At a World Congress of Families regional event in Belgrade in April, the group’s communications director, Don Feder, declared that a worldwide effort is needed to overthrow the “sexual revolution,” including the widespread acceptance of contraception, which he said leads to “death” by “preventing life from happening” and will ultimately lead to the “extinction” of humanity.
WCF, which will hold its annual conference in Salt Lake City this year, has from its inception pushed fears of a “demographic winter” caused by low fertility rates, a message that has been especially effective in European and Slavic countries where where right-wing movements encourage panic about immigration. Last year’s conference in Moscow, which WCF withdrew its official sponsorship of in resonse to the conflict in Ukraine but maintained an organizing role in, was organized under the theme “Large Families and the Future of Mankind.”
Feder told the gathering in Belgrade that the world is at risk from widespread contraception use “financed by governments, corporations or international agencies.”
“Many species have become extinct,” he said. “Our species may be the first to finance its own extinction.”
“We won’t find our way out of the forest of demographic winter until the sexual revolution is overthrown,” he continued, “its premises rejected, its prophets exposed, its dogma debunked. Ladies and gentlemen, ultimately the sexual revolution is about death: death through abortion, death through contraception (preventing life from happening), death through sexually transmitted diseases, death through pornography, death through promiscuity, all of this in place of monogamous marriage and childbearing.”
Also attending the Belgrade event were WCF’s Russian representative Alexey Komov and its French representative, far-right politician Fabrice Sorlin. Another speaker was Archipriest Dmitri Smirnov, a top official for “family” issues with the Russian Orthodox Church who has worked closely with WCF in the past.
The event was organized by representatives of the Serbian far-right Dveri movement, which worked with WCF to get a Belgrade gay pride parade canceled in 2013.
