Invasion of the neonatal neocons?

Here's a bit of vital and not at all horrific mental picture-inducing news for you, courtesy of the ever eloquent "Good Morning America:" "Republicans do have sex after all."

And apparently another reason liberals lose elections is because, unlike their allegedly more conservative counterparts, not enough of their amorous encounters end with popping out a wailing bag of future political disengagement to automatically "replenish their ranks" at the polls:

[Syracuse University professor Arthur] Brooks is dead serious about this. He says the baby gap will influence future elections. His message to liberals dismayed with his findings: "Have babies!"

I'd rather just pick apart his argument, thanks.

Now, I got to know the General Social Survey data, from which these findings were reportedly culled, more intimately than I would have liked in a class I took on public opinion research last year. The big take-home message there was that by getting creative with your statistics and sample sizes (which here are pretty small), you can make the data say just about anything you want to conclude.

What first jumps out at me (after the irony of so many conservatives having roundly neutered themselves of any possible natural selection arguments) is the 80 percent figure for the rate at which parental political persuasion is passed on. While it's true that parents' affiliation is often the strongest predictor of how a given American will vote, that figure seems a tad too deterministic and incongruent with notably close or landslide elections–especially given the share of the electorate, particularly its younger swath, that doesn't vote.

The older the voters, the more likely they are to actually cast ballots, and by that point they're not voting on "family" issues, they're looking out for themselves. If we're talking which group is going to have the next drastic electoral impact, I'd look to retiring baby boomers before tying to devise a way to beam campaign ads into the womb.

Setting entirely aside the power individual candidates can wield across party lines, the notion that when this supposedly lopsided cohort comes of voting age that the same issues and issue positions will still define what it means to vote "liberal" or "conservative" is also ludicrously shortsighted. It's no wonder so much of this country prefers to wrap its collective mind in allegorical but finite religious texts than stretch to fathom the notion of billions of years of random evolution.

For as usual, wanton prognostication usually ends up revealing more disturbing things about the present than it does about the future:

And Democrats such as Jenny Backus -- doing her small part by expecting her firstborn this October -- looked for the silver lining.

"It's something that you can always encourage your friends when you're doing a little matchmaking, to say, 'Hey, we got to make sure we close the fertility gap,'" she said.

Now there's a great pick-up line. It's running slightly less of a deficit on class than something about stuffing ballot boxes, swelling voter rolls or screwing two things at once, but come on–that would be almost as effective on liberal or independent women as these men who persist in toting around their drooling gene vessels like they were Labradoodles and using them to flirt with other women while their wives are shopping. Or about as effective as being Tom Cruise.

But at least now we know that those of us who don't want kids are not merely terrible human beings and, according to Forbes' recent (and so scathingly sexist it prompted a formal counterpoint) piece on avoiding career women, unsuitable for long-term relationships with comparably successful men because we have the gall to want a say in how we live our own lives–now we're sub-par citizens as well.

Yet even in the heat of culture-war battle, things just seem to have a way of balancing out: While the FDA handed the child-hating liberal whores a nice victory Thursday by allowing over-the-counter sales of Plan B, the God-fearing conservatives growing real families in labs got some good news from stem-cell researchers who announced a new technique, modeled on existing diagnostic testing, for deriving stem-cells from single blastomeres and without destroying embryos, giving more of the excessively engineered little buggers a shot at life, or continued indefinite deep-freeze.

But, naturally, the pre-female ones shouldn't stay there too long if they want a shot at snagging a husband–for in state-sanctioned declarations of love, as in astronomy, nobody wants a frigid dwarf.