Mark Steyn’s Christmas Tide Column: “Europe’s problem is that it’s barren”

LONDON, December 23, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An early Christmas gift from The Telegraph has been a new column by internationally known columnist Mark Steyn.  In his latest offering, Steyn’s cutting wit focuses on Europe’s underpopulation dilemma. Here are a few jems:  “Confronted with all the begetting in the Old Testament, the modern mind says, ‘Well, naturally, these primitive societies were concerned with children. They needed someone to provide for them in their old age.’ In our advanced society, we don’t have to worry about that; we automatically have someone to provide for us in our old age: the state . . .”“But the state – at least in its modern European welfare incarnation – needs children at least as much as those old-time Jews did. And the problem with the European state is that, like Elisabeth, it’s barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39 . . .”“Israel’s doing the numbers, too. If it doesn’t unload the ‘occupied territories’ soon, Palestinians will do their sums, quit asking for their own state, and instead demand a one-man-one-vote arrangement for the state they’re already in . . . It’s remarkable that, having survived the Holocaust, the Jewish people should now be in danger of not surviving their survival of the Holocaust.”  Concluding in his thoughtful and irreverent style, Steyn says, “it seems amazing that no Continental politician is willing to get to grips with the real crisis facing Europe in the 21st century: the lack of Europeans . . . The obligation to have children may be a lot of repressive Catholic mumbo-jumbo, but it’s also highly rational. What’s irrational is modern EUtopia’s indifference to new life.”  Read the whole Steyn column:  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/12/23/do2302.xml