they’ve decided to settle in. Not only that, but they will eventually run into the problem of inbreeding if they try to prevent their children from marrying outside of the community.
Yaidunno. I can’t say that Mormonism nor Scientology look to be dying off anytime soon.
Mormonism is still pretty weird. It’s certainly more mainstream than it was in the 1830s, but still that took 170 years. There’s really no knowing how popular any wacky belief will be. With the power of a lot of children, there’s also a lot of power to proselytize.
Affluence is, I think, the variable most linked to atheism and mushy religious beliefs. Large family counts will mostly keep these people from being able to become all that wealthy. And they’ll probably mostly stay in their region rather than moving to the city.
I wasn’t talking about dying off. I was talking about not rapidly growing to the point of outnumbering everyone else.
Mormonism has been around for several generations now and is still somewhat marginalized although it’s becoming more mainstream. I don’t see any indications that it’s a threat to take over the country. I don’t know if there are any statistics about the retention rate of the children of it’s adherents.
Scientology is certainly interested in growth and power but I think practically everyone outside of it sees it for the wackiness it is, and the internet is certainly not doing it any good.
In fact, I suspect that the internet is going to turn out to be bad for religion in general. While it’s true that it does enable like minded extremists to find each other, it’s also true that it makes a lot more information available to a lot more people.
When people start seeing the claims of other religions and when (young people especially) realize that, objectively, the religion they were born into is just as unprovable and inconsistent as the rest of them, they may start to have doubts.
Yes, perhaps the internet will kill the Quiverfull movement after one generation. Yes it’s possible that the beliefs will be too “out there” and it will fall apart on its own. But maybe they’ll homeschool and block all internet access. Maybe they’ll proselytize and convert 50% of the nation to their side. There’s really no knowing.
But more importantly is that it’s irrelevant whether they or any other group will succeed at their loophole ballot stuffing venture. That Y person is advocating to X group to use a means to deny others the ability to have an equal vote that the framers of the democratic process didn’t consider and hence isn’t quite yet illegal, raises the issue of whether it should be illegal, or if there should be another means of preventing such an attack. That’s all the question there is here. The Quiverfull movement might not succeed at making such an attack. Potentially, no group in the entire future history of the US might succeed at exploiting this loophole in democracy. But, there’s no way to know that. What we do know is that there is such a loophole and that there are probably ways to close it off.
But in the very unlikely chance that the Quiverfull movement is so successful that they do become an important voting block, they will have won legitimately. This is not a loophole in the democratic process – it is precisely the definition of the democratic process. In this situation they would have more voters than your group.
This is a frustrating thread. Sage Rat, you keep saying it’s a loophole, that it’s cheating and subverting and whatnot, but unless you can demonstrate that the children are in the control of their parents, all you are showing is that yes, some people have more kids than others.