Mark Steyn has some choice words about Mormon Demographics, and plugs Hugh Hewitts new Book: Go Here.

“Hugh Hewitt has a new book out this week, A Mormon In The White House? In The Boston Globe, Alex Beam answers the question:

Can a Mormon be elected president in 2008? No.

He offers the standard rationale: The Mormon church creeps out Mrs and Mrs America. It’s all just too freaky weirdy icky.

Maybe he’s right, but I would be surprised if anybody’s writing that kind of column in ten years’ time. As a world-champion Demography Bore, I have an interest in the numbers. From the official records, it’s long been clear Utah is a statistical outlier: at the bottom of the hit parade for abortion, unwed mothers, single-parent families, etc. It has one of the highest fertility rates in the western world. According to this piece by Eric Kaufmann:

In the 1980s, the Mormon fertility rate was around three times that of American Jews. Today the Mormons, once a fringe sect, outnumber Jews among Americans under the age of 45.

To modify the old Himmelfarb line, the Jews earn like Episcopalians, vote like Puerto Ricans, but breed like Continentals. Proportionately, the America of 2020 will have fewer Jews, fewer blacks but more Mormons. So if they are creepy-freaky then America will be significantly creepy-freakier.

So too will be Alex Beam’s Massachusetts, which (in contrast to Utah) has one of the lowest fertility rates in the country. In a civilized nation, it’s harder for yawneroo broadsheets to run columns arguing that a group that makes up 15 or 20 per cent of the citizenry are a bunch of weirdsmobiles. And who’s “weird” is often little more than a reflection of who’s got the numbers and the energy. Alex Beam may think Boston and New York are hip happening burgs where all the cool cats hang, but, in fact, the “youngest” state in the nation with the lowest median age is Utah.

As for the politics of it all, one notes that that’s also the only state where Bush got over 70 per cent of the vote.

Jenny Hatch