527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture | Katy Faust

Speaker 1 This is a worldview that does not discriminate between single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile.

Speaker 1 This is a world where if you're going to put children first, all adults must conform to those fundamental rights.

Speaker 2 Let's wrestle that out.

Speaker 1 That means that it is going to run up against all of our self-interest at some point.

Speaker 2 I have a friend, and he wasn't interested in children, but his partner was interested in children, and so they had children with surrogacy.

Speaker 1 There's one demographic in this country that's truly in the closet. It's kids with same-sex parents who desperately miss miss their mother or father.

Speaker 2 Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that?

Speaker 1 Forcing children to sacrifice something so adults can have what they want. Nobody has a right to a child.
Children have a right to their mother and father.

Speaker 2 And that lands us back into the, well, is it better that the child exists or not? argument.

Speaker 1 It all comes down to the same thing. And the question is: what does it mean to be human?

Speaker 2 I'm going to scrap this out with you.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today and sit down and talk to Katie Faust.
Katie is an author. She wrote Them Before Us,

Speaker 2 published in 2021, Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, 2023, and Pro-Child Politics.

Speaker 2 Katie is the founder and president of an organization called Them Before Us.

Speaker 2 And she advocates on behalf of the intrinsic and inalienable rights of the child.

Speaker 2 Her contention, which we discussed at length in the YouTube conversation,

Speaker 2 is that

Speaker 2 family policy, educational policy, economic policy,

Speaker 2 policy surrounding marriage should prioritize the natural rights of children,

Speaker 2 partly because children have inalienable natural rights, partly because they're voiceless and need to be defended, and partly because

Speaker 2 it seems self-evident

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 nothing that

Speaker 2 is harmful to children can be good for adults or for society. And so if you optimize

Speaker 2 your social policies in relationship to the well-being of children, you move a long ways towards optimizing your social policies for the flourishing of

Speaker 2 everyone. And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 we

Speaker 2 fought that through, I would say. Katie is not an admirer of surrogacy, for example.

Speaker 2 really regardless of the reasons. And

Speaker 2 so I pushed back on that and

Speaker 2 we hashed that through. And

Speaker 2 you can evaluate the consequences of that for yourself. We talked about

Speaker 2 the fact that not all families are created equal and that love does not define the family. You could think of it as a necessary but insufficient precondition for what actually constitutes a family.

Speaker 2 And Katie comes down pretty hard on both the religious and the biological side, arguing that,

Speaker 2 and I think rightly so that there isn't an ideal that can replace

Speaker 2 long-term committed monogamous child-centered heterosexual marriages as primarily as the foundation for successful

Speaker 2 and joyful stable rearing of

Speaker 2 children.

Speaker 2 And if you accept the doctrine that what's good for children is good for adults and for the state, then institutions that focus on the well-being, the flourishing of children, the prioritization of children,

Speaker 2 those institutions have to be foundational and prioritized. And that's certainly one of the doctrines of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which is this organization.

Speaker 2 Katie sits on its advisory board. And

Speaker 2 one of our

Speaker 2 fundamental principles is that healthy psyches and healthy societies are

Speaker 2 made possible by the establishment of healthy child-centered marriages. So you'll see how we argued and how we laid out the facts and the opinions.

Speaker 2 Katie's very articulate and well-informed, and she's a tough contender.

Speaker 2 And so if you're interested in how you navigate your marriage and your children, and how you might orient yourself in the world in relationship to your attitudes towards such things, then this is the podcast for you.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 Katie, let's talk about kids. Start by telling everybody what you do and why.

Speaker 1 Yeah, my name is Katie Faust. I'm the founder and president of the children's rights nonprofit Them Before Us.

Speaker 1 The idea is we put them, the children, before us, the adults in all matters of marriage and family. So what I do is I trigger people.

Speaker 2 That is what I do.

Speaker 1 When you say that children's rights to life and right to their mother and father need to come before adult desires, really what you're saying is every adult has to accommodate and sacrifice at some point.

Speaker 1 So I tell people, give me enough time and I'll piss you off too, because this is a worldview that does not discriminate between single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile.

Speaker 1 This is a world where if you're going to put children first, all adults must conform to those fundamental rights.

Speaker 1 And that means that it is going to run up against all of our self-interest at some point. So I think it's a necessary message.

Speaker 1 I think that it's critical not just to, you know, national thriving, but national surviving. But it does come at an individual cost for all of us.

Speaker 2 So let me ask you about that, you know, because

Speaker 2 that idea of self-interest and that self-interest is, say, at odds with the long-term interest of children is actually predicated on a pretty narrow view of what constitutes self-interest.

Speaker 2 Because my suspicions are that in a society that's properly constituted and with a psyche that's properly integrated, the interests of children and adults truly align, but they align over the long run.

Speaker 2 And so what sacrificed isn't so much self-interest as narrow, selfish, hedonistic gratification in the moment self-interest. Exactly.
Exactly. That's right.
Right. Well, and that's an important thing,

Speaker 2 important point to make because it's a big mistake that modern people make to identify their self with their hedonistic whims because that isn't their deepest self.

Speaker 2 Their deepest self, I would say, their most profound self, their best self, is the self. It has to be the self that's aligned with children because, well, how could it be otherwise?

Speaker 2 I mean, if we were fundamentally at odds with our children, we'd be fundamentally at odds with ourselves. And there's no survival and certainly no happy survival under those conditions.
So, so

Speaker 2 let's see if we can figure out what it means to organize ourselves and our societies around the long-term interests of children and make the presumption that that would be best for men and women by far, all things considered as well.

Speaker 2 Is that reasonable?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I will say that I think that there's a lot of people that are talking about how good marriage is for men, for example.

Speaker 1 Like, thank God there's been a resurgence of interest in actually, this is a vehicle of maturation for men. This is a wealth-creating institution for adults.

Speaker 1 This is good for women in terms of aligning with kind of the natural design of their body. And I'm so grateful for those voices.
I want to be the voice that speaks for kids. Kids don't lobby.

Speaker 1 They can't hire lawyers. They don't submit a mekus brief.
They don't speak at conferences. They don't submit articles and papers and op-eds.

Speaker 1 That is what to me is missing is representing the rights and well-being interests and desires of children.

Speaker 1 And it's because it's so easy to steamroll their interests because they can't speak for themselves.

Speaker 1 They are literally just at the mercy of whatever it is adults decide for them, whether it's in the cultural, legal, or technological space.

Speaker 1 So I obviously, I think that what's good for kids ultimately is going to redound to the benefit of all of society.

Speaker 1 I don't think it's an accident that what's good for kids also also in the long term ends up being good for men and women at all of society.

Speaker 1 But to me, the missing piece is accurately representing the interests of children in all of these conversations. So if I do my job, that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Speaker 2 So why did you become obsessed, let's say, with

Speaker 2 developing yourself as an advocate for the rights of children?

Speaker 2 And then there's a question that's intelligently allied with that is that what makes you believe, what gives you the conviction, or the delusion for that matter, perhaps, that you are entitled to and able to

Speaker 2 appropriately speak for the best interests of children, right?

Speaker 2 Because that's what your skeptics, obviously, the people who are skeptical about any mission such as yours, are going to make the case, like the postmodernist types always do, that you're just masking your own self-interest with,

Speaker 2 you know, putative care for children and pushing let's say a conservative agenda um using yeah yeah using your love for children as a camouflage so how did you get interested in this first like when did you start to become aware that this was a problem and then i guess you need to justify your stance and say why tell people who might be skeptical you know why you think that what you're doing should be regarded as credible.

Speaker 1 I think that a lot of people are going to say, well, are you sure you're not just advancing your own religious agenda or your own self-interest in the name of child protection?

Speaker 1 And I would say, you suspect that because you are massively projecting.

Speaker 1 That is literally what progressives have been doing on every single issue for decades, is cloaking some of the most child-destroying ideologies in the name of child protection or even child rights.

Speaker 1 So, I understand why that's a suspicion. It's because it's a very well-known playbook, especially on the left.
Why am I doing this?

Speaker 2 Yeah, and also, why, how are you not falling into that yourself, right? Because

Speaker 1 well, yeah, we'll find out. You can let me know.
We'll have a little JBP evaluation at the end of this, and you can let me know. You can give me the big Caesar of past fail.

Speaker 1 So I didn't get into this by choice. Like in the in the world of sort of Christians, and I'm like, I'll just state right up front, I am like a Bible-thumping evangelical to the max.

Speaker 1 Like you want evangelical credentials, I got you. Okay.

Speaker 1 So on that spectrum, I think that most Christians fall into either the truth tellers that are just constantly hammering away at the truth or the grace givers, the people that want to keep the peace and bring together all different kinds of people.

Speaker 1 I am a grace giver. I avoided this for a long time.
I don't like to make waves. I like to be loved.
I hate to be hated.

Speaker 1 It took me a long time to get into the public battle because honestly, I was busy with my four kids. My husband was the senior pastor of our church for a long time.

Speaker 1 Honestly, if the world wasn't crazy, I would just be reading the Bible with people and shepherding women. That is what I would be doing.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 but the marriage debate is what like flipped the switch for me. You know,

Speaker 1 I took your big five personality test, and I'm like 100% on extrovert.

Speaker 1 Conscientious,

Speaker 1 kind of, agreeable, 85%.

Speaker 1 Like, I will go along with almost anything.

Speaker 1 But when it is injustice against children, I see red. I just can't handle it.
And that's what happened in the marriage debate.

Speaker 1 What I saw, especially when the gay marriage discussion came to my state, Washington state, I saw this progressive agenda being pushed on the backs of child brokenness.

Speaker 1 You know, I, when they dared to connect marriage with parenting, which it wasn't always.

Speaker 1 A lot of times they advanced gay marriage on the total separation of the procreative aspect that has always been sort of the foundation for

Speaker 1 marriage idea, marriage policy, you know, social ideas about marriage through millennia. So a lot of gay marriage was disconnecting those two.
This isn't about kids.

Speaker 1 Oh, there's a lot of heterosexuals that can't have kids. So, you know, so gays can be married too.

Speaker 1 So, but when they did connect it to kids, what they said, what I heard them saying is, kids don't care if they have two moms or two dads.

Speaker 1 But functionally, what that means is kids don't care if they have lost their mom or lost their dad. That's what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 When you see the picture of a child with two moms, you're looking at a picture of a child who has lost their dad.

Speaker 1 When you're looking at a child with two dads, you are looking at a little girl or a little boy who has lost their mother.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 1 Sometimes that happens through tragedy. We used to experience that kind of, especially father loss on a mass scale.

Speaker 1 For example, after wars, before modern medicine, we used to experience mother loss at the time of birth.

Speaker 1 But thank God, due to modern warfare and modern technology, we are not seeing father and mother loss to tragedy on a mass scale like that.

Speaker 1 What we are now seeing is mother and father loss intentionally and now due to reproductive technologies commercially. But we're not looking at it as tragic anymore.

Speaker 1 Now we're looking at it as a step of progress. So my husband and I had been working with kids in a variety of different ways for a couple decades at that point.

Speaker 1 And I will tell you, I had not met a kid who lost their mother or father or who at minimum was not curious about the identity of that missing man and woman.

Speaker 1 But very, very often, it was the primal wound. It was the thing that you could barely touch, that you couldn't even get near without them flinching, without them crying.

Speaker 1 You know, when we were doing the lock-ins for the kids in middle school and high school, and there's that one kid that wants to stay up at 3 a.m.

Speaker 1 and talk with you in the middle of the gym floor when all the other kids are sleeping, you know what they want to talk with you about?

Speaker 1 Where is my father?

Speaker 1 Why doesn't he love me? Where did he go?

Speaker 2 Where is my mother?

Speaker 1 Why did she leave me? Why did she divorce my father? Why did she move across the state? It must have been me. There must have been something wrong with me.

Speaker 1 And so, this idea that you can just casually cut out a child's mother or father and it's going to not affect them at all, and that you were going to push some ever-widening progressive goalposts on the backs of fundamental harm to children.

Speaker 1 That was sort of the tipping point on the other side of the 85

Speaker 1 for me where i said get behind me satan now we roll when when when did that happen to you what what years was that that was 2012 2012 when i actually decided to start an anonymous blog because i am a peacekeeper and i'm a chicken and i know what these people will do to you you know they will make you pay so i wasn't out there with my with my name up front i just thought i just want to talk to the world about why marriage is actually about justice for children and the pain that they experience when you cut their mother or father out of their life and the harms that go along with that harms to their physical body harm to their emotion their academics their future relationships

Speaker 2 i went to a talk by um

Speaker 2 oh university of ottawa janice fiamengo

Speaker 2 who was a English professor at the University of Ottawa and who realized, who was a progressive, and who realized realized while lecturing that the things that she was saying were hurting the boys in her class.

Speaker 2 She could see it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was really at that moment that she became a serious scholar.

Speaker 2 And she's become, I don't know anyone who's done a better job of taking apart the feminist narrative, especially historically, than Janice Fiamengo.

Speaker 2 She's quite the monster. And I saw her at the University of Toronto.

Speaker 2 She did a series of lectures before she resigned to take care of her husband, her ailing husband. And she was protested madly.

Speaker 2 She was a very early person in the culture war on the academic side, and she paid a big price for it. And the

Speaker 2 lecture I went to at the University of Toronto was interrupted by half-wit.

Speaker 2 you know, cluster B psychopathology types pulling the fire alarms and packing the audience with false false tickets and then leaving.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that really shocked me during that display,

Speaker 2 and this was before I was in the public eye to any great degree, was that the whole audience seemed absolutely convinced that fathers, for example, weren't necessary, right?

Speaker 2 That a single mother on average could do just as good a job as a married couple raising a child. And I knew that that was false.
It's false.

Speaker 2 There are some single mothers who do a credible job and there's some married couples who do a dismal job, but on average, children with two parents do much better.

Speaker 2 And fatherlessness is a complete bloody catastrophe across multiple dimensions. And it's been a disaster.
And it's really...

Speaker 1 Do you mind if I jump in there? Because you said parents with two kids do better.

Speaker 2 But I want to challenge that and say, kids with two parents.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 that's what I'm getting.

Speaker 2 That's what I'm going to get to. Yeah, so please go ahead.

Speaker 1 Well, then, well, if this isn't what you were going to get to, then please get to what you're going to get to.

Speaker 1 But I will say that there has been some increased courage and boldness from the right and the left to say children need two parents.

Speaker 1 Like the data is now so strong that we're not able to reject that anymore. The myth of the single mother, you know, doing just as well, that is.
absolutely unsubstantiated.

Speaker 1 But I will say that it is not just two parents. It's not a two-parent home that advantages children.
It It is two married biological parents who advantage children.

Speaker 1 And that's a really important point.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, I think because go ahead.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 let's wrestle that out because,

Speaker 2 okay, so

Speaker 2 I have a friend, Dave Rubin. So I'll start with Rubin.
I don't think he'll mind.

Speaker 2 Dave's gay and he's married to his

Speaker 2 husband, who's also also named Dave. And Dave Rubin came along with me on my tour and I talked a lot about kids.

Speaker 2 And he wasn't interested in children, but he listened and his partner was interested in children. And so they had children with surrogacy.

Speaker 2 And I talked to Dave very forthrightly on a podcast about how insanely difficult that was. And Dave wasn't afraid to delve into the moral

Speaker 2 quandary, let's say, that surrounds surrogacy, which I would like to talk to about you.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the tremendous expense. And he was aware of the fact that, well, with two fathers, you don't have a mother.
And so his

Speaker 2 mother and his partner's mother participated and his sisters. And they did everything they could to

Speaker 2 formulate an environment exactly that.

Speaker 2 But what was evident, at this at minimum was evident, and I would like to talk to you about this because it's sort of at the core of the matter.

Speaker 2 The pathway they chose is not replicable as a basis for a stable society. It was very, very difficult for them to do what they did.
It cost a tremendous amount of time and money.

Speaker 2 They were insanely committed. They had the resources and they had the family support to flesh out the missing pieces, maybe, right? And so, maybe, Well,

Speaker 2 that's the issue. Maybe.
Now, you know, Dave told me that he wasn't particularly interested in contemplating a,

Speaker 2 what did he say? He didn't, what did he tell me? He didn't want to be wandering around Beverly Hills with a little dog

Speaker 2 in a, you know, purse when he was 60. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 You know, I remember the conversation you guys had where he said, I kind of feel like I'm at the end of what the maturity, the maturation that I can achieve without having children, children in essence is how that conversation went and that is true children do mature you in ways that other relationships and other demands do not but children are not a function of your maturation you should be a function of theirs so i understand so first of all let me say dave rubin incredibly talented absolute champion of western values probably one of the most talented interviewers that i know of right now and what he did to those children is 100 unjust unfortunately he forced the smallest, the weakest, the most vulnerable to sacrifice for two grown men.

Speaker 1 And even though they can try to make up for it with freezers full of breast milk, nighttime nannies, and the mothers in their life, they have denied their children not just one mother, not just two mothers, but I would argue, all three mothers, all three roles that a mother provides.

Speaker 1 Number one is the genetic mother who provides 50% of the child's biological identity. And that is a critical piece of identity consolation, consolidation, and formation.

Speaker 1 It is very hard for kids to answer the question, who am I? If they cannot answer the question, whose am I?

Speaker 1 And unfortunately, Dave and David have severed their children from 50% of the answer to that question. So there's number one mother that they've cut them off of.
Number two, the birth mother. This

Speaker 1 is not only the most critical, but the only relationship that children have for the first nine and a half months of their life.

Speaker 1 And the day that the child is born is the day when they are supposed to see the mother they already love for the first time, not the last.

Speaker 1 Why is it that we put children, newborns, on the chest of their mothers? It is not so they can form a bond. It is because children have an existing bond with that woman.

Speaker 1 It is her body, her smell, her voice. that soothes the baby.
She is the only thing that that child knows.

Speaker 1 We have measured, and it is her presence that decreases baby's cortisol levels, especially in the first couple days and weeks.

Speaker 2 Her presence,

Speaker 2 even go ahead, random moms.

Speaker 1 Her presence specifically. Random people, even the child's father, do not decrease cortisol levels and increase oxytocin levels in children the way that the child's own birth mother does.

Speaker 1 So that's mother number two. And then mother number three is the social mother, the woman that is providing the daily maternal love that satisfies children's souls and maximizes their development.

Speaker 1 So what surrogacy does is it splices what should be one person, mother, into three purchasable and optional women, the genetic mother who provides the egg, the birth mother that gestates the child, and the social mother that provides all of that female distinct nurturing that will, in essence, lead the child to that place of balance, thriving, and independence later on in life.

Speaker 1 And unfortunately, Dave and his husband, David, have starved their children of all three of those, not because of tragedy, intentionally and commercially.

Speaker 2 Okay, so I'm going to scrap this out with you. And it isn't because I disagree with you, you know, it's because it's very complicated.

Speaker 2 And, okay, so I guess the most logical, perhaps, and empathetic, possibly objection to the points that you made,

Speaker 2 which doesn't invalidate the points you made, by the way, and we can discuss them in detail, is that, well, these children that Dave has wouldn't have existed without this set of circumstances.

Speaker 2 And from what I can observe, the boys are very well loved. And I'm also not claiming for a moment that such arrangements can't go dreadfully wrong.

Speaker 2 And I'm perfectly aware of cases where that's been the case. So I'm not trying to be naive about this, but I'm also trying to take into account the fact that, well, and we can also talk about this.

Speaker 2 So they seem to have done as good a job of this as it's possible to do. Now, that's not replicable as a pathway for most people.
I don't think it's

Speaker 2 replicable as a pathway for most gay men. It's too difficult.
But insofar as it could be done, they did it as well as they could. And now they have these two children, which...

Speaker 2 who are apparently thriving and who wouldn't have existed had this not occurred. And there's something to be said for the fact of their existence.

Speaker 2 And you could say, well, they've been deprived of these three dimensions of maternal care or those have at least been substituted, but better to be deprived across some axes, you might say, than not to exist at all.

Speaker 2 And so, well, I'll throw that at you. And I'm not sure that's exactly fair, but it's harsh in the other direction.
And we might as well.

Speaker 1 I would rather have you ask me the hard questions because everybody in the audience is thinking that too. Do you know how?

Speaker 1 Because one of the things we do at Them Before Us is we catalog the stories of children who have lost their mother or father to a variety of different adult interests, not due to tragedy, but because some adult wanted it that way on some level.

Speaker 1 What I call desire-based maternal or paternal losses.

Speaker 1 And so one major category of that is children created through reproductive technologies, sperm and egg quote-unquote donation, which is a misnomer. Nobody's, this isn't a benevolent nonprofit.

Speaker 1 Nobody's donating their egg or sperm. Everybody is buying or selling, or children created through surrogacy.

Speaker 1 And so you can imagine that many of the kids get these kinds of objections where they talk about how they're troubled by the fact that they have dozens or hundreds of half-siblings because their father was a serial sperm donator, or maybe their mother donated her eggs to somebody.

Speaker 1 And so then they have questions like, who is my mother? Very normal questions, very human child, the kind of questions that every human child asks at some point. Who is my mother?

Speaker 1 Who are the people that are responsible for me? This is questions that adoptees have overwhelmingly. These are questions that children created through sperm and egg donation have.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, many of them, when they voice their concerns, when they voice their loss, when they voice their pain, what they hear is, would you rather be dead?

Speaker 1 So I think that this is pretty manipulative. I think it's a manipulative tactic to say, you do not get.

Speaker 1 to ask the questions or feel the kind of loss that every other human child has experienced throughout history

Speaker 1 because otherwise you wouldn't exist.

Speaker 2 So I say, look,

Speaker 1 there are other situations where we can be.

Speaker 1 For sure.

Speaker 1 Well, let me just say, we can be grateful for, recognize the dignity and the worth of these individual little lives, Dave and David's two children, that they are precious, worthy of life, and protection.

Speaker 1 And I would actually say that means that we required that we be critical of the circumstances of their conception. The exact same way we would handle a child conceived through rape.

Speaker 1 Your life is altogether good, but I can be critical of the circumstances of your conception because you were brought about in a way that actually did not respect and protect your fundamental rights as a human.

Speaker 2 What about surrogacy in general? Like

Speaker 2 you have people who

Speaker 2 who are buried, who fulfill the other criteria that you described, who are infertile and who turn to surrogacy as a,

Speaker 2 well, as a, as the pathway forward that's presented to them because of their lack of options.

Speaker 2 What's your... And I know what we're trying to do here.
You see, we're trying to draw this fine line between

Speaker 2 social policy that's replicable and iterable and productive en masse and the particular interests of particular people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's

Speaker 2 Well, that's a tight, that's a very difficult balance to attain. And something can certainly be good for people at an individual level and not good at a iterating and social level.

Speaker 2 And we have to always consider that when we act, you know, that's what, isn't that Kant's maxim? Act as if your action becomes a universal principle. And there's something to that that's very profound

Speaker 2 as a general ethical maxim. So let's talk about surrogacy in general.

Speaker 1 I don't necessarily think that there is a delicate nuanced line.

Speaker 1 And can it be iterated? And if you are going to do one thing that is going to be extrapolated for the general population, I'm kind of a simpleton in that I'm not a thought leader.

Speaker 1 I read the thought leaders. I listen to you and John Anderson.
And I love Carl Truman, but I'm a translator. I listen to what you guys say.

Speaker 1 I respect the policymakers, but I want to translate it down to something that is accessible and applicable for everybody.

Speaker 1 And I will tell you, I can use the same metric and rubric, and I think this is great for personal decisions and policy decisions. And that one rubric is: adults should sacrifice so kids don't have to.

Speaker 1 We should not force children to do hard things on behalf of adults. And ultimately, any form of surrogacy is forcing children to sacrifice something so adults can have what they want.

Speaker 1 Nobody has a right to a child. Children have a right to their mother and father.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 that's an interesting point. Let's see if we can take that apart a little bit.
So

Speaker 2 you're

Speaker 2 contrasting

Speaker 2 two hypothetical rights, and you're giving one clear primacy. Okay, so

Speaker 2 let's see if we can sort that out. So you said adults don't have a right to children,

Speaker 2 but children have a right to.

Speaker 1 They don't have a right to acquire a child. You have a right to your own biological child.
I mean, when you leave the hospital, you don't want to just leave with any baby. You want your baby.

Speaker 1 And you have a fundamental natural pre-political right to that baby.

Speaker 1 But you don't have a right to acquire a child that then has to lose their genuine right to their mother or father so that they can be taken home by you.

Speaker 2 So there isn't a nebulous right.

Speaker 2 That's fine. So, but if I said, well, if I can acquire that economically, if I have the means at my disposal, then why doesn't that translate into a right?

Speaker 2 Now, your argument, I think, is that because it comes at the expense of the child. and then that lands us back into the, well, is it better that the child exists or not argument, right?

Speaker 2 That lands us back in that domain.

Speaker 2 So you think that it isn't appropriate for someone to acquire that right. Why exactly?

Speaker 2 Let's go into that more. It's because it violates the child's pre-political right to biological parentage.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So first let me say, I think that there's an abuse of the word rights in our world, you know, and it's very much like a Mr. Incredibles thing.
When everything's a right, nothing is a right.

Speaker 1 And unfortunately, it seems like whatever adults really, really, really, really want is conveniently framed as a right. But if you're looking at things from a natural law perspective,

Speaker 1 not necessarily what we would even consider to be a civil law, because civil laws can be out of step with natural laws. And again, I'm not a natural lawyer.
Thank God, one of the most

Speaker 1 well-renowned natural law scholars, Robert George, wrote the foreword for our first book, Them Before Us, Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement. So

Speaker 1 there is natural law precedence for this, but like I said, I'm a translator. And so I don't think in these kind of first principle ways.

Speaker 1 I will tell you how to determine whether or not something is a natural right based on sort of my simplified understanding of natural rights.

Speaker 1 And then we'll be able to figure out pretty easily whether or not you have a right to acquire a surrogate-born child, even though you're purchasing egg and renting the womb and taking the children across borders without any kind of background check, even though you've got a criminal history and you're a known pedophile, which has happened in surrogacy cases.

Speaker 1 So let's figure out to what children and adults have a natural right.

Speaker 1 So when I, my understanding of natural rights, and my co-author Stacey Manning and I kind of detailed this out in our first book, there's three rules that make something a genuine natural right.

Speaker 1 Number one, it needs to exist pre-government, right? And that's kind of what our country was founded on is this idea that government doesn't give you rights. They just recognize and protect rights.

Speaker 1 So, a genuine natural right exists pre-government. So, like your right to life, your right to life existed before the government.
Government's not there to give it to you, they're there to protect it.

Speaker 1 Number two, nobody has to provide it for you. So, if it has to be like dug up from the ground, bottled, labeled, shipped, and put on a shelf, it's not a natural right.

Speaker 1 You might even need it to survive, but it's not necessarily a natural right. Number three, a natural right is given an equal distribution.

Speaker 1 So, if there's a differentiation in terms of the level of attainment or achievement, a GED versus a PhD or a dorm versus Mar-a-Lago, it's not a natural right.

Speaker 1 If it's a genuine natural right, you have it in equal measure. Everybody gets exactly one life.

Speaker 1 Everybody has the same ability, should have the same ability to defend themselves, should have the same ability to speak.

Speaker 1 And all of us, regardless of the technological tinkering that was done in some laboratory somewhere, have exactly two parents, one mother and one father.

Speaker 1 So children have a fundamental natural right to the two people responsible for their existence. Do adults have a right to acquire a child that is not biologically theirs?

Speaker 1 No, they don't, because that violates the fundamental natural rights of kids.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let me ask you this: then, these natural rights of the child,

Speaker 2 why, let's see if we can investigate why those are

Speaker 2 important or even crucially important. And that will also help us set them against the hypothetical rights of adults.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 you know, you can imagine, you could make a case, I suppose, that

Speaker 2 maternal longing is something that existed before

Speaker 2 the government, like it's an intrinsic part of human nature, and the government's there to

Speaker 2 ensure that its

Speaker 2 manifestation is made,

Speaker 2 is realized.

Speaker 2 And you can imagine an argument for surrogacy on that basis. But your

Speaker 2 claim is that you're violating something more fundamental, which is the child's right to two parents. Okay, so let's take that apart.
Okay, and I'll do that as critically as I can.

Speaker 2 As far as I can tell,

Speaker 2 and we have to look at the nuances of this,

Speaker 2 children are pretty good at bonding with multiple people. They're not good at bonding with multiple people sequentially if the previous person they bonded with disappears.

Speaker 2 So, for example, you could bring a nanny into your house and the child could bond very nicely with that nanny, but you can't, it's hard on the child to replace the nanny. let's say,

Speaker 2 especially when the children are under three. But children can bond with multiple people, and we know that partly too, because our past was in all,

Speaker 2 well, self-evidently tribal, and many people participated in the raising of a child.

Speaker 2 Now, that doesn't mean that the mother and father don't have some primacy, but it means that many people can participate.

Speaker 2 And so you could imagine, well, the argument would go that these relationships are, the maternal and paternal relationships are substitutable, as they are to some degree. Your argument is that

Speaker 2 they're not as substitutable as people would like to presume. And in that substitution, something of transcendent value is lost.
Well, here's a possible example on the biological side. You know, that

Speaker 2 babies and mothers swap DNA.

Speaker 2 And they do that at a level. That's a

Speaker 2 level that's so profound that, like, a baby will donate stem cells to its mother so that the mother heals better during pregnancy right and the mother will

Speaker 2 here's something very interesting too so a mother's breasts can detect

Speaker 2 calcium shortage on the part of the babies and mothers who detect calcium shortages will extract calcium from their own bones to fortify their milk to fortify their children.

Speaker 2 And so there are a lot of biological nuances in the maternal-infant relationship that we don't understand.

Speaker 2 We understand, too, for example, that babies who are born by C-section often have impaired immunological systems because they didn't pass through the vaginal canal.

Speaker 2 I mean, there are a lot of things going on biologically that are complex and sophisticated beyond belief, but also beyond understanding.

Speaker 2 And these are the sorts of things that you're pointing to that a child is deprived of. But, and fair enough, but it's

Speaker 2 also harsh,

Speaker 2 perhaps necessarily harsh, but definitely harsh to say to someone who's 35 and desperate for a child and who has the means to pursue surrogacy that that is

Speaker 2 off the table by fiat, despite the fact that the technology is there and the

Speaker 2 opportunity is at hand. So I know we're going over the same territory to some degree, but.

Speaker 1 That's okay.

Speaker 1 Well, let me ask you, if you don't mind,

Speaker 1 what are the studies that we have on maternal loss and the impact that it has on kids? What are the studies that you know of of kids that grow up without their mothers and how they fare?

Speaker 2 Well, I know that

Speaker 2 period of time, especially between zero and nine months, is critical for

Speaker 2 it's foundationally critical.

Speaker 2 And that if those relationships are disrupted, it produces wounds that are

Speaker 2 deep and potentially irreparable.

Speaker 1 The reason I asked you that is you couldn't think of any off the top of your head, right?

Speaker 2 Not specifically. No, not any more specifically than what I just laid out.

Speaker 1 Right. And that's because

Speaker 1 mother loss. It used to be that if the mother was gone, the baby's dead.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Mother loss, the mother loss is so antithetical to our species, right?

Speaker 1 That mother and child are bonded so tightly, both in the ways that you're talking about, in terms of like responsiveness of breast milk formulation.

Speaker 1 I mean, I always joke that mother's breast milk will change whether or not she's nursing a boy or a girl. So moms boobs know male and female, when a lot of Yale University professors do not.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I mean, like mother-infant bond and reciprocity between the two of them is

Speaker 1 primal. I mean, that's really the only word that you can have for it.
And so we don't have a lot of studies of mother loss in children because it goes against the grain of what it means to be human.

Speaker 1 And now we think we are just going to casually say, you know what, we can intentionally and commercially sever that bond between mother and child because we have the means to do it.

Speaker 1 And who am I to say that a woman who's 35 that has the means that desperately wants to be a mother who is going to take home her own genetic child? Who am I to say that she shouldn't do that?

Speaker 1 Well, I'm here to say, as best as I can, that I am representing the interest of that child.

Speaker 1 And the interest of that child is to not be intentionally separated from the only person they know the day that they are born.

Speaker 1 And I would say that the best example, the best proof that we have of the harms of that is adopted kids.

Speaker 1 And I say this as an adoptive mother.

Speaker 1 I say it as a woman who is the former assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world, somebody that understands that that adoption is an institution centered around the well-being of children, and it is an act of justice for children who have lost their parents.

Speaker 1 So, I'm not anti-adoption. I am telling you that adopted children have more externalizing disorders than the general population, even though they are raised by

Speaker 1 homes that are statistically more stable, wealthier, and adults who spend more time and money on them than the average population. So, why is that?

Speaker 1 It looks as though disruption of that primal bond with the birth mother has some kind of lifelong consequences and fallout.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 there's another explanation, too, there.

Speaker 2 I mean, because there's also the high likelihood that children who end up in a position to be adopted come from families with genetic histories that predispose them to disruption. And so, that,

Speaker 2 well, those are the two possible sources of the outcomes that you described. How much is attributable one to the other? That's a very complicated thing to sort out.

Speaker 2 But I don't think it bears directly on your, it doesn't bear necessarily directly on your fundamental argument that there's additional consequences. Well, and we do know, to be more precise

Speaker 2 in responding to your question about studies, Well, we actually do know the studies, there are studies that have been done on maternal disruption. First of all, all, we know that prior to the

Speaker 2 20th century, the one-year mortality rate for children who had no mother in orphanages was 100%.

Speaker 2 They all died. And

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 was changed by a woman nurse, a female nurse, and a researcher whose name I can't remember. Her name was Fat Anna, and she had a ward in Germany where the children didn't die.

Speaker 2 And, or at least all of them didn't die and the investigator whose name I can't remember went to Germany to see what was going on there and the only difference he could see in the ward was that a nurse would take the babies out of their crib and

Speaker 2 carry them around on her hip for some amount of time every day and that amount of direct contact was enough to entice them into life.

Speaker 2 And then there's an immense literature that was founded most profoundly by this animal researcher named Jak Panksep, who looked at the effects of maternal deprivation mostly on animal behavior and it's cataclysmic.

Speaker 1 Right. Well, and that's where most of what we have in terms of maternal harms is in rat populations.
Why is that? It's because it's absolutely unethical to test this on human children.

Speaker 1 Because even brief maternal deprivation, we know based on those rat studies can permanently alter the structure of a child's brain. So like when we start tinkering with the maternal-child bond,

Speaker 1 because some adults are sad, or maybe they have an identity that leads them to a place where they do not have an egg or a womb between them.

Speaker 1 So then we're going to just bypass and ignore everything that we know about the nature of the human child and maternal deprivation and the harms that go along with maternal loss.

Speaker 2 Maybe also everything that we know about the mother. Like you described yourself earlier as an evangelical Christian.

Speaker 2 And I've i've spent a lot of time looking at the imagery of of mary right if you think mary is the archetypal female that you can make that case that's a reasonable case to make but the thing about mary is that mary isn't an individual mary is mother and an infant and i think that

Speaker 2 the human female nervous system is actually adapted to the mother-infant dyad and not to the best interests of the mother because women are differentially sensitive to negative emotion, which makes them suffer more.

Speaker 2 And so you have to ask why.

Speaker 2 And one answer to that, and it's not the only answer, but one answer, and I'm sure at least it's partly true, is that women sacrifice their own emotional stability and happiness to be there as alarm systems for their infants.

Speaker 2 And that's how tightly wired they are together.

Speaker 2 And so it could easily be that the proper image of woman, in for a penny and in for a pound, let's say, the proper image of woman isn't individual woman the way it is individual man.

Speaker 2 It's woman plus infant. And that now

Speaker 2 you agree with that, do you? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. I agree.
I mean, just because I'm a mom and I'm an observer of reality

Speaker 1 and I'm around a lot of women and children and husbands and children, all of which. I mean, mothers and fathers offer distinct and complementary benefits to children.

Speaker 1 Neither of them are replaceable. Kids need a mom and a dad.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it's so interesting because

Speaker 1 then I'm sure some of the objections that we're getting from some of the people that are listening to this, they'll say, well, and you know, Dave Rubin said this in your conversation with him too, that his husband, David, is very nurturing and very empathetic.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that he's going,

Speaker 1 yeah, sure. Well, you know, one of the other

Speaker 1 categories of children whose stories we try to catalog at Them Before Us is children with same-sex parents.

Speaker 1 Our website, thembeforeus.com, probably has the largest story bank of kids with LGBT parents.

Speaker 1 And for a while, I had a very active group chat of kids with two moms or two dads who could just talk amongst themselves.

Speaker 1 Because I'll tell you, if there's one demographic in this country that's truly in the closet, it's kids with same-sex parents who desperately miss their mother or father, but cannot say that out loud because they are accused of being bigots and homophobes, even by people in their own family.

Speaker 1 So the place where they can talk to each other is sort of in these anonymous spaces. And there were a lot of those kids who would openly admit, I mean, most of them had two moms.

Speaker 1 There was only one that had two dads at one point, and they didn't stay too long. But many of them would say, look, I had a femme mom and I had a butch mom.
I mean, those words, their words, not mine.

Speaker 1 You know, the butch mom worked on cars, shaved her head, was stockier.

Speaker 1 And the femme mom, longer hair, kind of slim, worked in the kitchen. And I asked them, I I said, did any of those butch moms meet your need for a father?

Speaker 1 And they're like, no, she was my butch mom. And I loved her, I appreciated her, I respected her, but I craved male love.

Speaker 1 So this is not the kind of thing where a man can put on sort of a feminine presence. Kids actually want, crave, need, deserve, and have a right.
to their mother and their father.

Speaker 1 They don't want somebody that acts masculine or asks feminine, at least from the kids that I know. And obviously, I probably have

Speaker 1 a slanted sampling because the kids that are coming to me, many of which are going to come after this interview, too.

Speaker 1 We get tons of letters and testimonies from kids who cannot say this kind of thing out loud anywhere else.

Speaker 2 Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that? Because you clearly have a sample bias problem.

Speaker 2 That doesn't mean that the problems that your people are communicating aren't real, but it doesn't allow you to specify, because what you'd really want is a random sample of children with two moms and two dads, and that's going to be a small sample to begin with.

Speaker 2 And you'd want to see if their attitudes towards their parents and their life differed in any important way from the norm, or maybe even differed in any important way from the experiences of the adoptive kids that you described, because maybe that would be a more appropriate control group.

Speaker 2 And like, that's a pretty tough study to do. And maybe one's been done.
I don't know of one. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Speaker 2 But you have your chat group. They're incredibly rare.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 A quick note on same-sex parenthood studies.

Speaker 1 It's very rare to have high-quality studies.

Speaker 1 Interestingly, up until about 2005, there was a consensus among the social scientist community that children made raised by their married biological mother and father fared best in a low-conflict marriage.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, that is what they tended to say in unison.

Speaker 1 And then strangely, in the lead up to Obergefell, in those 10 years, there was an explosion of studies that said that kids with two moms or two dads fared no different or even better

Speaker 1 than kids raised by heterosexual parents.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then when you look at it, right, those 79 studies or whatever, many of which used the same data set and then reinterpreted and spun it to create multiple different studies.

Speaker 1 When you look at them, they all had very serious methodological problems. Like you said, not randomly derived.
They were volunteered, recruited. There weren't adequate controls.

Speaker 1 They were very small sample sizes. They weren't longitudinal.
They couldn't replicate them.

Speaker 1 And most of them had to do with the self-reporting of adults. Like there was even a study that came out last year in Italy.

Speaker 1 You know, gay fathers, children, you know, did just as well as heterosexual parents. But you look at it and it's like, gay fathers report that their children under 10 love having gay dads.

Speaker 1 I'm like, what you're saying is heterosexual parents are more honest about their shortcomings than gay fathers are. That's what you're talking there.
So it is going to be a long time. Well,

Speaker 1 first of all, there hasn't been a whole lot of studies since Obergefell, since gay marriage was legalized,

Speaker 1 because it was very obvious that there was a political push towards advancing those kinds of studies in the lead up to the Supreme Court's decision.

Speaker 2 Well, and you can imagine how difficult it would be to you even to publish a study that showed negative results.

Speaker 2 I mean, your career as an academic would be over.

Speaker 2 The research journal that published it would be pilloried like

Speaker 2 there'd be homophobic hell to pay on every bloody dimension. And so

Speaker 2 Mark Rignaris

Speaker 2 did this. What's that?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Mark Rignaris did that. He published the study in 2012 and he did it.
He used the gold standard of social science. He got randomly derived participants.

Speaker 1 He asked the children themselves as adults what their outcomes were. Were they more likely to be sexually abused? Were they more likely to suffer emotional distress or depression?

Speaker 1 Were they more likely to be on welfare benefits?

Speaker 1 And the, you know, the no difference study actually turned out to be a massive difference.

Speaker 1 And he almost lost his job. They came after his credentials.
They made his life a living hell. And since then, just like you said, there's been a queering of family studies.

Speaker 1 And so now you don't get funded unless there is a pre-political conclusion that you've already assigned to, subscribed to, and are advancing through that study.

Speaker 1 So wouldn't it be nice if we had good data? That would be great. We don't.
There's very few studies that apply that gold standard of sociological, social science methodology.

Speaker 1 Paul Sullins did do it, where he evaluated some government data.

Speaker 1 No surprise,

Speaker 1 those no differences ended up being major differences, especially as it related to things like daily fearfulness, daily crying, higher levels of emotional distress, much higher levels of children who had educational, you know, IEPs, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And why are we surprised by this?

Speaker 1 You know, anytime sociologists are not studying same-sex parenting, anytime they're doing any other kind of family structure study, they generally agree that biological parents advantage children in terms of they are more connected, more invested, and more protective of children.

Speaker 1 They generally agree that men and women offer distinct and complementary benefits to child rearing. They generally agree that losing a parent to death, divorce, abandonment results in child harms.

Speaker 1 They generally agreed that an unrelated adult increases the child's risk of abuse and neglect.

Speaker 2 By a lot. But then suddenly when there's

Speaker 2 a lot, like step-parents.

Speaker 2 This is unbelievably, unbelievably, an unbelievably massive risk factor. It's really quite terrifying.

Speaker 1 We have a name for it. It's called the Cinderella effect.
Like, that's how well established it is you know and wilson and daly you know the yeah the canadian

Speaker 1 sociologists very very solid researchers they're so good yeah and yeah what did they find that rates of fatal beatings in kindergartners in canada between the ages between the years of like 1979 and 1990 150 times greater at the hands of a stepfather.

Speaker 1 And so I just am like, okay, look, we know that the most dangerous place a child can find themselves in America today is in the home of an unrelated man left to care for the child himself.

Speaker 1 And so, but now somehow we're normalizing all of these other modern family forms where there's always an unrelated adult in the home, where the child's always being deprived of a biological parent, where they're very often missing the maternal or paternal love that maximizes child development.

Speaker 1 And somehow we're supposed to believe that these kids fare no different.

Speaker 1 I mean, unfortunately, it's just one more example of why we cannot trust the institutions. They've been captured by this woke ideology and it's kids that are suffering.

Speaker 2 Let's move to practicalities, if that's okay.

Speaker 2 And if there's other particular areas of concern that we should delve into, divorce, for example, I'd be happy to do that. I would like to talk to you about divorce, actually.
But

Speaker 2 tell me about your practical

Speaker 2 strategies. What exactly does your organization do? How widespread is it? What effect have you had? What are your plans?

Speaker 2 Flesh that out and maybe in a way, too, that enables people to determine if they would like to help or whether they could help. And if so, how.
So

Speaker 2 tell me more about your organization, about what you're up to.

Speaker 1 What I'm up to is a global takeover. That is what I'm up to.

Speaker 2 You and Klaus Schwab. I do.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 1 Me and Klaus can go toe-to-toe, maybe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, do you have a naked cat?

Speaker 2 Do you have a naked cat that you like carry around around with you? No,

Speaker 2 no,

Speaker 1 but I do have cat.

Speaker 1 I've got multiple cats.

Speaker 2 Okay, okay. Well, that's when you come over for your.
That's yeah. I think that's offset.

Speaker 2 You have children, no.

Speaker 1 I do have children. Thank God.
Great children.

Speaker 2 Okay, so global takeover.

Speaker 1 Global takeover is what we're after. In fact, that's one of the reasons.
That was the first thing I said to John Anderson when he invited me to join the advisory board. And

Speaker 1 you guys hadn't even named it yet, but he's like, we're doing this thing. I was like, what are you doing? And he kind of described it.
I'm like, ah, the righteous inverse of the World Economic Forum.

Speaker 1 Please let me in. So I love it.
Like, let's do that same global influence, but not top-down elitism, bottom-up personal responsibility. But it does need to be global.

Speaker 1 This movement to protect kids has to go into every country of the world because.

Speaker 1 Children in every country are, their rights are under threat from the same cultural, legal, and technological forces that are seeking to deconstruct their fundamental rights and relegate them to the status of accessory to be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship to the detriment of their identity formation, to the detriment of their safety and security, the investment, connection, protection that all children deserve.

Speaker 1 So, how do we do it? What does the global takeover look like?

Speaker 1 And it has to be two things. We want to change hearts and we want to change laws.
It has to be both.

Speaker 1 So, last year we did, you know, 100 interviews published on dozens of platforms making the case that all adults need to sacrifice for children because the only alternative is for children to sacrifice for adults.

Speaker 1 And that is an injustice. Anytime you have the weak sacrificing for the strong,

Speaker 1 that's all the evidence that you need that something unjust is taking place. That is never the pattern of justice.
It always needs to be the strong sacrificing for the weak. So you want to talk about

Speaker 1 that. That is it.

Speaker 2 You'd think that would be an argument that would be music to the ears of the typical leftist, right? Because that is, in principle,

Speaker 2 the fundamental

Speaker 2 orienting point of someone who stands for the oppressed and the poor, which is in principle the classic leftist stance. And it's also the case that you are, in a way,

Speaker 2 objecting to the commoditive...

Speaker 2 commodification of children, which you would also assume would be an attractive principle to those on the left who are anti-corporate commodification, although that seems to be a commitment that's honored mostly in the breach when it comes to, let's say, pharmaceutical companies and reproductive

Speaker 2 freedom, right? Because that freedom comes with commodification, as we've seen in the case of Planned Parenthood, for example.

Speaker 1 Yes. I think that there, again, you get into the waters of mislabeling adult desires as rights.
A right to choose, a right to reproductive freedom, a right to parenthood.

Speaker 1 All of those things really just mean I'm going to cut the child's mother or father out of their life, or I'm going to snuff out a child's right to life.

Speaker 1 So it's very important that we properly define rights. Children's right to life, children's right to their mother and father.
You could add to that children's right to innocence, not to have their,

Speaker 1 you know, not to be

Speaker 1 adulterated by

Speaker 1 sexualized or whatever, certainly a right to an intact unmedicalized body, not to have their healthy organs amputated or chemically sterilized through transgender treatments.

Speaker 1 I mean, the truth is that if you prioritize kids, if you defend their life, family, mind, and body, you kind of win the culture war.

Speaker 1 You get the right answer to all of the major issues that we're facing, especially culturally, especially whenever it intersects with the primary question of what it means to be human.

Speaker 1 If you can elevate and exalt the rights of children, you get the right personal decisions and you get the right policy decisions.

Speaker 1 So we are absolutely out there to change hearts, but we also want to change laws. So many of these child commodifying, child victimizing ideas, technologies, and laws go completely unchallenged.

Speaker 1 There is nobody to speak up on behalf of children. And maybe, very likely, I'm not the most qualified person to do this, but nobody was doing it.

Speaker 1 And so that's what we aim to do is we aim to represent children well,

Speaker 1 give them a voice when it comes to battling back bad legislation.

Speaker 1 We're at the place this year where we're able to propose some policy recommendations, especially for state-level lawmakers who want to claw back some of the lost territory when it comes to losing the marriage and family battle, you know, state after state and nation after nation.

Speaker 2 So you said

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 if you prioritize the natural rights of children,

Speaker 2 you obtain victory in the proper direction in the culture war. And so that would, say, put a stop to

Speaker 2 power-mongering for the sake of hedonistic gain, which is really in many ways how I see the LGBTQ

Speaker 2 power nightmare. It's the acquisition of power to prioritize

Speaker 2 sexual identity and sexual gratification.

Speaker 2 The entire identity structure is predicated on sexual identity. And so that's obviously associated with sex.
And that's associated with free sex, which of course doesn't exist.

Speaker 2 And it's certainly not something that's in the best interests of children.

Speaker 2 But it also seems to me that not only, let's say, by prioritizing the rights of children, so the interests of children, the natural interests of children, not only does the culture war sort itself out properly, but you actually serve, this goes back to the beginning of our discussion, the interests of the long-term sophisticated interests of men and women better.

Speaker 2 And so,

Speaker 2 so let's wander down that road a little bit, because this pertains to some of the issues that are going to be discussed at the ARC conference on February 17th to the 19th in London, which you're going to and I'm going to.

Speaker 2 You're on the advisory board of that, as you indicated earlier. And thank you for that.

Speaker 2 My wife is going to be doing a panel there. I don't know if you're involved in that panel, but if you're not, well, you're going to be involved in similar enterprises at some point.

Speaker 2 And you're doing that all on your own, anyways. So, but

Speaker 2 see, we watched a documentary by one of the people who's going to participate on involuntary childlessness. And he laid out some, the

Speaker 2 director, writer of this documentary laid out some very stark facts. And so, one of them, maybe the starkest, is that

Speaker 2 the typical 30-year-old woman in the West is now childless. Half, more than half are childless.
Okay.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we already know that one in three couples at the age of 30 have fertility problems. And so that is defined as being able, unable to conceive within a year of attempting it.

Speaker 2 trying to conceive. Okay, so by 30, it's one in three.
His data indicate that 50% of the women who don't have children at the age of 30 will never have a child.

Speaker 2 So that's one in four women is now destined to childlessness, and that 90%

Speaker 2 of those

Speaker 2 eventually childless women will regret it. And so we've doomed one in four women to

Speaker 2 the last to a solitary existence for the last five decades of their life. And

Speaker 2 I can't imagine what kind of cataclysm that's going to be when those women are 70 and older, because they'll have no one

Speaker 2 to speak for them, right? When they're most vulnerable and least economically productive. So, you know, of course, in Canada that we've turned to government-assisted suicide as a

Speaker 2 as a partial solution to that problem. And I think that's the fifth leading cause of death in Canada now.
It's something like that. Tens of thousands of people.

Speaker 2 And we're expanding that, of course, to people who are in economic distress, people

Speaker 2 who are having psychological problems like depression. Virtually everybody who's seriously depressed is suicidal, by the way, because they believe themselves to be a burden.

Speaker 2 And so, okay, so, anyways, the issue here, I think, at hand is the degree to which the interests of children and the interests of the true interests of men and women align. So, we know that men

Speaker 2 are likely, they have a proclivity for antisocial behavior and substance abuse, and that tends to ameliorate around the age of 25 or 26.

Speaker 2 They desist, most of them, and the reason for that is they take on responsible jobs or they get married. So men grow up when they get married.

Speaker 2 And well, they grow up because, well, they have to civilize themselves enough so a woman can stand having them around, but also in preparation for having children.

Speaker 2 And then what do you think that having children?

Speaker 2 What do you think that having children does for women? And why do you think that we lie about all of that to young women all the time, constantly?

Speaker 1 So much in there to unpack.

Speaker 1 First of all, we certainly are seeing an increase in infertility struggles.

Speaker 1 Obviously, a lot of that is environmental, but a lot of it is because women are squandering their primary childbearing years doing other things.

Speaker 1 I mean, you are hyper-fertile in your 20s and somewhat in your early 30s, but not so much in your late 30s and definitely not in your 40s.

Speaker 1 I mean, once you get to be 35 and you're pregnant, that's a geriatric pregnancy, baby. I mean, you've got a really narrow window to have children.

Speaker 1 And so, especially if you want more than one, you have to get started sooner. So, a lot of, I think that a lot of the infertility crisis that we're seeing is actually just a marriage formation crisis.

Speaker 1 And because people are starting too late. And so, you know, I tell young women when I speak to them,

Speaker 1 you really can have it all. I mean,

Speaker 1 I have the most blessed, incredible, rich life.

Speaker 1 I mean, I have an incredible career where I'm doing what I feel called to do, even though obviously there's a cost and it's uncomfortable and all of that.

Speaker 1 But I also have four incredible kids who are 21, 19, 17, and 15.

Speaker 1 And I tell women, you can have it all, but you can't have it all at once. And you better have marriage and kids first.
Do that first. Now, sometimes you don't get to choose.

Speaker 1 I know a lot of wonderful women that are those 30-year-old women who don't have kids yet, who desperately want to and wish that they were married and wanted to be married when they were 22.

Speaker 1 But I also know women who could have been married when they were 22 or 25 or 27 or 35 and put it off because the world was telling them, you have plenty of time.

Speaker 1 Or actually, really quality means getting your master's degree or making partner at the law firm. And then you discover woefully too late that you were lied to.

Speaker 1 And now you have a life of emptiness and

Speaker 1 solitude ahead. And it is incredibly dark.
And some of those women, I pray, find fellowship, community, and family in a body of believers at church.

Speaker 1 But you are short-changing women, especially the ones that long for it, of something that really will make them, bring them alive and bring them long-term joy.

Speaker 1 protection, investment, connection, in a way that somebody that you're paying to care for you is never going to be able to provide.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, like all of the different questions, you know, you talked about MAID. We're talking about the population crisis.

Speaker 1 We're talking about, you know, all of these reproductive technologies and these different forms of family. Ultimately, they all have the same source.
It's the same question.

Speaker 1 It all comes down to the same thing. And the question is, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human?

Speaker 1 And honestly, like a word for the Christians out there, you are the ones with the right answer to this. I mean, the humanists did not get it right.
The postmodernists did not get it right.

Speaker 1 The evolutionists don't get it right.

Speaker 1 You, the ones that understand the Imago Day, you, the one that understands who gives and who takes life, you who understands that we are made in the image of God, male and female, he created them.

Speaker 1 You who understand that Job, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were all set apart in the womb. You who understand that Christ came incarnate as a child, as an infant, and said, let the little children come to me.

Speaker 1 And if you want to attain the kingdom of heaven, you have to become like one of these.

Speaker 1 You who understand that God has devised serious corporal punishment if you cause one of these little ones to stumble.

Speaker 1 You are the ones, Christians, who have the right answer to what it means to be human.

Speaker 1 And the world is desperate for us to take that truth into all these conversations about marriage, family formation, death with dignity, abortion, IVF, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, marriage, transgenderism, every single thing, every hot button topic, everything that that gets you canceled on Facebook and everything that gets you banned from Thanksgiving dinner ultimately comes down to what does it mean to be human?

Speaker 1 And that is a life-saving answer. That is a child protective answer.
It's a civilizational defending answer. So you need to increase your knowledge and then increase your voice in the public sphere.

Speaker 1 It probably is the thing that is going to save the nation.

Speaker 2 So one of the things that we're wrestling with at ARC is identity in a digital age. And that's the topic that you just

Speaker 2 very eloquently expanded upon from a religious perspective. And

Speaker 2 we're trying to do some of this in the most practical possible manner.

Speaker 2 And so, one of the questions that my wife is trying to address at the moment is, well, she's trying to investigate the nature of femininity and not from the postmodernist or feminist perspective, let's say.

Speaker 2 What does it mean to be female and how is that distinct from being male? And this is a very complicated problem. And

Speaker 2 one of the ways to make that practical is to lay out something approximating a timeline. Like the timeline, as you've pointed out, there's an implicit timeline for women in modern society now.

Speaker 2 And the implicit timeline for

Speaker 2 ambitious women, let's say, is establish yourself as an independent creature between 20 and 30 so that you don't have to depend on a man, prioritize your education and your career, which is a very weird thing for lefty progressives to be telling young women, since, in principle, they're opposed to the corporate kleptocracy, and yet insist at the same time that women should bow down to it and serve it during their youthful years, which is a paradox I just can't reconcile.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the problem with that, as you've pointed to already, and as we've discussed, is that the

Speaker 2 window of reproductive opportunity for women is actually pretty damn short. It's about, it's a maximum of 20 years.
And practically, it's less than that. I would say optimally, it's more like 10.

Speaker 2 And then I've thought, I've kind of tried to think that through arithmetically, too, because what that means for the typical woman, I think, and this is for the typical high-functioning, attractive woman, is that she probably only has the opportunity to assess about five partners.

Speaker 2 You know, if it takes you, if people are actually interested in you, which is not a given,

Speaker 2 how long does it take to

Speaker 2 investigate a relative stranger to determine whether or not they're a suitable partner, assuming that's what they want? And I think you're fortunate if you do that five times in 10 years.

Speaker 2 Like that's that's a stretch goal. And so you have to solve that problem pretty early.
And maybe we need to be more pointed.

Speaker 2 It's like, you know, the Victorians believe that a woman should be married by

Speaker 2 22, something like that. I think that was threshold for old maid.
It was something pretty young.

Speaker 2 That has a harshness about it, let's say. But so does being involuntarily childless at 35, by the way, right, which is the fate of one in four women now.

Speaker 2 So it's also the case, interestingly, that women live about seven years longer than men, you know, and so you could imagine you could just have that seven years for your little kids.

Speaker 2 Because that's, you can have, you could do a pretty good job with little kids, making them their priority for seven years. So if you're thinking this through,

Speaker 2 if you were setting up an optimal life course for a young woman in an advisory capacity, like, how do you view the role of a young woman in her, let's say, from 15 to 19 and then from 20 to 25?

Speaker 2 Let's break it into five-year periods and tell me what you think.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I've got a couple of those in my house. Well, passing through my house, I've got a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old daughter.

Speaker 1 And, you know, what we tell them is, especially during the teen years, your job is friendship. Like, I think we have a marriage crisis in this country because we have a dating crisis.

Speaker 1 And we have a dating crisis because we have a friendship crisis. It is very hard for young people these days to have, to form and maintain healthy peer relationships,

Speaker 1 obviously because the digital space has taken over a lot of their peer-to-peer communications.

Speaker 1 And so you really do have to train your kids to maximize and develop their same-sex friendships during the teen years. A lot of that is going to be modeling.

Speaker 1 Are you modeling good same-sex friendships in terms of vulnerability, but good boundaries where you need it with different people?

Speaker 1 Are you being are you showing them the transparency how you need one another how you rejoice when they rejoice and mourn when they mourn i mean you become what you behold okay for better or worse and so model great friendships obviously i am of the persuasion i am not one of the kind of kissed dating goodbye uh christians like courtship only i actually do think that there is a role for dating in high school and college because i do think that you need to appropriately practice interacting with the opposite sex.

Speaker 1 So I've told my daughters, you know, when they're juniors and seniors, that if a boy has the guts to say, do you want to go out and get coffee? You should say, yeah, I'd love to.

Speaker 1 You need to reward him for having the courage to ask you in person to do that. You don't have to say yes.
And of course, you never need to do it if you feel creeped out or anything like that.

Speaker 1 But there is a, you know, you talk about men being civilized. And I would say the proper understanding of that is that women civilize the men.
It is women that have the

Speaker 1 civilizing effect on men.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the example I always use is: when I see, when I'm walking down the street in Seattle and I see three men coming towards me on the sidewalk, I don't care how big they are, what race they are, I will cross to the other side of the street.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to walk past them. But if I see those three men walking hand in hand with their girlfriend or wives, I'm not going to cross the street.
Okay.

Speaker 1 There's just something in me that knows that male behavior has changed because they are now united and they've bonded themselves to a woman in some way. Okay.

Speaker 1 So I I tell my girls, you have an incredible power on men to elevate their behavior, their choices, their decisions by how you respond to them. Okay.
It is the soft power that shapes the world, right?

Speaker 1 That's what women really are, the soft power that shapes the world, not the dominant, naggy power, the soft, beautiful, alluring power that changes the world.

Speaker 1 So I do think that there's a role of dating and I do think that we should encourage healthy dating, not drunkenness, not permanent friend zone, not jumping in and hooking up.

Speaker 1 A slow, careful dating relationship where there's parental involvement, where you can evaluate, especially worldview alignment.

Speaker 1 And then when you get into college, I mean, I told my 19-year-old, who is an incredible soccer player, and just, oh my gosh, all of my kids are incredible. My 19-year-old was looking for a college.

Speaker 1 She considered one that had a 75% female to male ratio. And I said, you won't even apply to that college.
Absolutely not.

Speaker 1 Like, this is your primary age, the primary window for you to find somebody who is like-minded, join your life to them in a cornerstone kind of marriage, not a capstone marriage where you figure it all out and then put the cherry on the top marriage.

Speaker 1 No, we're going to be strategic about who you're exposed to between the ages of 18 and 22. This is your chance.

Speaker 1 And I do, and I think parents have a huge role to play in encouraging early family formation, early marriage, proper dating. You can't control everything.

Speaker 1 You shouldn't try to control everything, but the messages that you send, the signals that you send, the environments you put your kid in, it can lead them to the place where they are not involuntarily single when they're 30.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about dating a bit more because you talked about the civilizing effect of women and

Speaker 2 the role of

Speaker 2 the alluring quality of women and beauty in that.

Speaker 2 And there's definitely, that's the calling aspect, but there's a conscience aspect too, that I think is worth highlighting that's relevant to young women. So

Speaker 2 there has been a series of recent studies on the personalities of people who prefer short-term mating strategies. And so that would be hookup culture.
And that's a variant of a

Speaker 2 widespread biological strategy for reproduction that varies on one dimension, which is investment versus no investment, right? Human beings are high investment reproducers.

Speaker 2 But some human beings prefer a relatively low investment, high investment strategy. And those are people who keep your daughters away from that.
That's right. But I want to explain why.

Speaker 2 Keep your daughter away. We know why now.

Speaker 2 We know why. Because the personality structure of men who prefer hookup culture has been delineated.

Speaker 2 So the men who prefer

Speaker 2 no investment sex are

Speaker 2 Machiavellian, so they use their language to manipulate. They're psychopathic, so they're predatory parasites.
They're

Speaker 2 narcissistic, so they crave unearned social status, and to cap it all off, they're sadistic.

Speaker 2 Right. So one of the things that the sexual revolution did, free love.

Speaker 2 One of the things that the free love revolution did was hand women over to psychopaths. Right.
This is not good. So the other thing, I'm curious about this with your daughters.

Speaker 2 Well, the other thing that women do for men is

Speaker 2 put limits on their psychopathy and their narcissism. Well, that's part of that civilizing process.

Speaker 2 But the limits aren't so much, they're partly that beauty and that alluring quality, but they're also partly hell no, right?

Speaker 2 Because one of the things I've discussed with my wife, for example, you tell me what you think about this, I think almost all the status that women have

Speaker 2 granted to them from men, like let's say at least in the domain of romantic entanglement and reproduction, comes from the woman's ability to say no.

Speaker 2 The ability to say no is actually a status marker. And that's especially true if the person who's pursuing you is relatively high status male.

Speaker 2 Because what you And women, you know, they're hypergamous. They tend to mate up across and up hierarchies.

Speaker 2 And so then you ask, well, what status does a woman have if she's pursuing a high-status male? And the answer is she has whatever status is granted to her by her ability to

Speaker 2 what? To stand inviolate against his advances. That's a marker of her status.
And so there's a limit setting there, too, that's crucial.

Speaker 2 And it's certainly something that men There's no doubt that that's one of the ways that men test women.

Speaker 2 You know, now you could say, well, if I say no, and that might especially be true at a college that's 75% girls and 25% boys, if I say no, I'll never see him again.

Speaker 2 But the right attitude towards that is, if you say no and you see him again, you should never see him again. You should be glad he's gone.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a few things.

Speaker 1 Another thing that the sexual revolution did, not just handing women over to the worst of all men, but it made women, it made young girls very hungry for any kind of male attention because it disproportionately starved them of the paternal love that was supposed to satisfy that longing for male attention.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, through the course of the, you know, the last couple decades where we decided to abandon the traditional notions of sex only within marriage, which meant children generally being bored to a household where they were going to have daily contact with both their mother and their father, is now we have girls who grew up without their father or with a revolving door of different men coming in and out of their mothers' lives.

Speaker 1 On average, as you know, these girls will start start their periods a year early, a whole year earlier

Speaker 1 than their counterparts.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right. So their bodies are literally signaling,

Speaker 1 I need to search for a man.

Speaker 1 And so now, not only are there more men that are predatory for girls, but now there's more girls that, you know, we call this father hunger in our work, mother hunger or father hunger.

Speaker 1 Like maybe you've got, you know, two moms or two dads who love you or a single mom who's providing for you materially, but they do not meet your need for male or female love. And so you hunger for it.

Speaker 1 And this is why you see incredibly high rates of teen pregnancy among girls who are fatherless, right? Because they didn't have that daily male love that they longed for, but they found it.

Speaker 1 Maybe they only found it for five minutes on a Friday night, but they found it. And so I think the sexual revolution has been bad for women.

Speaker 1 Of course, my argument is it has been especially bad for children, you know, perpetuating terrible cycles. A note on Tammy's podcast, if you have not watched it, you should go subscribe.

Speaker 1 She has done some really fantastic interviews on this topic of, you know, a proper understanding of what it means to be a woman, female.

Speaker 1 The interviews she's done on the effects of birth control on women's brains, I have sent out to tons of people. So it's very worthy of your time and attention for that.

Speaker 1 In terms of my daughters and limits and elevating the behavior of the men around them, I will tell you that both of them got a lot of attention from guys.

Speaker 1 Most of the guys were not worthy of a lot of their time and attention.

Speaker 1 But I will say that there were a few times where they said, no, I mean, I'm not talking about to a major sexual advance. I'm just saying, no, you can't have my attention.

Speaker 1 No, I won't be your girlfriend. No, I won't continue to be your girlfriend if you continue to do these kinds of things.

Speaker 1 And then they watched the men, the young men, the 16-year-old, the 17-year-old reform because the girl has something they want, even if it's just attention, even if it's just saying she is my girlfriend.

Speaker 2 There's nothing just about attention. There's nothing but attention, right? Attention is everything.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I just think that, you know, my daughters have seen the incredible power of no.

Speaker 1 And I will tell young girls, because I, you know, I've been involved in youth ministry for decades. I was running the youth ministry at our church until about a year ago.

Speaker 1 And I tell girls, like, if there's a guy that you really like, and if you want him to pursue you, you say no to pretty much everything. No, I won't hold your hand.
No, I mean, be kind, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can go on a date, but if it has to do with the physical advance, the more you say no, the more your desirability goes up. If you want him to move on, give him what he wants physically.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 no, give him what his whims.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's right. Right.

Speaker 2 Because you're serving the lowest part of him. Right.
And I don't mean that

Speaker 2 some sexually prudish element. I'm saying that sexual desire itself is a short-term gratification seeking mechanism, so to speak.

Speaker 2 And it has to be integrated into a personality that's forward-looking and future-oriented and social.

Speaker 2 And if the relationship degenerates to the immediately sexual, then it serves no one's medium to long-term interests, certainly not society's interests, certainly not children's interests, not least because it tends to culminate in abortion.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yep, that's exactly right.
Kids lose, kids lose. Anytime sex is happening outside of long-term committed heterosexual permanent unions, kids will always pay the price for that.

Speaker 1 I think that that's one of the reasons why we are where we are in terms of marriage and family is we have pretended like there's no cost, but there is a cost. There's always a cost to kids.

Speaker 1 We've said if the adults are happy, the kids will be happy. We've said biology doesn't matter.
Love makes a family, but that's not true.

Speaker 1 Somebody is always going to pay pay the price. It's just the kids who pay it because they can't defend their own rights.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you very much for talking to me today, Katie, and for helping us get to the bottom of the what, the metaphysics of the rights of children, I suppose, and to place them in relationship to the rights and needs and wants of adults.

Speaker 2 And those aren't the same thing at all.

Speaker 2 I understand that the conversations that you had at ARC, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, we had a convention there recently, will be available to everyone.

Speaker 2 And so if those of you who are watching and listening found this conversation useful and compelling and helped you further your ideas about the roles of men and women and mothers and fathers and children

Speaker 2 in families and in broader society, then you can check out Katie's contribution to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Convention.

Speaker 2 At that establishment, we've made focus on family, long-term, monogamous, committed, heterosexual, married, child-centered couples focused because we do think that,

Speaker 2 well, that's best for children. It's best for mature adults.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's a relationship that provides the foundation for a productive and abundant society. And so,

Speaker 2 well, there's something in that to annoy almost everyone, but it still happens to be the truth, as far as we can tell. Thank you very much for talking to me today.

Speaker 2 We'll continue on the Daily Wire side. I think I'll talk to you about divorce and family policy and the costs to marriage under the current legal circumstances.

Speaker 2 Maybe we'll talk about no-fault divorce, for example. For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

Speaker 2 To the Daily Wire for making this podcast possible, that's much appreciated. To the film crews here in

Speaker 2 Calgary, Alberta, and in Washington, D.C., thank you for your contribution and

Speaker 2 on to the Daily Wire side.