You are apparently totally unfamiliar with welfare rules (the old AFDC rules). It was almost impossible for married couples to qualify.

So no, Limbaugh quotes on “welfare queens” don’t help prove that the family “has to be white and affluent”. The family in question has to be (to repeat) “married, raising their biological children”—which plenty of non-whites are, and plenty of working-class people are, and about which I have, I repeat, never heard any complaints in the religiously conservative world.

Sorry, what I was thinking was “selfish over 3 or so.” My best friend has 3 (including twins), I have a sister and brother, etc. 3 is pretty normal. “or so” means 4 would usually be okay, but half a dozen is pushing it. More than six and you’re definitely getting into vanity and self-aggrandizement, IMHO. More than 10, and you’re into hoarding and it’s probably due to having your reason damaged by religion or illness.

The historical reasons for having big families don’t exist anymore in the first world. Kids are unlikely to die young, and they aren’t needed as extra hands to work the farm. It made sense when you never knew how many kids would survive to adulthood.

At the very least, people who want a big family could adopt number 4, 5, and 6.

Slanderous? You seem to have blotted from your memory all the Rush Limbaugh-quality complaints about welfare queens being paid to have more children.

One is that it’s always been with us: someone’s always worried that group x are breeding like flies.

Good point. For example, back in the days of the Roman empire, you had these Phillip-Longman-in-a-toga types fretting and fussing about how the decadent Romans were being outbred by those hardy barbarians from the north, who might even overtake the seat of empire, if given half the chance, and…Oh, wait. I guess that ‘triumph of barbarism and religion’ thing really did happen, back in that day.

Just saying.

Demography is not destiny, to be sure. But at the same time, there is not much destiny without demography, which is to say, without a demographic base. In the long term, it’s a numbers game. If you can’t reproduce yourself (and I’m not talking about genes here, I’m talking about the reproduction of culture), you’re out of the game but good. It’s been known to happen.

“Always” would indeed be too strong. But people do tend to follow in their parents’ political footsteps. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi have followed a cohort of people who were high school seniors in 1965 and also interviewed their parents and kids. They have found substantial transmission of parents’ party identifications to children over these three generations. The transmission was not perfect, and individuals tended to diverge more from their parents as they aged. Further, the actual content of what the two major parties stood for changed during the period of this study. Nevertheless, the degree to which parents’ political identities predicted their childrens’ and grand-childrens’ identities was striking.

That pattern could, however, be counteracted by “differentiation” and other social processes.

As usual, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I have also lived almost all my life in the conservative Christian world, and have found it often still rife with Bob Jones-style bigotry. My parents remain hostile to interracial couples, because the Bible says the races shouldn’t mix…somewhere. They and many of their ilk amongst whom I grew up were ripe for President Reagan’s vicious attacks on welfare queens and their Cadillacs. Perhaps I missed the part where American fundamentalist Christians repudiated the racism of their Greatest President Ever. Then again, Pat Buchanan is a self-identified conservative Christian, and he has yet again been quite explicit that it’s white people who need to breed more.

And I still say that when the “greatest part” of the “family-friendly” world spews vitriol over families where the parents are the same sex, and rabidly seeks to criminalize them, your definition of “family friendly” is ever so slightly off.

Re #17—many allegedly “family friendly” types will go apoplectic if the couple with 5 kids is not white and affluent—that is false and slanderously so. I would challenge you to provide even one quote to back it up.

Most married SAHM’s are from the working class—families with less than the median income (that’s census data and easily available). And I have lived almost all my life in the conservative Christian world, which is the biggest part of the family-friendly world—and every congregation I have been part of, in 3 different denominations, has been racially mixed and included interracial couples.

Fathers die, tj.

Like he says of ‘family-friendly’ , it’s a good shorthand way of picking out a set of fairly easily recognised attitutdes.

I wonder whether it will catch on.

Incidentally, I’m fairly pro-marriage myself, even though I don’t fall inside the designated demographic.

I’d also like to distance myself from any sort of criticism of large families. I don’t care how many kids people have.