By STEPHANIE NAKHLEH
Los Alamos
I’m writing this because I’m hearing from friends that Mr. Stradling’s recent piece (tl;dr — white Christians, who are the best parents, are being supplanted by non-Christian immigrants) is the latest in a string of incidents that have left people feeling unsafe and unwelcome in this town. The anti-LGBTQ+ crowd has been loud lately, and it’s not surprising that anti-immigration has entered the chat. Those of us who stand with our immigrant, religious-minority, and LGBTQ+ friends can’t just ignore this stuff and hope it goes away. It’s not going away. We need to constantly combat it; we need to make our neighbors feel safe and welcomed.
It’s possible that Mr. Stradling is truly puzzled at what could be offensive in his missive about “binary” heterosexual marriage being not just the best way to raise kids, but the only way to uphold society. The problem is he uses the word “society” a lot and clearly excludes from it everyone who isn’t a white heterosexual traditionally-married Christian. And, like eugenicists of the 20th century, he tries to make all this sound scientific.
To wit: “Let’s discuss the scientific examination of the role of family in our society,” he writes. “In the Biblical Genesis account, the marriage of Adam and Eve by God is described in this way…” He goes on with the story we all know. Note that the Biblical Genesis account is most definitely not science. The story of Adam and Eve is not how humans came about—humans are primates who came about the way everything alive does, through the process of natural selection. And as marriages go, the Biblical method of snagging a rib from a bloke to make a clone woman who makes clone babies that then reproduce with each other is problematic, both morally and scientifically. Do not recommend.
In fact, although the word “science” is tossed around, the piece is focused on religion. OK, let’s go there. It’s so curious how often conservative Christians ignore the entire New Testament, especially in matters of marriage. If Jesus thought the most important job was to marry and have kids, probably he’d have led by example. Instead, he urged people to abandon their families in order to join him. The unmarried and child-free-by-choice fellow’s focus was not on procreating, but on urging people to be nicer to each other. In his daily life he created a family out of an extended group of people he wasn’t related to. There’s a Biblical family model for you.
The Old Testament, in contrast, offers up “Biblical marriage” examples such as: a man and his concubines; a man and the housemaid who was forced into babymaking after the wife turned out to be too old; a man and any attractive slaves he acquired; and a man and the victim he raped. Among others. The mid-20th-century American family model Mr. Stradling advocates is not especially Biblical and is historically aberrant. And the glossy idealization of it has harmful real-world effects. Even conservative columnist David Brooks, hardly the standard-bearer of wokeness, is skeptical of it.
“During this period [the 1950s], a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids,” writes Brooks. “When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965. … That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.”
Conservatives like Mr. Stradling say that 1950s model is the cause of good things, but it may be an effect rather than a cause of stability. Brooks says, “Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.”
For the sake of argument, let’s take Mr. Stradling at his word for a moment and accept the proposition that stable marriages cause good things for kids and society. If that is true, why doesn’t he want to extend the institution to more people? If marriage between two committed adults causes such good outcomes, you’d want lots more committed adults marrying and creating kids, right? Luckily, we have in fact expanded the institution: many committed LGBTQ+ couples are marrying and raising kids—and it’s going great! One would expect lots of support for this from a marriage aficionado, but no. Only the straights should be married, he says, and they had better be “gender-normal” to boot: “Binary, gender-normal, husband and wife, married relationships are essential to the propagation of the next generation,” he writes, and that’s such a weird thing to say, because it’s obviously untrue.
I’ve saved the pièce de yikes résistance for last. Mr. Stradling writes: “If we do not have women and men willing to marry and bear and raise children, we will not survive as a society. (But there will be someone willing to immigrate here to supplant us.)” This is nationalist pronatalism verging on modern eugenics. As someone whose family would not exist without immigration, I find Mr. Stradling’s statement absurd and upsetting. My kids have a grandparent who is not only an immigrant, but an Arab, which appears to be the scariest kind of immigrant to Gary. We’re also not religious, yet here we are, having raised a whole entire family with kids graduating from college and getting married and everything. Are we supplanters?
Many might label Gary’s own family as a threat to society or as “supplanters” merely because they are Mormons—certainly the LDS have been seen as outsiders and have faced the same kinds of discrimination he is himself espousing. I don’t agree with that view. Mr. Stradling and his family are as much a part of society as I am, as my father-in-law is, as my child-free, LGBTQ+, Hindu, and/or Jewish friends are.
Unless we’re Ted Kaczynski and have deliberately retreated from society or are actively attacking it, we’re all in this together. We’re all part of society. Immigrants to the US who have lots of kids are creating lots of American kids, which is obvious to those who live outside their ethno-Christian bubble. Stradling cites France as a cautionary tale, without realizing that America is much more successful than France in integrating newcomers. Why? Because anyone can be an American. Stradling sees “America” as weak because his vision of it is so narrow. I see the country’s strength coming from its breadth. (Hat tip to this Jamelle Bouie piece I read this morning.)
The strength of our community and our country comes from the diversity of people in it. Gary is frightened because his vision leaves so many out; what’s left is an anemic, embattled “us” facing an insurgency of everyone else. Certainly his vision leaves my family out, as well as excluding all my LGBTQ+ friends and their families. According to that “supplant” quote from Mr. Stradling, we’re not only excluded from his society, we’re an active threat to it.
And this is where things slide from weird to dangerous. While I see America as a place that thrives on heterogeneity, Mr. Stradling has a purist “blood-and-soil” idea of who belongs that has led to genocide in the 20th century—the same century that saw the rise of the nuclear family he so cherishes. The Great Replacement language he invokes is inherently antisemitic; he can only deny the tie if he claims total ignorance of how loaded the word “supplant” is. Surely Mr. Stradling saw the footage from the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which tiki-torch wielding white supremacists marched around screaming “You will not replace us” (alternated with “Jews will not replace us”). These are the same fears Mr. Stradling wrings his hands over in his letter. To acknowledge that ugly dogwhistle isn’t to perform woke histrionics. You’d have to be willfully deaf to miss it.
But he doesn’t stop there. If it seems I’m being hyperbolic by bringing up genocide, note that Stradling himself raised the specter: In his follow-on statements (see screen-capture above for more context), Mr. Stradling has dug in deeper by quoting President Putin in an alarmingly admiring way, and indicating that Christian Serbs massacred Muslims because Muslims were having more kids. In this view, genocide is a natural, understandable, and inevitable response to being less fertile. Stradling writes, “Concerning Kosovo, Putin has said, (paraphrase), ‘Conquest by high reproduction rates will not be allowed to stand!’ But I think, in addition to genocide, he has to get the cooperation of Russian women to succeed in that battle, and they are not cooperating. Whether that is good or bad depends on your perspective.”
Depending on your perspective? Depending on your perspective? Mr. Stradling, my perspective is that genocidal massacres and forced birth are not reasonable responses to racial and sexual anxiety. Please rethink your views and your words.