Whenever the topic of personal liberty is debated, it is unfortunate that the liberty to do evil is often what is at stake. On one side there are libertines, or those who are at best morally indifferent, arguing that morally offensive behavior ought to be legal and even socially acceptable; on the other side there are those who advocate that what is immoral ought to be illegal as well. There are reactionaries and progressives both who turn their noses up at the idea of personal freedom as nothing but a recipe for chaos and an invitation to anti-social, selfish, and even cruel behavior à la Lord of The Flies.

I have had the good fortune to see this tendency challenged by my generation, the “Ron Paul” generation if you will. For the first time in a long while, the idea that we ought to maximize personal liberty so that we may freely choose to do what is good is beginning to catch on. The contraception mandate has awakened many Catholics from a statist slumber, a dream-like state in which government as such was seen as the guarantor of the public peace and common good. But there is much more that needs to be seen, many more areas of life besides religious practice or our weekly paychecks that governments across the nation are intruding upon in the name of safety and order.

Producers and sellers of raw milk are being targeted for raids across the country; even the Amish aren’t safe. You won’t fare better if you attempt raise pigs or chickens in a manner that displeases local or state governments and the agribusiness interests who successfully lobby them. It was only after a wave of protest and indignation that the Obama administration rescinded a law that would have barred children from working on their family farms.

Speaking of children, if you believe that yours would be better off without vaccinations, you may see a S.W.A.T. team at your front door when you refuse to relinquish your child to Child Protective Services. And if you send your child to a public school, make sure you instruct her not to burp in class or write on her desk, or even blink or breathe in a way that could be interpreted as “disruptive“, lest they be arrested, put in handcuffs, and hauled off to jail.

These are only a few examples of the sort of things that were once part of normal, everyday life for millions of Americans becoming criminalized or at least attracting police involvement in an unprecedented way. One could also look to the sexually-invasive security methods of the Transportation Security Administration, which may spread well beyond airports and into shopping malls, sporting events, and other places that Americans casually frequent on a daily basis. It is also a guarantee that they will be accompanied by mechanical drones in the near future, the same sort of technology used to keep track of people assumed to be violent threats to national security.

What is at stake in these examples, and there are thousands more like them, is not only liberty but human dignity. It is a violation of human dignity to force a 95-year old woman to remove her adult diaper, or to expect a reasonable person to feel as if a serious security risk is being addressed by such measures. It is a crime against decency to terrorize a four-year old girl as a potential terrorist suspect for hugging her grandmother, or this child, or that child, for whatever reasons. In these cases we are to believe that we must be degraded and humiliated in order to “keep us safe” from the terrorists.

There are more than a few Americans who agree with this sentiment. And yet one hopes that we have reached a point at which we say to ourselves: what exactly are we keeping safe? What happened to the nation that was inspired by Patrick Henry, who cried “give me liberty, or give me death”? If the majority of Americans eventually decide that life is worth living without liberty, they will soon find themselves living without dignity either, for the two are inseparably linked.

This is confirmed in the teaching of the Church. Pope Leo XIII begins his encyclical Libertas by stating as much: “Liberty, the highest of natural endowments, being the portion only of intellectual or rational natures, confers on man this dignity – that he is “in the hand of his counsel”(1) and has power over his actions.” To be endowed with liberty is to be endowed with dignity, not to mention moral responsibility and accountability; to be denied liberty in an arbitrary fashion is to be denied dignity as well. Thus it will not do to speak of human dignity while forgetting human liberty.

The battle for liberty and dignity is inseparably tied up with philosophy and theology as well. This becomes clear if one watches some of the “God debates” between Christian and atheist philosophers, such as this one between atheist Sam Harris and William Lane Craig. As Craig repeatedly points out (to no satisfactory response), in Harris’ view of the world, human beings lack free will, and therefore lack moral accountability as well. To broaden the point a bit, mere animals that lack freedom can have neither morality nor dignity. To assign them dignity is arbitrary and subjective; on such a foundation, human dignity cannot stand.

We can only insist upon our dignity if our liberty is something more than a chimerical illusion, if it is really a property, a defining characteristic, of the human being. Not only that, but it must be understood that liberty is not the product of a random, meaningless series of historical events, but instilled in man for a specific reason, by a specific being. There may well be atheists who strenuously object to the sort of gross violations of human dignity and liberty I provided examples of above, and this is on balance a good thing. What will ultimately become of such objections, however, if they lack a solid foundation in reality? The approach of the secular Leviathan is at least consistent with the view that man is nothing more than an atypically complicated animal with no special meaning or purpose for existing. Pleasure and pain, as Bentham wrote, are his sovereign masters; the preservation of his life, as Hobbes insisted, is his sole concern. If he lives without liberty or dignity, it is enough that he merely lives.

Maximizing our liberty and dignity does mean accepting some restraints. But the Church has not proclaimed dogmas and morals so that man can be weighed down with unnecessary burdens. On the contrary, it is only through knowledge and acceptance of the truths revealed to us by our Creator – the very being responsible for the creation of our inherently free souls – that we can exercise our liberty in accordance with our nature and with an eye to our ultimate and eternal destiny. To cherish liberty is always to invite some risk. We may choose sin and damnation; we may choose to harm ourselves and others and disrupt the common good.

But the idea that evil can be eliminated in this life by the rational planning of man is far more dangerous. Scientific progress can create the impression that such a fantasy may one day become a reality; the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century were infatuated with the possibilities of total social management. And yet, as F.A. Hayek argued in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, such dreams are based upon a “pretense of knowledge”, an unfounded assumption that the methods that have produced such marvelous results in the hard physical sciences can be applied or mimicked in the social science. But one would only assume that such methods could be easily transferred if they already tended to view human beings as atoms or cells, without free wills, pushed about entirely by external forces.

When I look at our intrusive state – put whatever adjective in front of it you will, be it “police”, “nanny”, “managerial”, etc. – I can’t help but see the pretense of knowledge in full swing. There is no need to make rash comparisons to Hitler or Stalin, because our own intrusive state is not the product of one man’s will imposed upon a nation; it is a product of attitudes, assumptions, and policies that have gradually been adopted by the social and political elites of the country. Who can resist them? Only those who have the full and complete understanding of who and what man is; and this is found only in the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church.

Good news! While my daughter takes her ballet class, I can now take a “strip-hop” class. I read the announcement at my daughter’s dance studio:

Unleash your inner seductress. Come join the fun!

Really? Gyrating and peeling off my clothes in front of other women…fun?  “Let me be clear,” I told my husband, when he looked a little too keen on the idea, “the only way I’m unbuttoning my blouse for another woman is if she’s administering a mammogram. The sexiest thing I’ve got going is staying alive to help you raise these kids.”

Just when you think it can’t get worse than selling thongs to eight year olds, it does. What used to be a “skill set” for working at a “strip joint” — universally seen as a desperate place for desperate men and women– is now called an “exercise class” and held in studio B at Little Dancers. I guess it’s never too early to expose your daughter to pole dancing and to normalize it for her by doing it yourself.

Lest I sound strident, or puritanical, I’m neither. Though my address is not quite 90210, it’s close. I live just outside of Beverly Hills, in West Los Angeles.  I can assure you that no one who leans toward puritanism purposely resides in L.A. It would be like moving to Seattle and hoping to not get wet. By L.A. standards, my family is pretty normal.

In part because of the weather, and in part because of the entertainment industry, Los Angeles supports a body-conscious, even provocative, culture.  And too often, the line between what is acceptable for adults and what is acceptable for children is blurred.  In this case, a “strip-hop” class—even in L.A.—ought not to be offered or advertised at a children’s dance studio.

And yet, a culture of false modesty isn’t the answer either. Some years ago, I knew a family who forbade their daughters to wear jeans…ever. They claimed it was immodest. The girls, who loved and respected their parents, acquiesced. Some years later, however, the parents’ dictum had unforeseen consequences. The girls went away to college, met other very conservative, very faith-filled young women and discovered that everyone else wore jeans. As simple as it might seem, this lead to questioning much else of what their parents had taught them. They suffered a crisis of faith because of an incomplete understanding of modesty.

We have to be careful. Clothes and image are extremely important to teenagers. We must be sensitive to their biological and psychological need to be pretty and to fit in. We must draw a line, of course, but we must draw it thoughtfully. Our Catholic faith enjoins us to be free in the spirit of God. There is no prescriptive dress code to follow. Rather, we are called to follow a properly developed conscience, and if that fails, to fall back on common sense—which would seem to dictate against G-strings for eight year olds and pole dancing for mothers.

Finally, if a religious upbringing, a well-developed conscience, and common sense all fail, there exists one last defense against total moral abdication—vanity. To that end, let me just say that I’ve seen myself naked and I’d rather die than take a strip-hop class. You can call it morality. You can call it modesty. You can call it meekness.  If the choice is between a pole or my pride, I’m gonna cling to what’s left of my pride. Thanks anyway.

President Obama’s recent statement on gay marriage has again thrust his religious views onto the front pages. In defending his position, Obama stressed that he and his wife were “practicing Christians” and that his stance was supported by Christ’s teaching of the Golden Rule.

Since his quest to win the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 2004, Barack Obama’s faith has provoked controversy. In that campaign, his Republican rival Alan Keyes—a black Catholic—accused Obama of stressing his faith only “when it’s convenient to get votes.” When faith must be followed, explained, and serve as a basis for policies, Keyes protested, Obama pled the “separation of church and state”—a concept that was neither constitutional nor scriptural. “Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” Keyes asserted, because his behavior was so contrary to that of Christ’s.

These charges prompted Obama to reassess how his faith related to his approach to politics. He concluded that his typical responses to Keyes’ criticisms—that “we live in a pluralistic society” and “I can’t impose my own religious views” on others—had been inadequate.

By 2006, Obama had decisively changed his tactics. At the Sojourners/Call to Renewal conference, he chided Democrats for refusing to talk about religious values out of fear of offending people or belief that religion had no role to play in the public arena. Ignoring “the power of faith” in the lives of Americans was “a mistake.” Obama urged Democrats to discuss “how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.”

Obama called the contention that people “should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates” a “practical absurdity.” American law, he argued “is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.” “Secularists are wrong,” Obama asserted, “when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama strove to win the votes of religiously-devout Americans by providing a biblical basis for his policies on poverty, healthcare, immigration, and other issues. He urged citizens to “heed the biblical call to care for ‘the least of these’”—America’s poor—by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, increasing the minimum wage, and supplying universal health insurance.

During the campaign, Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright (who pastored the United Church of Christ congregation Obama had attended in Chicago for twenty years), the widespread misperception that Obama was a Muslim, and his stances on abortion and homosexual rights called attention to his religious beliefs and created controversy.

As president, Obama has frequently testified to his Christian faith, most notably at four National Prayer Breakfasts, and linked many of his policies to biblical teachings. Contrary to the wishes of many of his supporters, he has also continued George W. Bush’s Faith-based Initiatives.

Obama’s rhetoric and actions have led to conflicting claims about his presidency. John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College, recently labeled Obama perhaps the “most explicitly Christian president in American history” because of his extensive citation of the Bible and copious references to Christian faith. Fea stressed that Obama regularly read the Bible and prayed, was being mentored by evangelical pastors (most notably Joel Hunter, Kirbyjon Caldwell, and T.D. Jakes), accentuated both faith and works, urged Americans to follow God’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves, and strove to build the kingdom of God on earth.

Glenn Beck’s criticism of Fea’s op-ed on his show brought the history professor hundreds of scathing emails and elicited numerous rebuttals. The response of well-known conservative activist and author David Barton was especially caustic. Barton denounced Obama as the “Most Biblically-Hostile U.S. President.” Barton supplied dozens of examples to support his contention that Obama has engaged in acts of hostility toward people of biblical faith, violated biblical values, and given preferential treatment to Islam.

Meanwhile, in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Mitchell Landsberg correctly observed that Obama has been both “praised—and pummeled—on matters of faith.” “Few presidents,” he added, “have spoken more often or more articulately about their religious beliefs” or been so censured by some religious groups because of their policies.

Obama has been reproached for not attending church regularly, praising Islam and the Qur’an, requiring religiously-affiliated institutions to provide coverage for contraception, and his policies on abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, and ministerial exemptions.

Because of continued confusion about his faith (45 percent of Republicans in Alabama and 51 percent in Mississippi identified him as a Muslim in recent polls), conservative charges that he is waging war against religious groups, and substantial concern that some of his policies contradict either biblical principles or long-standing American religious freedoms, Obama’s faith and religious issues are very likely to be a major issue in the 2012 presidential campaign.

Copyright Vision and Values 2012

How does a wooden puppet become a real boy? How does one tame a wild boy full of spirit? When does a boy become a man?  What is the art of educating the young to become refined and civilized?  Pinocchio shows that the wooden puppet—stubborn, slothful, and  thankless–deserves the honor of boyhood when he acquires not only certain virtues like honesty, obedience, docility, and industriousness but also the virtues of the heart—a grateful heart, a kind heart, a caring heart, a devoted heart, and a charitable heart. These old-world Christian ideals Geppetto struggles to instill in the puppet—the boy who never studies, constantly breaks his promises, is always running away, ignoring good advice, and constantly begging for food.  Pinocchio cannot gain the status of real boy unless he learns self-control, appreciates the goodness of Geppetto and the love of the fairy mother, and honors the timeless truths of proverbial wisdom that Geppetto strives to teach him.

These traditional sayings recur throughout the book: “disobedient children never do any good in this world”; lazy boys who never study become donkeys; beware of evil companions; “only the aged and crippled have a right to beg”; “remember that every man, rich or poor, must find something to do in this world”; and “hunger is the best cook.” The wooden son impervious to his father’s wisdom acts insolent to Geppetto; an idle Pinocchio makes excuses to avoid study and prefers to beg for food rather than work for his bread; the self-indulgent boy is easily tempted by idle amusements and evil companions that divert him from school and cheat him of his money; and the fastidious boy famished for food refuses to eat pears unless peeled. These are the traits of the wooden, obtuse puppet that changes into the real boy once he learns the invaluable lessons that Geppetto’s traditional wisdom offers youth.

The first lesson instructs the puppet in the law of moral consequences; a law that Pinocchio assumes does not exist or does not apply to him. Defying the proverbial truths, Pinocchio learns their lessons from the pain of experience rather than from respect for authority.  Hanging on a nail on a tree, caught in an animal trap, confined to a doghouse, stuck in mud, and locked in jail, Pinocchio confesses, “How many dreadful things have happened to me! And I deserved them, for I am obstinate as a mule.” Later rather than sooner Pinocchio eventually comprehends the law of consequences that leads him to the truths of the moral life. Disobeying authority and defying rules to do as he wishes and to enjoy complete freedom, Pinocchio—always running away from home—soon finds himself with a collar in a doghouse where he acknowledges another hard truth he has been evading: “If I had been willing to study and to work, if I stayed home with my poor father—I would not be here now in this lonely place, working as a watchdog for a peasant.” Pinocchio must recognize the eternal law of cause of effect that governs the moral life as well as the physical world.

Another lesson that wisdom offers youth is a sense of appreciation for the true value of precious things. Geppetto sells his only winter coat to purchase Pinocchio the primer he needs for school, but the puppet then sells this costly book to go to the puppet show while “Geppetto stayed at home shivering in his shirt sleeves.” When Fire-eater the Showman learns of Gepetto’s poverty and sacrifice for his son, he offers five gold coins for Pinocchio as a gift to his father—money that Pinocchio entrusts to the Fox and Cat who tempt him to bury it in the Field of Miracles where he is told it will multiply—Pinocchio ignoring the Cricket’s warning: “Go back home, and carry the four gold pieces you have left to your poor father, who is weeping and longing for you.” Pinocchio neither appreciates the food on the table when he refuses to eat the  pears nor the value of an education which he abandons to travel to Playland that lures him with the promise of no schools, no books, no masters, and a week with six Saturdays and one Sunday. When boys do not appreciate their fathers and mothers and the blessings of food, education, and love, they turn to doltish, brutish donkeys that have lost all refinement and sensitivity. Without the ability to tell the difference between a father and mother’s loving advice and the foolish counsel of idle companions, Pinocchio’s hard woodenness remains adamant.

However, Pinocchio finally becomes a real boy when he appreciates the patience and forgiveness of his father and mother that melt his heart. He eventually values the gift of their timeless wisdom that he sees proven by his wayward life. After nearly losing his father who is searching the seas for his lost son, Pinocchio finds Geppetto in the stomach of the shark and leads him out of the mouth, the young boy carrying the old man who cannot swim on his back: “You can come on my back, and I’ll carry you safely to the shore”— a gesture reminiscent of pious Aeneas with the weight of his father Anchises on his back as they flee from the burning of Troy. The boy who refused to study or to work engages in manual labor and weaves baskets to provide a cup of milk to this father. The puppet who put pleasure above duty and sold or lost precious gifts for idle amusements resolves, “I’ve worked until now for my father; from now on, I’ll work five hours longer every day for my kind mother.” Like pious Aeneas devoted to his aging father and like the Homeric heroes who find their lives incomplete until they repay their parents for their loving care, Pinocchio acknowledges his indebtedness and demonstrates his sense of appreciation by acquiring a good heart—the greatest lesson Geppetto and the Fairy instill in their puppet-boy. As the Fairy congratulates Pinocchio when the puppet becomes the real boy, “In return for your good heart, I forgive you all your past misdeeds. Children who love their parents, and help them when they are sick and poor, are worthy of praise and love . . . .”

The civilizing education of the home and  devotion of a loving father and mother that pass on the wisdom and moral ideals of  the ages change wooden puppets into grateful boys, grateful boys into generous men, and generous men into noble heroes with sacrificing hearts.

“The Traditional Mass is not a spectator sport.”

The statement rings out like a shot in the quiet, muggy, non-descript church. Oscillating fans buzz from various strategic locations. Incense wafts up from the thurible tucked away to the right of the altar. The congregants sit quietly, attentive. The women’s heads are covered, and everyone is dressed modestly. Nobody throws holy water at the rather oddly-garbed priest standing at the pulpit. Nobody gets up and indignantly walks out. It’s only my third time at the Priory of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but I already know that as far as Traditional Latin Mass enclaves go, this place is different.

Don Daniel Augustine Oppenheimer has made the statement confidently, peering intently over his small, frameless glasses at the small group of assembled faithful before him. His tonsure is an anachronism that brings to mind the monks of old. His habit is distinctly Augustinian, although I initially mistake it for Dominican, because how many of us ever see a religious in a habit anymore? (Up close, you can see the wear and tear on the fabric, the quiet but telltale signs of true vows of poverty.) His comfortable-looking cork and leather sandals are, I surmise, probably worn in the cold months of the year as well as the warm.  His face is kind, his manner of speaking academic. Referencing his desire for the faithful to participate in the Offertory chant and instructing them how to do so, he is making a case that I’ve never heard in eight years attending the traditional Latin liturgy of the Roman Rite.

“Historically, liturgically,” he says, “the people have participated in the Mass. When they stopped participating, the old Mass went away. And by then, it was in such a state that nobody missed it.”

The Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem - Don Oppenheimer’s fledgling clerical institute of consecrated life – were established in 2002 by then-Bishop Raymond Burke in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. What ensued was a nine year search by the Canons for a permanent home. When I discovered them, the CRNJs had recently been received by Bishop Michael Bransfield of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, WV. They began offering the sacred liturgy at the former St. James’ parish in Charles Town, WV, on Palm Sunday, 2011. One trip to the monastery cemented it as the most edifying place of worship I’ve yet discovered. By the time I was hearing Dom Daniel’s thoughts about the proper role of the faithful in the traditional liturgy, I was hooked. This – this – was what I had been looking for all these years.

The Canons exemplify what a sustainable traditional movement should look like. Although the order is tiny – only one priest and two seminarians – when you’re around them, you can’t help feeling like something big and important is happening.

“We celebrate the traditional liturgy with great joy.” This statement, another part of Dom Daniel’s sermon, helps me put my finger on what is so different. Never known for our collective charisma or charm, those who self-identify as “Traditionalist” can often be about as much fun as a leaky bottle of lemon juice at a paper cut party. This is ironic when you consider that we believe the traditional Catholic experience is a “pearl of great price.” We should, therefore (if there’s any sense in the world) be a pretty happy, personable lot. And to be fair, I’d say that a good many of us are. Nevertheless, it only takes one bad egg to spoil the batch, and we’ve got dozens. Consequently, our bad reputation persists.

This is why seeing this kind of Christian joy in action in a monastic community that opens its doors to public worship is something else entirely. For starters, the monks – Dom Daniel, Frater John, Frater Alban – are so noticeably kind. At the conclusion of Mass, they mingle with the faithful, whom they take the time to get to know by name. They sell produce, and fresh baked breads, employing monastic industry to support their work. And if you forgot your wallet? No worries. They’ll probably spot you a loaf. They remember not only who you are, but what is going on in your life, and when they say they’re praying for your intentions, you get the feeling that they mean that they’re doing so with great specificity.

What this does is create a sense of community – something that I have found to be lacking in many traditional parishes I’ve attended or visited. Often times, the Traditional Latin Mass is attended by people from every far corner of the geographic area, creating a loose federation of individuals that know each other by face or even by name, but have little in the way of a sense of real common bond. It’s a lovely thing to have coffee and donuts in a Church basement as a means of socializing with your fellow parishioners, but it’s a different thing entirely when a priest and his confrères make you feel as though you’re a part of something more cohesive and organic.

This communal aspect is almost familial, and is rooted first and foremost in the liturgical experience. The CRNJs believe in a participatio actuosa that is neither the frenetic, hand-holding around the altar experience of many post-Vatican II parishes, nor the austere, entirely interior participation of those more inclined to chapels of the Society of St. Pius X. It is a human, natural, anthropological form of worship, where one is engaged but not coddled, involved but never given the sense that it’s all about them.

The chants — which are beautiful, in a simple, country monastery kind of way—are sung antiphonally, meaning that the schola and the faithful alternate voices. The faithful are encouraged to join the altar boys in making the responses to the priest, since the reason the altar boys make those responses at all in the first place is to act as representatives of the faithful. These aspects of liturgical participation may not seem groundbreaking to anyone who has been raised on the Novus Ordo Missae, and will not even come as a surprise to those Eastern Rite Catholics nourished on the ancient liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, but to the average traditional Catholic, they are (seeming) innovations that border on scandalous.

Except that they are not innovations at all.

“The low Mass is not normative.” Dom Daniel explains to me. “It was never intended to be used this way. This liturgy we celebrate is designed for parish life.” And the liturgy he celebrates, by the way, isn’t quick – easily running 90 to 120 minutes every Sunday. Every Mass with the Canons is a High Mass, unless there are not enough members of the community physically present to assist in all the Mass parts.

If that sounds long to you, I suppose it is. But when there, one enters a sort of “sacred time” — an almost transcendental experience that feels as though it’s more of an eternal moment than a passage of minutes or hours. I would much rather spend two hours at a liturgy with the Canons than thirty minutes at a poorly said, silent-as-a-tomb low Mass. There’s no other way to explain my preference than to say that in the former, I encounter God; in the latter, I keep looking at my watch.

Dom Daniel likes to remind visitors to the Priory that they do things “by the book.” They are rubrically scrupulous to the 1962 Missal, even if that might cause shudders to anyone who carries around a tattered copy of Pope St. Pius V’s Quo Primum in their back pocket. Among devotees of the Gregorian Rite, there’s some controversy in the notion that the faithful should ever open their mouths, whether in prayer or in song, within the context of a Sunday liturgy.

Theologically, historically, you can brawl this one out to your heart’s content. I’ve seen evidence for both arguments. But common sense tells me that the “be seen and not heard” approach to liturgical participation is madness, invented by people who want Catholics to fall in line, not ask questions, and wear their complete docility on their sleeves. This is the kind of Catholicism that caused many of the faithful to abandon the Church in the mid-twentieth-century. Those fabled ruler-wielding nuns cracking the knuckles of anyone who dared think for themselves or struggled with a doctrine drove Catholics away from the Faith and into the arms of secular rationalism. I should know. My father was one of them. Luckily, he came back. Many didn’t.

People are people, and by their very nature they need to be a part of something to care about it. They need to find themselves invested. We worship God in community because no man in the Christian life is an island. We pray together because none of us were meant to go it alone. Finding a liturgy that is reverent is hard enough. Finding a liturgy that is reverent but also inclusive in a healthy, orthodox way is even more difficult. The Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem model this as part of a comprehensive approach to traditional Catholic spirituality. If the Traditional Latin Mass and sacraments are to not only be sustainable, but continue to grow, it’s the kind of model that more will have to follow.

The outrage over Dan’s Savage’s profanity laced lecture at a conference for high school journalism students has focused on his frontal attack on the Bible. This has diverted attention from Savage’s objective: promoting his “It gets better,” campaign, the purpose of which is to encourage confused and troubled teenagers to ‘come out’ and experiment with homosexuality.

Christians may be upset, but this hardly bothers Savage who is achieving his objective. His anti-Bible rants appeal to his target audience. He undermines the students’ faith, validates their rebellion against parents, and encourages sexual promiscuity. The raucous applause from the students, who didn’t walk out, shows that Savage’s remarks had the desired effect. Unfortunately, defending the scriptural prescriptions against homosexuality will only reinforce Savage’s message that Christians are anti-sex and that being gay or pro-gay is cool.

For decades, the gay activists and their allies have been engaged in a systematic campaign to get their propaganda into schools. First, they used parents’ fear of teen pregnancy to push for comprehensive sex education, which turned out to be pro-gay education. Then they used the AIDS epidemic to push pro-gay ‘safe-sex’ education. Now they are using bullying to launch a frontal attack on religion and push a pro-gay agenda. Dan Savage’s rant has only made explicit what has been implicit in pro-gay education from the beginning, namely that it is stridently anti-Christian.

Pro-gay education is based on fabrications and lies. For example, in spite of claims that persons with same-sex attraction (SSA) are ‘born that way’ and can’t change, there is no scientific evidence that to back up these assertions,[1] and plenty of evidence that SSA is rooted in early negative experiences[2] and that change is possible.[3] Many teenagers who think they might be “gay” discover later they aren’t.[4]

While Savage tells vulnerable teens experiencing SSA that “It gets better,” there is substantial, uncontroverted evidence that it doesn’t, and it could get a lot worse. Encouraging adolescent males to engage in sex with other men is a prescription for disaster. Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the gay community. Since 1981, 300,000 MSM have died of AIDS, and 6,000 are expected to die this year and every year for the foreseeable future. According to the CDC, in 2008, 17,940 MSM were diagnosed with HIV infections, an increase of 17% from 2005. MSM accounted for 53% of all new infections. MSM are 44 to 86 times more likely to be diagnosed HIV positive than men who don’t.[5] In addition 65 percent of all new cases of syphilis were found in MSM, although MSM make up less than 2% of the population. MSM are more likely to contract cancer, particularly Human Papillomavirus caused anal and oral cancer; more likely to contract antibiotic resistant gonorrhea[6], and a host of other exotic sexually transmitted diseases.

Gay positive ‘safe sex’ education has failed. Adolescent MSM may promise themselves to always use a condom, but study after study reveals that very few MSM keep that promise.[7] They suffer from ‘condom fatigue.’ They have sex when they are drunk or high. In the heat of passion they lie about their HIV status. They don’t get tested when they know they are at risk.  The younger a man is when he begins to have sex with men the greater the risk he will become infected.[8]

The AIDS epidemic didn’t randomly strike the gay community. There was an epidemic of STDs among MSM before AIDS appeared. And those dealing with the pre-AIDS STD epidemic among MSM that the introduction of a new lethal pathogen would be disastrous. Tragically, they were right. What is worse, after the AIDS epidemic started, gay activists successfully sabotaged standard public health measures for control of STDS. They were more interested in preserving their sexual revolution, than saving lives. The history of the disaster was laid out by Randy Shilts (who died of the AIDS) in his book And the Band Played On.

And disease is not the only risk, boys who enter the gay scene are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, particularly crystal meth,[9] more likely to engage in prostitution or be victims of domestic violence.

The geeky, awkward adolescent, who thinks that coming out as gay will provide instant acceptance, will quickly discover that among gay men physical beauty is highly prized. In the sex crazed world of circuit parties and anonymous hook ups that characterizes gay life, the unattractive — even the just average — face repeated rejection.

And even the beautiful ones grow old. Consider the story of Bob Bergeron a handsome gay New York therapist, who according to his friends had it all. He had just finished a book designed to provide positive advice to older gay men, The Right Side of Forty: The Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife and Beyond.  However, in January of this year a friend found him with a plastic bay over his head. He had been dead several days. His suicide note was written on the title page of his book. An arrow pointed to the name of the book, followed by the words: “It’s a lie based on bad information.” Unfortunately Bergson’s suicide is not an aberration. Gay and bisexual men are three times more likely to attempt suicide.[10]

Given the health consequences alone, pro-gay education presents an unacceptable risk –  a risk far greater than the problems it pretends to address – and its advocates – like Dan Savage – shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred yards of school. A pro-smoking or pro-pedophilia advocate would pose less danger.

I am following up a recent blogpost about China’s demographic decline.  This piece from the Economist shows that the inexorable rise of the Dragon will be hindered by its demographic Achilles heel.  According to the UN medium variant population projection, China’s population will dip to below 1.3 billion in 2050 (assuming that its very low fertility rate starts to recover).  However, if its fertility rate remains at about 1.5-1.6 children per women then China will have less than 1 billion people in 2060.  Thus, China can no longer be considered the factory of the world – its workforce will actually start to shrink in absolute terms after 2013.  If China wants to continue to supply its hungry factories with hands then it will need to look offshore for workers. Who knows what problems large scale immigration will bring to China, it is, after all, a country that does not have a history of integrating migrants in large numbers in recent times.

Here are some other demographic numbers where China is set to outperform the USA.  Apart from surpassing the USA in terms of manufactured output, car sales and energy use (and perhaps by 2017 in terms of economic size at purchasing-power parity) China will also by 2050 be much more advanced in terms of its median age. Half of China’s population will be below and half above the age of 49 in 2050, compared with the USA’s 40 years.  By 2050, the share of the population the over-65 age bracket in China will have grown 17.4 percentage points from 2010, whereas the same group in the USA will only have grown 8.1%.

In short, China is not having enough babies and its remaining population is getting old.  And with a growing number of Chinese elderly who cannot rely on their family for support, rest homes are in hot demand (according to this article, also from the Economist).  What is interesting is the role that NGOs, and particularly religious organisations, are taking on to provide these rest homes.  In Hangzhou, a city 180kms south west of Shanghai, 20% of the 33,000 beds for the elderly are provided by NGOs.  Because of the demand that the ageing population is creating for rest homes, the Chinese Government is starting to look for help – even from religious organisations that it is traditionally wary of.  Although it only applies to officially approved religious organisations, in late February the government issued a document that seemed to encourage religious groups to do charity work.

Is this a recognition that the one child policy is creating a problem that the Chinese Government can’t deal with? Who would have thought that ripping babies to shreds in their mother’s wombs while the mother is held unwilling on the operating table would turn out to have such bad consequences?

The sooner that China wakes up to its demographic malaise and rescinds this unjust one child policy the better.  We must continue to bang the drum – the future generations are not a disease to be immunised against, surgically removed and generally avoided at all costs! I hope that I live to see the day when Chen Guangcheng is mentioned around the world in the same breath as Wilberforce, Clarkson or Harriet Beecher Stowe?

This article was originally published on MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons Licence.

In 2005 I spent three months in Rome. In some ways I have never left. Perhaps it sounds like a commonplace to say that I “left part of myself” in the Eternal City. But the fact is, I did. I returned to Rome once more, in the spring of 2007, when I proposed to my now-wife in Assisi, and I have not been back since. And yet, to this day there is hardly a week that goes by when I do not dream about Rome, and often these dreams recur far more frequently than that.

There is very little to tell about these dreams: usually I am alone, or with another person or group of friends, wandering through the cobblestone streets and alleyways of the city. It is not so much the events, but rather the mood of these dreams that so disturbs my sleep, and then my waking hours, so that I often feel the influence of their haunting beauty long after I have awoken.

Very often, in the curious manner of dreams, “Rome” looks nothing at all like the real Rome, and yet when I awake I am absolutely certain that I was dreaming about the Eternal City. This makes sense because Rome has become so much more to me than a city, even a very beautiful one: it has become an archetype, a symbol, an abstraction of beauty, both man-made and divine.  And whenever I encounter such beauty in my dreams, whether it bears any resemblance at all to anything actually in Rome, it is categorized simply as “Rome.”

Our sleeping subconscious minds are far more skilled creators than our waking selves, and if I could show you the churches and basilicas and cafes and boulevards and parks and vistas that my imagination has cooked up in the small hours of the morning, you should see why I feel as if I am haunted by the Eternal City. And yet, for all of their ethereal beauty, I doubt that anything my sleeping imagination has concocted comes anywhere close to what the real Rome has to offer.

Though I must have walked through the giant bronze doors of St. Peter’s Basilica four dozen times in real life – more perhaps – every time was like the first: which is to say, every time I felt an almost irresistible urge to drop my knees. I wonder if it is ever possible to become insensible to that moment when you step into the nave of the basilica and catch sight of its vaulted ceilings, the immensity and height and beauty of which never fail to catch you off guard, and feel that strange, buoyant sensation, as if the weight of the heavens has been resting on your head, and has suddenly lifted? The only other place where I remember feeling that sensation to a similar degree was the Pantheon, with its massive dome so cleverly concealed that you don’t even know it is there until you are directly under it, and the first glimpse of which literally made me feel as if I was about to lift a full three inches off the floor. In both of these buildings is found an architecture of such purity and elegance, that is at once light and airy, and solemn and manly. And this is but the tiniest fraction of what Rome has to offer.

Having grown up in a suburb of Toronto, with its Soviet-style apartment blocks, strip malls, and cookie-cutter homes, Rome came as a shock to me: I did not know, at least with the full weight of experience, that men could create such beautiful things. But even more unexpected and earth shattering was the revelation that the creation of exquisite beauty was not only the province of masters and geniuses. For while Michelangelo and Raphael may have carved statues and painted pictures of seemingly divine craftsmanship, these works of genius are inevitably displayed in buildings with painstakingly assembled marble floors, gilt ceilings, polished pillars, intricate chandeliers and carved facades that are sometimes wrought with hundreds upon hundreds of stone gargoyles and saints. And who assembled, carved, chiseled, and cast all of these magnificent things? Not geniuses, but rather common artisans: thousands upon thousands of common stone masons, blacksmiths, painters and carpenters whose names will remain obscure until Doomsday.

Like any other sightseer who has wandered through the museums and churches of Rome, it was not long before the uncomfortable question began insinuating itself: Why do men no longer create such things? Why, with all of our education, wealth and technology, far beyond the wildest imaginings of the medieval popes and peasants who financed and built the churches and palaces of Rome, can we not build, or paint, or carve what our medieval and renaissance forebears built and painted and carved? What have we lost?

This essay is not about that question, or its answer. I take it as a given that we have lost something, and I believe I have a pretty good idea what it is. Rather, the first point I wish to make is that we have not lost it completely. Much of the beauty of the past is preserved for our enjoyment. And sadder, perhaps, than the fact that such beauty is no longer being created on a wide scale, is that many of us have chosen rather to gorge ourselves on the grossest provender of the ersatz “pop” culture in which we are immersed, than to dine upon the far more substantial and nourishing fare of true culture. That is the first point I wish to make.

But I do not wish to sound like a curmudgeon. And so my second point is this: that the spark in the human soul that created Rome has not been extinguished, not entirely, and that it is up to each of us to fan that spark into life until it burns anew in a living flame. For if we only ever enjoy the achievements of the past, we run the risk of becoming mere elitist antiquarians – dusty scholars of a dead tradition, snobbishly excoriating the failures of the present while doing nothing to remedy them: hoarding beauty, and ignoring that it, like goodness, is self-diffusive, and demands to be multiplied and shared. We all know such people, and they tend to be full of anger, for implicit in their cultivation, in their knowledge and their discerning taste, is an elegy for beauty, Whom they believe is dead, even if well-embalmed: but Beauty is not dead, because, for all the protestations of a syphilitic German philosopher otherwise, God is not dead.

For those who are disgusted with what now passes for culture, there is a middle way, and it is this: to allow authentic beauty to soak into our minds like a rainfall on a fertile field, and then to carefully tend that field until it brings forth new life, fresh life. In other words, we must be like those nameless artisans of old, who, though they were not geniuses, though they had not the greatness of a Raphael, or a Brunelleschi, nevertheless were able to contribute their small piece to works of architecture that centuries later still take our breath away, because of the simple fact that they had drunk in true culture so deeply that, even if they could not have put it into words, it seeped effortlessly from their pores.

I said earlier that I would not discuss the question of what our culture has lost, but I find that I cannot finish this essay without doing so. The answer, of course, is simple: we have lost God. And without God all we have left to do is to give vent to the barrenness of our own souls bereft of the Divine Spark: hence, modern art, modern architecture…modern life.

This, then, is the first duty of those who wish to restore authentic culture: to rediscover God. Once do that and our lives will, even without our consciously willing it, express this new knowledge. Maybe not in artistic achievements (though for some it inevitably will, and we should support such artists wherever we find them), but in the very fabric of our lives: the way we live, the way we love, the work we do, the homes we build, the books we read, the songs we sing, the games we play, the families we raise. And in all of these humble ways, we will be as those medieval artisans, laying our stone, chiseling our gargoyle, painting on our gold leaf, contributing our small, anonymous piece to what John Senior eagerly looked forward to and called “the restoration of Christian culture.”

In this way maybe one day we may yet create a new Rome.

For centuries the public square and the street have been the spatial media of public culture. But just how important is traditional public space—urban space—to a genuinely public culture? In an age of increasingly sophisticated electronic communications, does civil society require the physical and spatial arrangements of the traditional city? I don’t know the answers to these questions. But to me the abandonment of traditional urban form seems symptomatic of a decline in public culture. Public space and civic buildings once received a high degree of aesthetic and financial attention, of a sort that indicated their cultural importance. That attention increasingly seems directed elsewhere.

I was struck by one small expression of this recently, in two separate conversations. One was with an acquaintance who had recently spent an evening with friends out in some middle-class suburb of New York, a family consisting of two parents and one child (who the parents had decided would be an only child), and a large house with three bathrooms. This struck my conversation partner as odd. What are they doing out there with all those bathrooms? The other conversation was with an architect friend in Chicago who mentioned to me that she had left her old job in the private sector for her current job in county government because she was “tired of doing $100,000 bathrooms for clients in the north-shore suburbs.”

Both comments touched a nerve, because I had recently (and frustratingly) finished third in a little local competition to design a vacation house—and noticed that the first- and second-place winners had both included three full bathrooms in their designs for a house of less than 1,800 square feet. Silly me; I had only thought to include one and a half baths! Feeling all of a sudden out of touch with America, I began researching the real estate advertisements of my local papers. There I discovered how apparently important bathrooms and bedrooms have become to the definition of the good life in the suburbs.

The growth and proliferation of the automobile suburb is due largely to post–World War II federal transportation and housing programs that clearly appeal to some deeply ingrained American tendencies and desires; but suburbs are actually a nineteenth-century invention. Proximate creations of the passenger railroads, pre-Depression suburbs always had at least a few architect-designed, quasi-palatial dwellings for their wealthiest residents. In the arriviste postwar suburbs of today the democratization of luxury proceeds, but this time promoted less by architects than by professional builders in the speculative housing market. One manifestation of this appears to be the increasing prominence of master bedroom “suites” and the increasing number and size of bathrooms found in houses targeted at the middle and upper-middle classes.

Evidence for this trend is certainly ample in the “home guide” section of any American newspaper. In a 1997 edition of the Chicago Tribune I found a typical feature article about a thirteen “custom home” development at the outer edges of suburban Chicago where the different three- and four-bedroom residences ranged from 2,800 to 3,800 square feet—comparatively small by current standards. All thirteen houses featured master suites segregated from secondary bedrooms. One advertised a suite with a walk-in closet that “looks like it could accommodate the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” and two-person showers sans doors (“bigger than some cars”). Each house had multiple bathrooms; several had four, and one had six.

We can hope (though should not presume) that most of these houses are well built. It seems noteworthy however that none of them are either architect-designed or (from the photographic evidence) aesthetically distinguished. Moreover, if the prominence of their bedroom suites and bathrooms is not necessarily typical of most new housing construction, neither is it particularly unusual or confined to automobile suburbs. In the same paper there were numerous advertisements for new “luxury townhomes” in older Chicago railroad suburbs, many featuring two bedrooms and two and a half baths. Increasingly, the market assumption appears to be that every bedroom in new residential construction requires its own bath. This was common in luxury residential construction for most of the twentieth century, but appears now to have trickled down to suburban middle-class housing as well.

What, if anything, should one make of this? At one level, I think the appropriate answer is “not much.” Within the requirements of justice, people with money are and should be free to spend it pretty much however they want, and I have zero interest in or passion for denigrating the virtues of private home-ownership, personal hygiene, and modern plumbing. At another level, however, a residential ideal of one bathroom per bedroom can have the insidious effect of becoming the standard by which housing comes to be deemed acceptable. And as this ratio becomes normative, embodied in building codes and other institutional regulations, it makes it that much more difficult to create affordable housing for that sizable sector of society unable to buy in affluent suburbs.

But there are cultural issues here as well. Architecture high and low expresses and embodies, intentionally or not, cultural ideals and aspirations; and in light of the residential building industry trends featured in the Tribune, it may be worth reflecting upon what some of these are. Journalist Karen Tensa, reviewing Bathrooms: Inspiring Ideas and Practical Solutions for Creating a Beautiful Bathroom (Clarkson Potter, 1996), expresses the view that today’s opulent bathrooms and bedrooms represent a rejection by Americans of our “puritanical roots.” This is plausible enough, as far as it goes; but the implications of this rejection may be larger than she realizes, and not entirely benign.

Bigger and more luxurious bedrooms and bathrooms seem to me just one physical manifestation of that shrinkage of the public realm happening reciprocally and in tandem with America’s true growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self. Like the decline of the street and square as active public spaces—and the demise of the alley, the ubiquity of the driveway, the transformation of the garage door into the front door, the demise of uninterrupted curbs on residential blocks, the relocation of domestic life to yards and family rooms at the rear of the house, and the creation of complex suburban roofs apparently intended to simulate small villages—the growing number and importance of domestic bathrooms and bedroom suites indicates yet another way we materialize in our built environment our culture’s turn from the civic to the private.

This turn to the private would have dismayed but not surprised Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, Tocqueville recognized individualism as a peculiarly democratic proclivity. His 1840 characterization of individualism (“a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to . . . draw apart with his family and friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself”) goes far toward describing a social reality that has taken physical form in the American suburb.

But I have one more contemporary bathroom story; and though it is not a story of suburban bathrooms, it too is a tale about architecture, public culture and democratic ideals. The central campus of the University of Virginia is considered by many the most beautiful spatial and architectural ensemble in the United States. Designed by Thomas Jefferson as a model “academical village,” the university’s purpose was to help create and promote an educated citizenry, which Jefferson thought necessary for the success of an emerging American democracy. For an Enlightenment luminary such as Jefferson, reason rather than church or crown was to be the authoritative principle of America, and this dictated among other things that a library rather than a church or chapel would occupy the premier position at his university. The library (the Rotunda) therefore sits atop the highest point on the original campus. A secularized version of the Pantheon in Rome, the Rotunda terminates the north axis of a large green space—The Lawn—that itself is flanked on its east and west sides by a series of ten residential pavilions interspersed between some fifty-six cell-like rooms connected in front by Doric colonnades. The pavilions were designed originally for double duty as both faculty residences and classrooms, and the cell-like rooms were built to house the student population.

Today Virginia’s student body numbers approximately seventeen thousand and the full-time faculty some twenty-four hundred; the university’s physical facilities have grown accordingly. The Rotunda is no longer the university library but remains, with The Lawn and the rest of Jefferson’s original design, the symbolic center of campus life. Likewise, the pavilions are no longer used as classrooms, but are instead residences occupied by various deans and administrators as well as select faculty members. The student rooms, however, continue to be occupied by an elite group of senior undergraduates, chosen on the basis of outstanding academic and extracurricular performance at the university. This is regarded as a singular honor, and student residence “on The Lawn” is highly coveted in spite of several inconveniences—including the fact that student rooms are equipped with neither toilets nor showers (which are located in outbuildings behind the student quarters).

At Virginia, therefore, elite students voluntarily forfeit—even if only for an academic year—personal comforts available in every other university residence facility for the honor of living on The Lawn and the pleasure of its building and spatial arrangements—a little vestige of ascetic culture right here in the good old U.S.A. I might as well also point out that the design of this premier architectural icon, this intended microcosm of a fledgling democratic culture, is strikingly hierarchical. Jefferson physically and spatially subordinates the student rooms to the faculty pavilions, and both to the majesty of the Rotunda and The Lawn (the latter being the equivalent of the university’s public square); and this hierarchical arrangement of buildings and spaces together embody and express the shared purposes of the academic community.

Both Jefferson and Tocqueville believed that democratic liberty depends upon culturally encouraged habits of individual self-restraint and concern for the common good. But Tocqueville recognized that the conflicting democratic ideals of freedom and equality tend themselves to undermine the self-restraint necessary for democracy to work by creating a restless and dynamic social milieu that fosters envy, individualism, and that unlimited desire for material pleasures that has become contemporary consumerism—a large cultural habit that finds one small expression in the proliferation of the “post-puritan” domestic bathroom and one large expression in the decline of civic architecture, the street, and the public square. And although both Jefferson and Tocqueville were articulate advocates of democracy as the form of government best suited for a just society of free human beings, Tocqueville the French Catholic aristocrat had a decidedly stronger sense of original sin and the corruption of human nature than did Jefferson the Deist Virginia gentleman—and hence also a stronger sense of the fragility of democratic government, the corrosive agents to which it is vulnerable, and the kinds of character virtues necessary to sustain it.

Our dominant moral imperative today is expressive rather than renunciatory, and we pay an aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural price for this. That the rising status of the suburban bedroom and bathroom coincides with the decline of the public realm and the nadir of civic architecture is not, I think, by chance. The irony of Mr. Jefferson’s University is that the young democratic culture it celebrated in such enduringly transcendent beauty may have become, in its loss of individual self-restraint, a democratic culture almost wholly incapable of producing transcendent civic architecture.

This excerpt is from
Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred
by Philip Bess (ISI Books, 2006)

Many people I talk to are worried that it seems to them that the ‘wrong’ sort of people are having all the babies – those who are not in stable relationships or who are, rightly or wrongly, perceived to have lower morals and to be less educated.  Concerns are voiced especially among my parents’ age group (in their 50′s) who generally had their babies earlier.

This is largely because more educated young people often feel that having a baby will interrupt their hard earned career paths, or they simply settle down later after finishing university, establishing a career, travelling, buying a house, finding a similarly educated partner willing to marry them!, setting themselves up well financially, etc. and then find that they can only have one or two children (often using some sort or fertility treatment) or that they can’t have them at all.

However, this phenomenon is not actually all that new according to a recent study.  Childlessness among college-educated women actually peaked in the 1990’s, when about 30 percent had no children, according to a new analysis of U.S. data (although I assume less women overall actually went to university then).  Now for the first time a recent study has found that a greater number of highly educated women in their late 30’s and 40’s in the United States are deciding to have children, something that Newswise describes as ‘a dramatic turnaround from recent history’ in an interesting article based on a new study by Ohio University (reported here in the Journal of Population Economics).  In fact, fertility increased at almost all ages since the late 1990s or 2000 across all groups of women studied.

Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor of economics at Ohio State University comments in the article that:

“One of the major economic stories of the second half of the 20th century was that highly educated women were working more and having fewer children. It is too early to definitively say that trend is over, but there is no doubt we have seen fertility rise among older, highly educated women.”

It is not clear from this research whether women are actually leaving their jobs to have children or are employing childcare, but it is clear that they are increasingly opting to have a family – and that’s surely positive for the future of our society.

It is interesting that the findings on women’s fertility were very different depending on education level – giving some weight to my mother’s friend’s concerns. However, Qingyan Shang, an assistant professor at the State University of New York and the first author of the study, reports that the numbers of children are not actually all that different: “For the less educated women, it is more a story about the timing of their fertility. They are having their children earlier now than they used to, but they are not having any more children overall,” he said.

The study notes that, with the data available, there is no completely accurate way to calculate how many older women are using fertility treatments to achieve this higher fertility – and of course fertility treatment often results in twins and triplets so more babies.  In their analysis, the researchers found that multiple birth rates began increasing around 1990 – especially among highly educated older women, who would probably be most likely to be using fertility treatments. Among college-graduate women in their early 40s, the multiple birth rate more than tripled from 1990 to 2006.

However, the researchers insist that the use of fertility treatments is not the only cause of the new trend so perhaps some of it really is women going back to good old fashioned families.  Dare we be so quaint!