Homosexuality is either genetically or environmentally determined.  Environmental influences are either intrauterine or postnatal.  Behold the universe of possibilities!

Sexual orientation probably results from the interaction of environment and genetic predisposition, but science, so far, explains only a little.  Voluntarily choosing homosexuality cannot be discounted, although the more deeply embedded in genetics or early experience homosexuality is, the less voluntary it is likely to be.

A related characteristic, sex, is equally mysterious.  The sex ratio at birth, for example, sometimes changes in response to environmental conditions.  Severe drought results in Australian aborigines who still live in their traditional surroundings having more girls than boys.  Similarly, according to Ralph Catalano of the University of California, Berkeley, the dissolution of the communist grip on East Germany (and the ensuing severe economic dislocation in 1991) was followed by births of more girls than boys.  These findings make it appear that male embryos are more vulnerable to a harsh intrauterine environment.  If adversity differentially impedes male development, might it account for some tendency toward male homosexuality?

Very harsh postnatal conditions may also select for homosexuality.  If, for example, rearing children is fraught with great difficulties, the presence of nonreproducing adults may enhance young relatives’ survival and success enough to compensate the nonmarrying aunts and uncles for forgoing direct descendants of their own.  Concentrating all resources on fewer children sometimes enhances the reproductive success of the extended family, thus increasing—in the terminology of sociobiology—“inclusive fitness.”

If homosexuality is not all in the genes, we may speculate on which current conditions combine to make homosexuality more visible and probably more prevalent.  Among whites, might low morale and downward mobility account for some homosexuality?

Admittedly, schools indoctrinate the young in homosexual lifestyles, cities and foundations penalize the Boy Scouts of America for refusal to entrust boys to homosexual troop leaders, and the military is ambivalent about sexuality.  Efforts to subvert the nation’s young include teaching that white Americans are guilty of exploiting everyone else and that their vast achievements are a chimera.

A confident people would resist such an attack on their culture and power.  The attack against European-Americans succeeds because we allow it, giving every sign of being a depressed and demoralized people.  Homosexuality could be addressed if demoralization were even a fraction of the cause.

Certain demographic pressures undermine confidence.  Working their way through the economy and political system, demographic changes have steadily undercut the middle class, while ethnic diversity is celebrated for its own sake, and traditional culture is scorned—all leading to a confused state of mind and country.

Principal changes in U.S. demography stem from the 1965 immigration law, which substituted the principle of “family reunification” for quotas based on country of origin.  In its wake, not only sheer numbers but the source of immigrants changed.  From approximately 250,000 mostly European newcomers annually, today’s green-card and work-visa immigrants approach 1.5 million.  Illegal immigration adds an additional one-half to three-quarter million annually.  The majority of newcomers are “minorities.”

Both the numbers of nonassimilated newcomers and their effect on the economy create stress.  Rapid growth in the workforce—if not matched by enough new capital both to create jobs and to maintain the ratio of capital invested per job—results in a combination of lower-paid jobs, worse working conditions, and fewer benefits.  Harvard professor George Borjas estimates that, in 2002, immigration depressed the wages of native workers by 4.9 percent, or about $2,600 per year per worker.  Borjas estimates that each ten-percent increase in immigrant workers depresses the wage of native-born Americans by an additional 3.5 percent.  Applying Borjas’ methodology to the latest government statistics, Edwin Rubenstein calculates that the total annual-income loss from immigration suffered by native-born workers is $302.9 billion.  That loss increases in lock-step with the size of the immigrant labor force.

The erosion of the average native-born American’s real income has been accelerating since 1965.  A study entitled “Divergent Paths” (released in 2003 by the Russell Sage Foundation) compares the wage growth and job security of young white males entering the labor force in the 1960’s with that of similar men who began working in the late 1970’s and early 80’s.  The study documents a decline in economic prospects that its authors expect to be permanent and which has hollowed out the middle class.

Fierce competition for jobs began to weigh on young Americans after approximately 1970.  For the first time in a generation, entrants into the labor market encountered rapidly growing numbers from their own ranks—the baby boomers—as well as women and immigrants.  Little by little, job-seekers began to surpass the net number of new, good jobs.  Where a single income had afforded a rising standard of living for the average family, two incomes soon became a near necessity.  Most women lost the opportunity to choose full-time homemaking.  The burden of supporting a family began to loom large.

Hourly labor endured the earliest effects of saturation in the labor-market, but professionals in technical fields where fluent English is not required have also suffered.  Between 1968 and 1995, engineers with ten years’ experience were hit with a 13-percent decline in wages (measured in constant dollars), whereupon demographer Michael Teitelbaum declared the obvious: The problem was too many engineers for too few jobs.

In 1996, Herbert Stein, former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, observed that “the risk of becoming unemployed has now spread to people who did not expect to have that risk.”  Even when—for the first time in many years—unemployment dipped below five percent in 1997 and briefly reached four percent in 2000, some observers suggested that fewer than half of Americans were as financially secure as they had been some decades earlier.

Phyllis Schlafly attributes much of the increasing unemployment among American engineers and information-technology specialists (computer programmers) to special visa programs.  Workers enter the United States under H-1B (limited in number) and unlimited L-1 visas.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 384,191 foreigners who held H-1B visas and 328,480 with L-1 visas in 2001.  These numbers exclude visitors who have had visas extended for a three-year period or who work in educational institutions.

At least 890,000 H-1B visa-holders are in the United States at any time.  Visas expire if an H-1B worker loses his job; prosecution of those who overstay their visa (who become illegal aliens after the visa expires) is almost nonexistent.

Economic growth must be substantial to overcome the explosion of the workforce caused by this flood of immigrants.  During the 1990’s, more than 13 million net new immigrants arrived in the United States.  Andrew Sum and his colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies of Northeastern University write that “New foreign immigrants contributed nearly one-half of the growth in the nation’s civilian labor force.”  (Labor force is defined as those of working age either employed or looking for work.)

Recession barely slows immigration.  The Center for Immigration Studies reports that the “number of foreign-born adults (legal and illegal) holding a job has grown by 1.7 million since 2000, while among natives the number working actually fell by 800,000.”  Andrew Sum and his coinvestigators add, “All of the decline in net employment over the 2000-2002 period was borne by native-born workers.”

American unemployment—reported in September 2003 by Martin Weiss in the Safe Money Newsletter—is 12.8 percent of the labor force, if we count underemployed part-timers as well as the unemployed.  The demand for new jobs is immense.

Men face the fiercest job competition, because 70 percent of working-age immigrants are male.  In fact, eight of ten male workers joining the labor force between 1990 and 2000 were newly arrived immigrants.  Of the two million or so immigrants arriving annually, approximately three quarters are working age.

Thus, mass immigration is a major lever on the job market.  Without changes in immigration law and enforcement, it will rise even as good manufacturing and technical jobs go overseas.  Young Americans and established immigrants will not enjoy the economic opportunities created by their own country until immigration stops.  When it does, America’s young men and women will be somewhat buffered from Third World overpopulation.

Family formation is sensitive to economic conditions.  Marriage requires decision and commitment.  Good career paths make traditional marital relationships attractive and accessible, while deteriorating circumstances—wealth, income, security, and prospects for advancement—make people cautious.  Bleak outlooks restrain most people from taking on responsibilities.  Young people without jobs, or with dead-end jobs below their expectations, often do not marry and try, above all, to avoid becoming parents.

The young in a generation who have grown accustomed to lowering expectations and new cultural forms are increasingly likely to remain economically dependent on their parents.  The 30-year depression in the labor market and debt that grows in lockstep with our consumer culture discourage both marriage and the responsibilities of parenthood.  Postponed commitments evolve into singles lifestyles.

A singles lifestyle is the default option in life, “chosen” through inaction and the passage of time.  Meager chances for forming a traditional family increase the attractiveness of “alternative” lifestyles.  Thus, some young people may try out, or at least become open to, homosexuality, a variant of the singles culture.

If part of the prevalence and visibility of homosexual behavior is the result of choice, then a possible swing factor is the perceived ease of supporting a traditional family.  Eventually, the culture bows to multiple fait accomplis and recognizes new “styles” of relationships.

In fact, declining economic prospects coincided quite remarkably with the higher visibility—and possibly the prevalence—of homosexuality.  In September 1971, a Minneapolis judge granted one homosexual the right to adopt another.  In 1974, the American Psychiatric Association voted to rescind its classification of homosexuality as an illness.  On the political front, tax reform in 1973 reduced (and ultimately reversed) the married-unmarried tax-rate differential that had amounted to a penalty on the unmarried.  Increasingly, homosexuals felt free from the need to marry.

Antiprocreative lifestyles and choices extended well beyond overt homosexuality.  On March 22, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Massachusetts’ Baird decision, which had restricted heterosexual couples’ right to contraception.  On January 22, 1973, the Court removed legal obstacles to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy in Roe v. Wade.  Women increasingly asserted their independence from traditional household and maternal roles.  The feminist “revolution” was so powerful that women who chose not to work outside the home reported social disapproval, even ostracism.  Discussion of the right to physician-assisted suicide also surfaced in this era.  And, in 1972, California reported that the teenage suicide rate was the highest in its history.

These antifamily, antilife developments emerged alongside a dawning sense that overpopulation could become a problem for America.  The first Earth Day observance, sponsored in 1972 by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, called for both environmental protection and stabilization of population size.  (Ironically, population effects are often cyclical.  Shrinkage in the workforce raises wages, so the working people who benefit generally increase their likelihood of marrying and reproducing, and the next generation is larger.)

Lasting improvement in economic prospects might raise morale and bolster appreciation of country and culture—especially if we recognize that our traditional culture is in a fight for survival, a threat compounded by mass immigration and low birthrates among the native-born.  Procreation is often part of a serious defense.  Palestinian women, having few options, fight for land with the highest fertility rate in any Muslim country.

Those who have opted out of traditional family lifestyles might be awakened from passivity—even from a sense of futility and nihilism—if white America were to reject such debilitating trends as the role assigned to whites by liberal guilt.  As Shelby Steele writes in the Wall Street Journal (“Yo, Howard,” September 13, 2003), “Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. . . . [R]acial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil.  Say ‘I’m white and I’m proud’ and you are a Nazi.”

Only a black can sing that particular tune, a fact that captures the depth of white intimidation.  Rubbing salt into the wound, Steele’s piece continues: “No group in recent history has more aggressively seized power in the name of its racial superiority than Western whites.  This race illustrated for all time—through colonialism, slavery, white racism, Nazism—the extraordinary human evil.”

If white intimidation were not proved by the appearance of Steele’s diatribe in the mainstream press, the failure to counter his attack should do so.  A more self-confident press would object, as does columnist Samuel Francis, that Steele’s “nakedly anti-white claim that whites illustrate for all time an ‘extraordinary human evil’ is not only flapdoodle . . . but a little gob of racial spit.”

Intimidated European America can rise again—but not easily.  Choosing to defend our ethnic tradition means overcoming decades of education that elevate victimhood and denigrate European-American culture and white males—perennially portrayed as insensitive exploiters.  The contrary image—European-American culture as a noble tradition worth preserving—could become a beacon for all, including those for whom heterosexual or homosexual preference is closely balanced.

Restoration of economic prospects to a level where more children can be satisfactorily and successfully reared could result in marriage and procreation, which, on one level, are forms of self-affirmation.  Familial values affirm cultural values.

We need, therefore, not to renounce a particular sexual orientation but to affirm our traditional society, which will drive our determination to protect American jobs, demand an end to mass immigration, and turn economic opportunity to the service of traditional family formation.  The return of conditions that encourage the young to marry and reproduce—and might facilitate the retreat of optional homosexuality—can come only through a concerted effort on the part of many Americans.

Giving way to the forces arrayed against European-American culture is surrender.  Convince men and women to take pride in their past and future, in their culture and country, and they will strive for its survival.