If there's one thing I hate, it's when I'm forced to review book reviews of books I haven't read! But review the review I will, because I have a responsibility to live up to the blogger's creed of speed, volume, and vehemence.

In my defense, I should say that it is possible to agree or disagree with the alleged premises of a book as they are presented by a book reviewer -- even without having read the book. That's because a reviewer's statements about a book can be analyzed at their face value regardless of whether they accurately represent the book. If a reviewer attributes something to an author, I can disagree with it, and if it turned out that the author didn't say it, why, my disagreement wouldn't be with the author, but with the reviewer. Bear that in mind as you read my speedy, voluminous, and vehement review-review.

Just as you don't have to have read the book, you don't have to be an atheist or a gay marriage advocate (I'm a non-conforming neither) to question some of these premises:

In The Empty Cradle, his indispensable book about falling birthrates, Phillip Longman postulates a number of forces influencing American birthrates.

Some are obvious: the spread of abortion, contraception, divorce, and women's work opportunities. Another factor is the decline of religious belief (or at least practice) in America over the last 200 years. As Longman writes, 47 percent of those who attend church weekly "say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as compared to only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church." The birthrate in pious Utah is nearly double what it is in secular Vermont.

There are a host of other small, hidden influences. The social acceptance of homosexuality surely plays some part. And Americans have become more geographically mobile over the years. People now settle farther from their families than ever before - which cuts off a traditional source of support for day-care costs: grandparents. For a variety of reasons, American women have also been putting off childbirth until later in life. Longman notes that "recent studies show that a woman's fertility begins to drop at age 27, and by age 30 can decline by as much as 50 percent." And for practical reasons, the chances of having multiple children decline with age.

Assuming that Last was talking about the book, and not interjecting his own opinions, I wanted to know more, because there seem to be a couple of unsupported premises there. Let's start with the churches. While I do not doubt that there's a correlation between church non-attendance and fewer children, does that mean there's a causal relationship? Does church non-attendence really cause a failure of reproduction, or might it be that parents with children tend to see church as a more valuable activity, which might help develop their developing children's character? Might it therefore be just as likely that having children promotes church attendance? (I have close friends who never attended church until after they had kids, and now they're regular attendees.) I'd want to know how many of the church goers with children were church regulars before they had kids.

Intrigued, I looked for more information about the book at Amazon. From the book description:

Overpopulation has long been a global concern. But between modern medicine and reduced fertility, world population may in fact be shrinking--and is almost certain to do so by the time today's children retire. The troubling implications for our economy and culture include:
* The possibility of a fundamentalist revival due to the decline of secular fertility
* The threat to the free market as the supply of workers and consumers declines
* The eventual collapse of the American health care system as inordinate expenses are incurred by an aging population.

As to the connection between the "social acceptance of homosexuality" and the declining birth rate, I couldn't find any mention of it at Amazon. However, there's this comment in one of the reviews:

[Longman] suggests legalizing gay marriage (p. 175), but fails to address the negative evidence in the Scandinavian countries where gay marriage has already been legalized with the consequences that fertility rates have failed to recover and marriage itself is declining even more precipitously, leading to a less stable environment in which to bear and raise children.

Seriously, I am curious about the theory Last imputes to Longwood. How might "social acceptance of homosexuality" cause a decline in the reproductive rate of the general population? Unless the statement suffers from an omitted premise, I can't see how.

I mean, suppose you're Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, and you decide to socially accept homosexuality. I've heard the arguments about how acceptance leads to approval, but even if it did, what might that mean? That you'd have gay friends? Invite homosexuals into your home for dinner? That you'd not hesitate to buy from gay businesses? By what mechanism would the attributes of social acceptance lead to having fewer children? Unless your friends were gay Stalinists who made it their business to scold heterosexual "breeders," and you considered it a mandatory part of the social acceptance obligation to take marching orders from them, I'm at a loss.

More likely, there's a hidden premise to Longman's alleged claim. That the social acceptance of homosexuality is leading ever greater numbers of homosexuals to freely admit their homosexuality -- and that once they have taken this drastic and irreversible step, that they've forever removed themselves from the human breeding pool. (Again, there are premises nested within premises.)

Does the evidence bear that out?

Getting reliable figures on the gay population is next to impossible, but estimates range from a low of less than 1% to a high of 6%. As I see it, the problem with eugenics-based theorizing (that gays shrink the population) is that it runs smack into the "gay gene" theory. If we assume that homosexuality is genetic (a theory I regard with great skepticism -- but one which is promoted by gay activists), then if all homosexuals "came out" and rendered themselves non-reproductive, homosexuality would be expected to decline, and homosexuality (at least exclusive homosexuality) would go the way of the Shakers. Without reaching the question of whether gay activists want their own population to die out, if we assume the extinction of the gay gene and a longterm die-off of homosexuals, wouldn't the heterosexual, breeding population only increase over time?

So, even assuming if we assume complete 100% social acceptance leading to official social and governmental approval of all homosexuality, I'm just unable to see how this could possibly lead to a longterm reduction in population.

Interestingly, in his discussion of the Longman book, Arnold Kling touches on this:

I wonder, for example, if liberal attitudes about homosexuality, which reduce the pressure on homosexuals to marry and have children in order to appear normal, will lower the amount of homosexuality in the gene pool at some point.

And if I may be forgiven a moment of dark satire, I'd like to think the unthinkable, and ask the unaskable: Might gay marriage be paving the way towards the eventual extinction -- not of the human race, but of the homosexual race?

(Fortunately, I don't believe in crackpot eugenics theories or sexual ghettoization, and I'm free to advocate old-fashioned things like sexual freedom . . .)

NOTE: Longman's advocacy of gay marriage is also confirmed at this religious site which disagrees with him. Is it possible that he didn't actually say what Mr. Last has attributed to him? Because if Mr. Longman did advocate gay marriage, while simultaneously complaining about social acceptance of homosexuality, that's a problem which needs explaining. (Of course, if he didn't, there's still some 'splainin' to do.)

Since when do I have to read a book to find out whether or not it says something that isn't there?

UPDATE: Thanks to Pajamas Media for the link!