Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Josh vs the Anti-Gay-Parenting Activist” Katy Faust

Transcript

“Josh vs the Anti-Gay-Parenting Activist” Katy Faust · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a Humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. Well, this show is called
• 0:09
  Uncomfortable Conversations and this episode does what it says on the tin.
• 0:14
  Katie Faust is a child's rights activist and a family values a Christian speaker and
• 0:20
  commentator in the United States. The Dangerous Idea under consideration today is whether
• 0:27
  or not gay parenting should be banned. Actually, should we ban any family structure that
• 0:33
  does not prioritize the right of every child to have a biological mother and a biological
• 0:39
  father in a nuclear family arrangement? That is the basic position of Katie. She's the
• 0:43
  founder of a nonprofit that works towards that goal. It's called them before us. She
• 0:50
  publishes and speaks and testifies as a conservative social commentator widely on issues
• 0:54
  of marriage and family matters of justice for children. This includes, in particular,
• 1:00
  surrogacy, IVF. We talk a bit about adoption and about divorce and so on. And Katie
• 1:06
  has been, I must say, shunned by a lot of woke people. She's even been shunned by people
• 1:11
  like Dave Rubin, who's this anti-woke commentator in America who claims to be a brave champion
• 1:18
  who's willing to fight the fight. But all he did to Katie was block her on social media
• 1:22
  and never talk to her. Which I don't think is, I mean, talk about being a snowflake.
• 1:27
  That is not the right approach here. The position that Katie articulates is increasingly
• 1:32
  popular in the United States. There is a declining support for gay marriage there. There is a
• 1:37
  concern that the whole thing has gone a bit too far with LGBTQIA plus and so on and
• 1:43
  that we've lost sight of what is right for the children. So I wanted to tackle this head
• 1:48
  on. I'm enormously respectful and grateful to Katie for coming on this show. She did
• 1:52
  Jordan Peterson's podcast. She did John Anderson's podcast. She's got a sort of a rising
• 1:57
  star and for her to make the time while she was in Australia to come into the dragon's
• 2:01
  den, so to speak, and speak to someone whose lifestyle and ideas she completely and fundamentally
• 2:06
  disagrees with is admirable. She's actually a former pastor's wife. She was raised by
• 2:12
  a lesbian mother. So to some extent, she knows of which she speaks. I hope you enjoy as
• 2:17
  much as I genuinely did this rumble with the one the only Katie fast. Do you find Australians
• 2:29
  are receptive to your message? I think everybody's receptive to my message. She says humbly.
• 2:37
  I know because what I talk about goes down to the fundamentals, the non-negotiables of
• 2:43
  what it means to be a human specifically, what it means to be a human child. And I think
• 2:46
  that when you can bring it down to that level, you actually find an awful lot of agreement
• 2:50
  whereas a lot of the ways that we talk about this can be in really political kind of spaces
• 2:56
  or but when you kind of peel back all of those different defensiveness or kind of political
• 3:02
  not posturing because I think people really believe it. But when you can take it out of
• 3:05
  the realm of what adults want and you can get down to what doesn't mean to be a human
• 3:09
  child, you can't argue with a lot of that. Is that harder to do in America because of
• 3:13
  the heat of the culture wars? My sense when I talk about issues in the States is that people
• 3:19
  are more likely to put you into a particular camp and then re-judge what you're saying
• 3:24
  with it. Really listening to what you're saying. And we all have there are all these issues
• 3:28
  like the one that your issue, then there's Israel and Gaza, then there's like, I mean,
• 3:33
  immigration. I tried to read what you just published about Israel and Gaza, but it was
• 3:36
  behind a paywall. Oh, that's unfortunate. I know. But if you want to give me your heart
• 3:40
  tick. I know your heart tick. Oh, my goodness. I've done about 15 long editorials about
• 3:45
  it since October 7th. So there isn't an easy heart take except that I'll send that piece
• 3:50
  to you. But as you can imagine, I've been living in a world of pain for the past couple
• 3:53
  of weeks about it because well, because because where you at, like, well, it's only me
• 3:57
  hanging. Oh, well, the world of pain at the moment was that I have traditionally since
• 4:01
  October 7th been the person who is who is critical of anti-sionists and saying like
• 4:07
  you're, you've lost your minds a little bit about this just because you're looking at
• 4:11
  the brutality in Gaza, but you're not understanding the full context of what Israel is up against.
• 4:16
  And then I felt like that came a time earlier this year where I could no longer be on board
• 4:21
  with the extent of the devastation in Gaza. And so the article was basically saying, yes,
• 4:26
  a lot of the things that anti-sionists are accusing Israel of are deranged. Yes, would
• 4:32
  I mean, yes, yes, yes, yes. And still as Jews, as diaspora Jews specifically, we should find a way
• 4:38
  of articulating a vision of our Jewishness that isn't joined at the hip to the IDF. We have to have
• 4:45
  an ability for Israel not to be the thing that we're always reflexively defending because it's
• 4:50
  endangering Jews and it's morally simplistic at this stage. Like, so let's find a way to think
• 4:55
  about our Jewishness outside of Israel. Of course, that cracks me up because I'm like,
• 5:00
  you've got 40 books that have been time tested, that have an incredible cohesion to it.
• 5:10
  Can you find that identity there? Right. Right. But there's a defensiveness. Again,
• 5:17
  it's tribal. It's like, you know, it's like people aren't listening. People don't listen to the
• 5:21
  first 800 words of the article. They only focus on the final few words because those are the
• 5:26
  ones that trigger them. And I'm sure I assume that similarly with you, people don't necessarily listen
• 5:30
  to exactly what it is that you're saying. They just go, she's an enemy of LGBTQIA plus rights. Yeah.
• 5:37
  Yeah. Which I probably am. Depending on how you define it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let me let you
• 5:42
  define it. So them and us. Yeah. Who's the them? Who's the us? What's the objective? Yeah. So
• 5:48
  the nonprofit I run is called them before us. Sorry, them before us. That's fine. It's hard when
• 5:52
  like it's all pronouns. You don't know anything about what I'm doing based on the name. Who are
• 5:56
  the they? Who are the we? Who's the us? Who's the them? This is Katie of me before you. Yeah.
• 6:01
  Yeah. There's all kinds of challenges. I'm just hoping I'm not the first person to fuck it up.
• 6:05
  It's not. Yeah. Okay. Um, them as children, them before us. The idea is when it comes to children's
• 6:12
  concrete rights and needs the children come first. And I tell most people that interview me, um,
• 6:20
  that is a perspective and a philosophy and a world view that will confront every adult at some
• 6:24
  point. At some point, every adult is going to have to say, is it me or is it them? Who comes first?
• 6:29
  Is it the kids or is it me? And so children have fundamental natural rights, um, concrete rights.
• 6:36
  They may not be reflected in our civil law, but they are natural rights that can be discovered
• 6:41
  through the system of natural law, right? A way of understanding what we ought to do in the world
• 6:45
  based on looking at the world around us, right? What is self evident? Um, and so the idea that
• 6:51
  children have, for example, a right to life, um, pretty well established. I think humans have a
• 6:55
  right to life. So then you have to get down to when does life begin and you can have that conversation.
• 7:00
  I think solidly on the side of at the moment of conception. But then there's also a right that
• 7:05
  children have to be known and loved by both their mother and father, um, just like adults have a
• 7:11
  right to take their baby home from the hospital. There's something special about their relationship
• 7:16
  to that child. Generally, you know, when a husband and wife have a baby and leave the hospital,
• 7:20
  they don't want just any kid in the nursery. They want one specific kid and they have a natural
• 7:25
  right to that one specific kid. So similarly, children also have a natural right to be known and loved
• 7:32
  by the two people responsible for their existence. Now, if that is true, if children have a right
• 7:37
  to life and if they have a right to their mother and father, at some point, every adult is going to
• 7:42
  have to sacrifice and bend. There's no adult, single married, gay, straight, fertile or infertile
• 7:48
  that can do whatever they want that gets a pass. Every adult at some point will have to say,
• 7:53
  I'm going to do what my children need. I'm going to do what's best for them. I may not get what I want.
• 7:58
  So I tell people, give me enough time and I will trigger you to because at some point,
• 8:04
  it's going to run up against every adult self-interest. And so the policy implications of this
• 8:08
  would be, you just touched on abortion. That's a pro-life or anti-abortion stance. They would be
• 8:14
  in opposition to all forms of surrogacy, IVF, artificial creation of life, trading in babies and
• 8:22
  all that sort of stuff. Is there anything big that I'm missing? Divorce. Divorce. Would you outlaw
• 8:29
  divorce? I would return to more of an at fault divorce framework. What Brad Wilcox at the
• 8:38
  Institute for Family Studies refers to as divorce justice. I think that there should be justice.
• 8:43
  When a marriage breaks down, justice in terms of affirming and supporting the faithful spouse,
• 8:48
  because what no fault divorce very often is is unilateral divorce. One person being divorced
• 8:53
  against their will, very often divorce becomes giving the most power to the spouse that wants the
• 8:59
  marriage the least. Or the most misbehaving spouse will often get the most, is maybe driving
• 9:06
  the process, whereas the innocent spouse, the faithful, the one that's trying to keep it together,
• 9:09
  the one that's willing to go to therapy, you know, very often has a lot of the...
• 9:14
  Well, I'm not sure that it's true that the most faithful spouse is necessarily the one who's
• 9:18
  trying to keep it together. I mean, it may be that one of the spouses is misbehaving and being,
• 9:22
  and you know, is screwing around. And the other one wants to leave. And then the one who's
• 9:28
  misbehaved is the one who's trying to beg for forgiveness and keep it together. Should the
• 9:32
  person who has been wronged not have the right to exit that relationship that the other person
• 9:36
  has betrayed? We used to call that fault, right? There used to be a category. There used to be
• 9:41
  a couple categories. Okay, so what marriage was going back religiously from a civil perspective,
• 9:47
  from an institutional perspective, was it was the uniting of two people who had the capacity to
• 9:53
  create and raise children. And then the cultural and legal reinforcement of that relationship,
• 9:59
  because it benefited not just the adults, the children, and therefore all of society.
• 10:03
  But throughout history, religious institutions, civil institutions, different governments have
• 10:08
  recognized that there's reasons why you might need to exit that marriage. And they would say,
• 10:12
  when one party is at fault of breaking their commitment to having to hold through richer
• 10:18
  support, you know, better or worse, till death do us part. Like it's a commitment to
• 10:23
  with my body, I these serve, you know, is how we used to say it, which my daughter and her husband
• 10:28
  said in their wedding vows when they got married six months ago. And I was like,
• 10:33
  you like, I raised the right children. Oh, no, you were, you were horrified. No, no, I was amazed.
• 10:39
  I was amazed. I'm like, what is that self sacrificial statement? Okay, I'm going to serve you
• 10:44
  with my whole self. So that was kind of our picture, but it wasn't limitless. Like we would say,
• 10:49
  you know, the religious traditions have very often recognized that divorce was permissible,
• 10:56
  or maybe necessary in cases of adultery. There also used to be recognitions for like extreme
• 11:00
  cruelty, what we would call abuse. Similarly, we've also recognized that abandonment or addiction
• 11:06
  were justified, were grounds for divorce. And that makes a lot of sense.
• 11:10
  And just to clarify, because your focus is so much on children, is it salient whether or not
• 11:14
  the couple have children? So I like, if you've got a, if you've got a couple who don't have children
• 11:20
  and have no anticipation of having children, should the rules for divorce be different. So
• 11:23
  personally, I'm like, in my opinion, I'm like, I don't think it's good for you, necessarily,
• 11:28
  to just make an easy exit because the truth is you'll probably recreate the same problems
• 11:32
  in your next marriage. Very often it's not them. It's you. But from, I'm like, you're not harming
• 11:38
  kids if you exit. But then when you structurally decide that all of America, for example, is going
• 11:43
  to have a no fault divorce system, which we do, which is anybody can exit the marriage for any reason
• 11:48
  at any time and you'll never see it coming. That actually does have an impact on how everybody else
• 11:53
  looks at marriage. Because when you can exit easily, you sometimes enter easily, right? Or when there's
• 11:59
  a more sort of a casual approach to marriage, like, oh, it's just a vehicle of adult fulfillment,
• 12:04
  which is what no fault divorce communicated to adults. Like, this no longer is about the kids.
• 12:09
  Katie, it doesn't seem to me that places which allow divorce more exhibit more couples just
• 12:15
  randomly getting married for no reason. In fact, divorce, right? I mean, marriage rights are
• 12:19
  lowest in the country where divorce is easiest and marriage seems to be more universal and more
• 12:24
  easily embarked upon in cultures where divorce is much harder. It's interesting because higher
• 12:29
  expectations, right? More rigid requirements actually does elevate behavior. And so we see that
• 12:36
  places that have instituted for a while, we had states that had no fault divorce and at fault
• 12:41
  divorce. And the states that had no fault divorce where you could easily exit their marriage rates
• 12:46
  declined. Because you're like, well, what is this? You're saying a moment ago that people will have
• 12:50
  less respect for marriage and they'll just get into marriages more randomly. Yeah, they might easily
• 12:54
  get in and easily get out, but they'll say what's the point? But they don't more easily get in.
• 12:58
  They get in at lower rates. The other response is, what's the point? There's nothing special about
• 13:02
  this. I see. So you mean they might just walk away from marriage altogether? That's exactly right.
• 13:07
  Huck up, check up. Yeah, there's no difference. So your question was like, can you have one spout,
• 13:14
  a couple that doesn't have the kids is okay for them? Yeah, you could imagine a parallel system
• 13:17
  where you have like, you're allowed to get married. And if you get married, then you're allowed
• 13:21
  to divorce for no reason. If you want to have kids, then from the moment you get pregnant, your
• 13:25
  marriage vows essentially change and you, you know, there's a switch that gets flaked and then
• 13:30
  it has to be at fault. So then you can say, okay, if you are going to go through a divorce. So there
• 13:34
  are some states, for example, I'm not sure what's happening in Australia, but there's all kinds of
• 13:38
  people that are working to try to undo the harm of divorce. Even though there's no state that I know
• 13:43
  right now that is genuinely considering reversing no fault divorce, there's all kinds of efforts
• 13:47
  like, okay, well, if you have kids, can we require a six month waiting period? Well, if you have kids,
• 13:52
  we're going to, before you can get a divorce, you're going to have to go through all of these
• 13:55
  training sessions so that you can understand how it's going to impact your children's physical health,
• 13:59
  mental health, emotional health, academic health, relational health. We're going to show you that
• 14:03
  this is actually going to hurt your kids. We're going to do whatever you can to throw up some road
• 14:07
  blocks. And so can you have a system where there's a divorce law for people with kids and a divorce
• 14:13
  law for people without? No, because the thing about marriage and family law is there's a constellation,
• 14:19
  right? Everything kind of moves together. The definition of parenthood, the definition of marriage,
• 14:23
  how you establish relationships with one another and how you bring those children in like
• 14:30
  adoption requirements, like all of that is like a big solar system that works together. So you can't
• 14:35
  say, for example, with IVF, you know, you can't necessarily say, well, we want IVF, which I'm
• 14:41
  highly critical of IVF as you probably have picked up for everybody. You can't just say, well,
• 14:46
  we're going to permit IVF in certain cases where it's only the husbands and wives gametes and
• 14:51
  only a certain number of embryos. We're not going to destroy anything. There's some countries in
• 14:56
  the Europe that have tried that, but it's very, very difficult to do. You can't say, we're going to
• 15:01
  open the door for just this kind of permissiveness for adults in divorce or IVF without saying,
• 15:06
  we're going to restructure the entire constellation of marriage, family, parenthood, all of that.
• 15:11
  Why is it so hard? Isn't that just because then people will say, well, you're discriminating against
• 15:15
  me and you're depriving me of this right that other people have. Right. Because marriage and family
• 15:19
  go together, because marriage and parenthood are married at the hip. Why? Because these things have
• 15:25
  historically always gone together. Marriage and children are a package deal and our laws are structured
• 15:31
  that way. It's on the divorce question before they divorce. Suppose you had a woman with biological
• 15:37
  children and she gets married to a stepfather who's not the biological father of those kids,
• 15:42
  that marriage doesn't work and she wants to reunite with the children's biological father.
• 15:47
  She wants to divorce that guy and get together so that she, so now you've got two conflicting
• 15:53
  priorities that you care about. You want children to have biological mother and biological father,
• 15:57
  but you also want marriages to stay together. Do you oppose the divorce of the biological mother
• 16:03
  from the stepfather? It's interesting to me because very, very often when I talk about who children
• 16:09
  are, what they need, the ideals, people do what you're doing right now, which is they'll appeal to
• 16:14
  these extreme edge cases, these massive exceptions. So you've just appealed to someone. Do you understand
• 16:19
  why that? Why we do that, right? In philosophy, you know, you do that because in order to tease out
• 16:24
  what's true or what's not, you need to sort of push it to the edge like, you know, why is that?
• 16:27
  We call it edge cases. That's what we call edge cases. Why has murder bad? Well, what if
• 16:31
  Anne Frank was in, you know, is the line of bad? What if Anne Frank was in your attic? Would you lie
• 16:35
  to the Nazis? So you pull out those things to try to understand the contours of the argument,
• 16:41
  not as some kind of brilliant gotcha because you think that it's going to happen all the time?
• 16:44
  Well, so I would say I would be happy to entertain that edge case, but should we first establish
• 16:48
  the rule? And would you be willing to understand, would you be willing to concede that the rule
• 16:54
  is that based on social science, natural law, I would say what is self-evident, that children
• 17:01
  benefit from and deserve and are made for a relationship with their own mother and father,
• 17:08
  unless there's extenuating circumstances or crises that prevent them from having it.
• 17:12
  No, I wouldn't concede that rule, but that's your rule. So I'm just teasing out whether or not
• 17:16
  your rule is consistent. Yeah. Well, I would say that we know based on mountains of social science
• 17:25
  that biological parents are statistically the most connected to, invested in, and protective
• 17:32
  of children. And you can measure that in a lot of different ways. And you and I can work on that.
• 17:37
  But I would say I can I'll answer your edge case on the understanding that it's an edge case.
• 17:44
  And you're appealing to like a stepfather situation, which the edge, the rule about step parents
• 17:51
  is that they're less connected to, invested in, and protective of children. And that is
• 17:55
  objectively measurable. I'm not saying there are not heroic step parents. There are. There are
• 18:01
  100% are. No, I'm with you on that because they don't are on it. Yeah. Yes. So now you're saying
• 18:06
  we'll create this case where, you know, mom marries stepfather. They want to go through a divorce.
• 18:11
  That's going to create some instability for the children. But then she's going to return to
• 18:15
  the biological father and then they're going to get married. Also another transition. Transitions can
• 18:19
  introduce stress to children. They can be higher stress. But I would say in that situation,
• 18:23
  the children probably want that scenario anyway. There was a study that was done in, I'd say,
• 18:29
  2018 where this idea of kind of any two will do. Well, as long as children have two loving parents,
• 18:35
  or as long as they have a mother and a father figure, they're going to be fine. But the study
• 18:39
  in the UK found that children who were raised by a lone mother up until the time they were eight.
• 18:45
  Fair to about as well as children who were raised by a mother who had remarried a stepfather.
• 18:49
  But if the mother remarried the child's own, if the mother married the child's own biological
• 18:54
  father at age eight, they tended to rebound and match the level of overall thriving as children
• 19:01
  whose parents had always been married. So there is something beneficial about the mom marrying the
• 19:06
  biological father of the children through a divorce in there. And, you know, there's some complexities
• 19:12
  in terms of transition and instability. Right. Yeah. But so I mean, the reason I'm asking
• 19:16
  an edge case is because it's interesting to hear the language that you use to justify your
• 19:21
  reasoning as you're going through. And what I hear you're talking about is you're talking about
• 19:25
  well-being, right? So avoiding instability for the child, what is in the best interests of the child?
• 19:30
  And you also mentioned that the child might want it. In other words, the child has some agency,
• 19:34
  right? So you're appealing not so much to in that case at least, to rights, to natural rights.
• 19:41
  You're talking about what is best for the child? What is what is in the child's best interest?
• 19:46
  And how can we give some credence to what the child themselves actually wants? Which I think is a
• 19:51
  place where we're likely to get closer than by talking in esoteric ways about what the natural
• 19:56
  rights of the child are, right? So why is it not in the interests of the like, let me first
• 20:02
  concede. Step parents are disproportionately violent towards children, especially male step parents
• 20:10
  unfortunately. Obviously losing a biological parent who you have a connection with is terrible
• 20:19
  and that's a trauma. So that affects the child's well-being. So the way that you couch that is
• 20:24
  biological parent who you have a relationship with? Yeah, that was intentional.
• 20:28
  Right. Yeah. And the dissolution of families is bad. And ideally, we know there's a lot of
• 20:36
  data also, a bit single parent households, fair worse than two parent households. So then the
• 20:41
  question is going to come down to obviously whether or not the biological link between a biological
• 20:47
  parent and a child, not whether or not it's salient, I suspect it probably is, but whether it's
• 20:55
  orders of magnitude more salient than all of the other factors that go into the well-being of a child.
• 21:00
  Why is that so important to you? Why is it important to you? Aren't you the biological father of
• 21:06
  your children? Yes. Why does that matter to you? It actually doesn't. Really? Why didn't you go get
• 21:12
  a sperm donor? Oh, I mean, why not have a connection? Why not have some kind of a genetic lineage if
• 21:19
  you can? So yes, you're right. It matters like, well, it matters enough that I'm not going to go and
• 21:26
  pay money and go through the logistical and bureaucratic hassle of not doing it if I can just jerk
• 21:32
  off into a jar. I mean, wasn't like, you know what I mean? But put it this way, if it were the case
• 21:39
  that I found out that my mother had had an affair and my biological father was not in fact my father,
• 21:47
  that would be shocking, headspinning, weird, for three weeks. And then I'd be like,
• 21:55
  who cares, really? Like, he was my dad. Some donor conceived children feel that way. Like,
• 22:02
  wow, this guy raised me for 25 years and he wasn't even my biological father. What a guy.
• 22:08
  And some of them are plunged into an identity crisis because they're like, oh my gosh,
• 22:13
  I learned to German because I thought my family was German, but I'm not who am I.
• 22:18
  And overall, what we see for children created through sperm and egg donation and adoption
• 22:23
  is it's very hard for children to answer the question, who am I? If they can't answer the question,
• 22:28
  who's am I? So it doesn't end up being pretty important. It's one of the reasons why.
• 22:33
  I mean, it doesn't depend on how you talk to them about it. I mean, children have weird
• 22:36
  questions about all kinds of things and it reminds me a little bit like I was I was in Cuba and
• 22:44
  there was this guy who was sort of showing us around. He was like, he wasn't with my family.
• 22:48
  I was just with my friends. And he was going on and on about gay people listen, gay people, that
• 22:53
  and he didn't know I was gay. And one of my friends sort of just called him on at one point,
• 22:57
  because he's this traditional very less skill and like Latino guy who has very,
• 23:00
  you know, traditional what I would regard as retrograde ideas about messy about sexuality.
• 23:06
  And when he pushed him, when my friend pushed him, pushed his final thing was like,
• 23:10
  what am I going to tell my children? You know, what am I going to tell my children? They see
• 23:14
  two men kissing in the street. What am I going to tell them? And my friend was like,
• 23:20
  be more fucking creative. Figure out what you're going to tell him is say some people love some
• 23:23
  people the same sex and people love some people the other sex. You know, this is something that I'm
• 23:26
  going to deal with with my kids. You know, oh, you know, why we've got two daddies and two mummies.
• 23:31
  I can imagine it being an existential crisis for some people, especially if the people around them
• 23:35
  are ill equipped to have that conversation. But there are lots of things that kids, why am I fat?
• 23:41
  Why have I got curly hair? Why do I have, you know, what's going on with my breasts? What's happening
• 23:46
  here? What's happening there? Like why do people do this? Why are there wars? There's lots of
• 23:50
  complicated questions that children ask. It's up to us as grownups to help them figure out the world.
• 23:55
  And I don't see that the answer to the question of why do I have two dads is massively more complicated
• 24:02
  than any other hair brain question that a child comes up with. You know, it depends on the
• 24:06
  situation, but in our case, well, you know that, you know, so and so is your beloved person who
• 24:12
  is this and she is that and we are, yeah, it's a little bit more complicated, but families are
• 24:16
  families and you're loved. Will that lead, can I certainly say that that won't lead to an
• 24:21
  existential crisis where they have, where they are racked by, you know, some psychological downside
• 24:28
  for not having grown up with a female in the household. I can't say that for sure, but there
• 24:32
  are lots of things that we can't say for sure about the well-being of children. There's one thing we
• 24:36
  can say for sure about children. Every single one of them comes from a man and woman, 100% of them,
• 24:42
  there's no edge cases for that. And we've studied family structure enough to know that when they are
• 24:48
  grow, with the grow up without one of the other, there's a deficit. I'm not saying that it's not,
• 24:53
  you can't overcome. Children overcome and have to grapple with all kinds of deficits in their
• 25:00
  childhood, but that is one thing where there's no edge cases. A hundred percent of the time, you
• 25:06
  guys had to find somebody to give you 50% of the genetic identity for your children to understand
• 25:11
  it was a close relative, which I think is also interesting. Why? Why did you choose a relative
• 25:17
  of Sean's, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Why not? I think the answer is because there's
• 25:24
  something really special about having a genetic connection to your children. And I think that
• 25:30
  you recognize it. You probably also, Sean probably wanted some kind of biological connection to.
• 25:36
  Yeah, it's lovely because it's wonderful. It is. It's lovely. It's also, I mean,
• 25:42
  vastly expensive and complicated not to, right? So it's like, I think what you're pointing to there
• 25:48
  would probably be a more powerful argument if my sperm donation and the involvement of this close
• 25:56
  family member in donating her eggs were the more difficult and expensive option that we adopted for.
• 26:03
  But those are actually the three easy option. And we would have had to go an extra mile to avoid
• 26:09
  having a genetic connection with our children. I'm not saying that it's not nice,
• 26:13
  but had we had to do that if I was in fertile and if we didn't have a close family,
• 26:17
  female family member, and we'd had to go through a more, I guess, distant form of IVF,
• 26:26
  then would my relationship with my children be less close and would it be worse for the children?
• 26:33
  Like, I'm not quite sure I see the mechanism by which the children are harmed in that scenario
• 26:39
  versus the scenario that they've got. I think the point that I'm making is in the world of
• 26:44
  reproductive technologies, we recognize that biology matters when the adults want it to.
• 26:50
  So like right now, there's two big cases in Australia, an IVF company called Manash, I think.
• 26:57
  Manash? Yeah, that's a university in Melbourne who does some of that work.
• 27:02
  So they're having this big crisis because they've now had two IVF mixups where people have
• 27:07
  gone home with their own children. But the thing is that people go home with unrelated children
• 27:12
  all the time in IVF. Sometimes you will purchase egg, you'll purchase sperm, maybe you'll get an
• 27:17
  entire donor embryo. And that's fine as long as the adults want it that way. So the problem is that
• 27:24
  biology matters in the world of big fertility. Biology matters when the adults want it to.
• 27:29
  So biology matters, you know, if the adults are like, this is the child I want, I want my sperm,
• 27:34
  I want the egg of this known donor or whatever. The thing is that biology matters to children too.
• 27:39
  And we tend to understand that when we look at it from the perspective of the adults, well of course
• 27:43
  you want your own genetic child. Well, of course you're upset that you got this the wrong embryo.
• 27:49
  But it matters to kids too. It matters for the sake of their biological identity. Like children do
• 27:53
  want to know, who's my mother? Where did I come from? That's one of the reasons why in the world of
• 27:59
  adoption in the United States, we have absolutely overhauled adoption best practice. Whereas in the 60s
• 28:05
  and 70s, we had overwhelmingly closed adoptions where people were like, you don't need to know the
• 28:11
  identity of your poor single mother unwed mother. We don't even need to tell you that you're adopted.
• 28:16
  You're being raised by this wealthy heterosexual white couple and you're doing fine. To now 95%
• 28:23
  of adoptions in the United States are open adoptions because social workers recognize that even if they
• 28:28
  can't be raised by them, children benefit from as many connections with their first family as
• 28:32
  possible because there's something about those two adults that they give children something that
• 28:38
  their unrelated adoptive parents can give them. And I'm saying this as an adoptive mom, right?
• 28:43
  There are things that I can't fully compensate for that my son has lost. So I guess I just want to
• 28:49
  make the point that biology matters. It matters to children. And right now we're just talking about
• 28:54
  biological identity. We can get into risks. The risks of unrelated adults parenting children as well.
• 29:00
  But in terms of that biology matters, I mean, you know, you're like, well, kids have all kinds of
• 29:03
  questions. I'm, why am I obese? I have ADHD or whatever. But let me ask you this because I don't think
• 29:09
  that this is, who is my mother is not at the same level of, why do I have dyslexia?
• 29:16
  So let me ask you like, can you think of great movies or novels or works of art where children go
• 29:24
  on a search for their long lost uncle or mother's girlfriend? No, but you're asking too much of
• 29:35
  your opponent's arguments there because I don't think that any reasonable person would say that
• 29:39
  it's not meaningful to have a connection to a parent like that. They're biological parent because
• 29:45
  isn't that the argument that you're making is that it's not important to have a relationship
• 29:49
  with your biological parent? Well, I think there are a lot of things that are being smuggled in here.
• 29:53
  So the adoptive, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. Like there were similar changes here
• 29:58
  in Australia as to in the United States about open adoptions and one of my friends is,
• 30:05
  their parents turned out had been a sperm donor when he was in high school or university or whatever.
• 30:11
  And his biological daughter tracked him down when the laws changed. Like for the first
• 30:17
  whatever 25 years of her life or something, she wasn't allowed to find out. Then they changed the
• 30:21
  policy. She reached out. It was a mutual thing you were able to, the end of the parent could go
• 30:25
  on to a register. The child could go on to a register. You guys did a really good job with that
• 30:28
  in terms of Australia having like rights. I would say like their crumbs, but they are rights for
• 30:34
  donor-conceived people to know the identity of the person that you get them. We also don't have
• 30:38
  commercial surrogacy here, which you do in the States. You can't pay people for, I mean,
• 30:43
  you can reimburse them, but you can't pay a fee for, for sorry, we'll get to that I'm sure.
• 30:47
  But and so what I've seen is this beautiful kind of flowering and flourishing of a wider family,
• 30:52
  where you've got the original nuclear family. And then you've got this other, this adopted child
• 30:58
  who had a great family of her own. And now you've got two families where there's an enormous
• 31:03
  amount of love. So the quest for the biological parents specifically, right? Yes, it's ingrained,
• 31:10
  it's like, it's in eight. I mean, there is something fundamental and primal and mammalian about.
• 31:16
  I think primal is the right way to put it. Right. About the, about one's lineage.
• 31:20
  Yes. One of the reasons why we're tribal is also because we feel like we belong. There's a
• 31:25
  sense of like heritage, there's a sense of coming from somewhere. There's a sense of place,
• 31:29
  and there's a sense of belonging. And all of that is emotionally tied up in our sense of what
• 31:35
  our biological parentage is. And I'll grant you all that. The question comes with the next move
• 31:41
  that you make, which I think is to say that that primacy is so fundamental that it's worth
• 31:48
  trampling over what I would regard as a lot of other public goods and rights in order to enshrine it.
• 31:55
  Well, a society in which people can flourish and create more families and more love
• 32:02
  that have different kinds of shapes, right? That a society in which children who are up for adoption
• 32:08
  aren't robbed of the capacity to have a loving family because there are such strict rules about
• 32:14
  whether or not they can be adopted by same-sex parents, a society in which gay people
• 32:20
  have to have their desire for family thwarted because of the imagined natural rights of children
• 32:27
  whose statistics show would be just as well adjusted or more so in that family.
• 32:32
  Tell me about those statistics. Well, we can get into these statistics because I know you dispute
• 32:37
  them, but there's a lot of them. Let's talk about what's bad for kids, and then I'll talk to you
• 32:44
  about the statistics. Can I just circle back and say, I just want to make the point that this idea
• 32:50
  of who are my parents, where do I come from? It is primal, and I think that you said it exactly
• 32:54
  right. And it is reflected in all of historically great art, great literature, great movie, you have
• 33:00
  endless stories of children seeking their long-lost father because there's something that only that man
• 33:06
  can give to them that even a loving heterosexual adoptive parent cannot give to them. And I think
• 33:11
  that we diminish that to the deficit of children and all of society. And we do it intentionally
• 33:17
  because we want adults to be able to forge whatever kind of romantic or familial bonds that they
• 33:22
  want, even if it means that the children are going to suffer in some way. So I don't mean to be
• 33:29
  rude, but what I'm doing my job, I feel so called accurately represent the child's perspective
• 33:38
  because they can't sit in on podcasts and they can't file amicus briefs. They can't advocate
• 33:43
  for their own rights. And you are being so gloriously charitable and curious. And so I really want to,
• 33:49
  I really appreciate that. So I don't mean to sound like obstinate or combative or anything,
• 33:54
  but I also, I'm not going to be doing what I'm supposed to be doing if I'm not
• 34:00
  really identifying these non-negotiables of what it means to be a human child. So
• 34:05
  thank you for letting me make that point. No, absolutely. I mean, bring it. It's called
• 34:10
  uncomfortable conversations for a reason. What's bad for kids, right? What's bad for kids,
• 34:15
  the abuse, an abusive parent, a broken home. Poverty is pretty bad for kids.
• 34:23
  Define broken home. Oh, a home in which there is conflict between the parents and one of them
• 34:29
  leaves. Okay, so broken home is a home where what's broken? The structure of the nuclear family.
• 34:38
  What's a nuclear family? Two parents and kids. Okay. Why is it just two?
• 34:46
  Because, I mean, why not two? What wouldn't you have to make a case for it not to be two?
• 34:51
  You would. But why are you defining it as two? What makes two so important?
• 34:57
  I think it's probably a, we've probably inherited that from culture and biology.
• 35:03
  So it could be four? That could be a nuclear family? Four parents? Yeah, I guess so.
• 35:08
  Yeah. Okay. Why? Look, so you just said a nuclear family is important. So why?
• 35:13
  Tribally, it was more than two. I mean, traditionally in lots of traditional societies,
• 35:18
  you would have the old ax maximum that it takes a village, right? And you would have a much
• 35:25
  more collective approach to raising children. Maybe grandparents would be the primary carers,
• 35:29
  while the parents were off doing other things. Do you think that's different than a four-parent
• 35:33
  home? Well, I mean, I think if you're, if by four-parent home, you're invoking an idea of
• 35:38
  kind of purple head like polyamorous, you know, communities where, then I think we're injecting
• 35:45
  a sort of whole set of other things that we might disapprove of. What about one man and three wives?
• 35:51
  One man through wives practiced widely in the Islamic world, nuclear family?
• 35:59
  Well, now we're just quibbling over language. Isn't this semantic at this point?
• 36:03
  Well, who said, if you're not arguing about words, what's the point of arguing? I mean,
• 36:07
  like everything is about the words that we're using because words are giving shape to truth.
• 36:11
  And I want to make sure that we're talking about the things that really are true because you're
• 36:15
  using... I mean, I want to make sure that we're focusing on what you claim to be focusing on,
• 36:19
  which is the well-being of children. Yes. So is it possible for a, in a Muslim family where there's
• 36:25
  a husband and three wives? It is highly likely that there are all kinds of other extraneous things
• 36:31
  that are going on that are deleterious to the well-being of the child. It's probably misogynistic,
• 36:35
  it's probably sexist. It's probably dysfunctional in ways that I would regard as dysfunctional,
• 36:40
  but maybe more religiously traditional people, like yourself, might actually regard as being
• 36:46
  fine, in terms of having a... Does it just say that because I'm a crazy bribal
• 36:50
  trooper that I love polygamy? Because this is about to get really spicy. Not polygamy, but a more
• 36:56
  traditional patriarchal structure in the nuclear family. I love you, patriarch. That's for you,
• 37:03
  that's for your self-destruct. Yeah, okay. So my focus is on what is good and bad for children.
• 37:13
  And my worry is that you use the pretext of that focus to actually smuggle in a whole bunch of
• 37:18
  other things that you just like because you're... Because I'm a bigot. Not a bigot. No, I don't think
• 37:24
  you are a bigot. I'd be very surprised if you were. No, because I'm an undercover agent for a
• 37:28
  religious takeover of Australia. Everyone is allowed to have their moral and traditional preconceptions,
• 37:35
  and you're open about the fact that you're a deeply Christian person, and so you have certain ideas
• 37:40
  about the way that the world should be ordered, and the easiest way to embark upon those ideas.
• 37:46
  Is to do it in the name of what's best for the kids? Well, exactly. I mean, this is not a... I'm not
• 37:50
  saying you're being cynical about it, but I'm just saying that that instinct can often through,
• 37:54
  you know, whether it whether you go back to violent video games or McCarthyism against communism
• 38:00
  or whatever it is. There's a long tradition of people saying, but think about the children
• 38:05
  in order to as a way of kind of reinforcing their own prior existing worldview about the way
• 38:11
  the things should be ordered. Do you think you and Sean have done that? No, no. I'm pretty careful.
• 38:18
  You don't think that you've taken your worldview that love makes a family, that families come in
• 38:24
  lots of different shapes, as I think you said, and then you have said, therefore we are going to
• 38:32
  decide that the best interest of the child aligns with our previous ideas that two men can offer
• 38:40
  the same thing to children as their own biological married mother and father. Well, in that
• 38:45
  extremely narrow respect we have, but if you're using it in that term, then all of us are, I mean,
• 38:50
  our entire lives are just a litany of imposing our own preconceptions on the world. All we're doing
• 38:56
  is living our lives and using a daughter in common sense to figure out what is likely to be.
• 39:02
  Did you say daughter? Yes, sorry, data. Great. Sorry about that. Obviously, need to be on the ground
• 39:09
  a little more before I jump in. The other tricky thing about Australians. So you just said what
• 39:13
  you're saying, I just want to recap. You're saying you're using data and common sense to create a
• 39:19
  family. Your family reflects data and common sense. Is that what you're saying? Okay. Yes.
• 39:26
  So if there was a, if there was research, I guess we have to get into sort of like the the data
• 39:35
  and the stats here, right? Thank you. I mean, obviously I got to have all kinds of help here.
• 39:39
  The other tricky thing about Australia, the Australian accent just as an aside, is that we do this
• 39:42
  weird thing where there where when a word ends in a vowel and the next word begins in a vowel,
• 39:48
  we put a linking R in. So we would say like data and instead of data and or like China and Japan
• 39:57
  or something. Anyway, so if there was, if there was a body of research that said that children
• 40:03
  fed more poorly in same-sex couples than in straight couples, then I would have absolutely given
• 40:11
  pause. So to that extent, it's based on data. What kind of data? I assume you're very thoughtful,
• 40:17
  very educated journalist. What is your, what is your sense of the data when it comes to research
• 40:24
  on same-sex-headed households? Well, I'm glad you asked. I don't normally bring notes. Okay.
• 40:30
  But I did ask someone who I know who works in this field who's not a crazy, you know, LGBTQI
• 40:38
  activist. But so 2023, BMJ Global Health, the paper was called Family Outcome Disparities
• 40:49
  Between Sexual Minority and Heterosexual Families, a systematic review and meta-analysis.
• 40:54
  Was that the Italian? That's the Zhang Wang Wang Zhu Tan Tien. So I'm guessing not a
• 41:00
  okay. Okay. Okay. I'm a weird classroom Italian. Sorry, no significant differences in physical
• 41:05
  health. Is this the one that did that? Is this the sort of overview of a variety of different?
• 41:09
  It's a systematic review and meta-analysis. So that would be a meta. Yeah. 2020,
• 41:15
  Marisky, DeWitt, and Cabou in the American Sociological Review called School Outcomes of
• 41:20
  Children Raised by Same-sex Parents, Evidence from Administrative Panel Data. Is that the one
• 41:25
  found? Is that Netherlands? Is that the Scandinavian? No, that's not the Scandinavian one. I don't
• 41:28
  think because I've got that one as well. Children raised by Same-sex Parents perform better in
• 41:32
  school compared to those raised by different sex parents. Sorry, what study was that? Is that
• 41:36
  the Netherlands one? No, that's American Sociological Review in 2020. 2016 study in Pediatrics,
• 41:43
  the Journal, Children of Same-sex Parents are just as healthy and well-adjusted as those of
• 41:47
  heterosexual parents. The American Psychological Association, the Australian Psychological Association,
• 41:51
  and the Canadian Psychological Association have all independently concluded that Children's
• 41:56
  well-being does not vary based on parent sexual orientation. The 2017 study by far
• 42:02
  entitled Disparental Sexual Orientation Matter along a childrenal follow-up of adoptive families
• 42:06
  with school aged children in the Journal of Developmental Psychology, the Journal of Child
• 42:12
  Development by Patterson, Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents. There's another study from 2022
• 42:17
  that compared Children aged six to 16 with Same-sex Parents to their peers with different sex
• 42:24
  parents, which found no significant differences in areas like social adjustment, emotional
• 42:28
  adjustment, or general behavioral problems. The University of Melbourne in 2014, that's going back,
• 42:33
  found that Children of Same-sex Parents scored higher on measures of general health and family
• 42:37
  cohesion compared to the general population. In Pediatrics Journal in 2020, a review concluded that
• 42:43
  Children of Same-sex Parents are just as healthy and well-adjusted as those of heterosexual parents.
• 42:47
  There's the Pew Research Center study in 2025, and so do you want to just
• 42:55
  tell me why we'll lose our own? Some of them are distinct studies and some of them are capturing
• 43:03
  some of them are recaps of... Okay, let me go back. Up until about 2005, there was a consensus
• 43:10
  in the sociological world that Children Fared Best when they were raised by their married biological
• 43:15
  mother and father in a low conflict marriage. That is what everybody on the left and the right
• 43:20
  would say until 2005. Why? Because if you look at data and common sense, obviously the two people
• 43:30
  responsible for these existence of the child are going to be the most connected to invested in
• 43:35
  and protective of them. You can look at that from an evolutionary perspective. Usually.
• 43:39
  100% I'll grant you some edge cases, edge cases where... I mean, some people give up their child.
• 43:45
  Yes, some people abuse their children. Horrible. Okay, so but on the whole, when you look at
• 43:54
  kind of the pantheon of human relationships married biological mother and father in a low conflict
• 43:59
  relationship, that was the consensus among all sociologists. And in what circumstances are we
• 44:05
  taking children out of that environment to put them into same sex households?
• 44:11
  Well, I'd say culturally, legally and technologically, we've absolutely overhauled things to do
• 44:16
  exactly that. But we can get to that after we have that. There is no universe in which children
• 44:21
  who would otherwise be brought up in a heterosexual family with biological parents are not getting
• 44:27
  that and getting something else. Because we've created systems where we can design and purchase
• 44:33
  and legally extract children from their genetic mother or father through the combination of
• 44:38
  reproductive technologies and overhauling our parenthood laws. Only when that mother and father
• 44:43
  were not going to raise that child. Sure. So we've said it's okay to sell your children.
• 44:47
  And I actually don't think that that's a reflection of the best. We can talk about the commercial
• 44:52
  side of things. Right. But that's a separate, that's a distinct question from, here is this ideal
• 44:57
  family and we're not giving the children that ideal family. Sure. There is no universe in which
• 45:02
  the children who we're going to have that ideal family are being taken away and raised by
• 45:07
  same sex families or other families. Okay. That's one way to think about it. The other way is
• 45:11
  we are now manufacturing and in some places incentivizing the creation of motherless or fatherless
• 45:17
  children. Do you think that's true? That we have created systems that incentivize or permit people
• 45:23
  to create motherless or fatherless children? Yes, it depends on you. If your strict definition
• 45:27
  of mother and father is the biological, you know, the person who produced the sperm and the person
• 45:31
  who produced the egg, then that's on general aperture. Yes. And I would say mothers and fathers
• 45:37
  are more than that, but they're not less than that. So let's talk about the data. So something happened
• 45:43
  around 2005, especially in the United States, where suddenly you had this entire consensus
• 45:49
  that was data driven and common sense. Right. That these two adults, and you can look at it from an
• 45:54
  evolutionary perspective. Obviously, if you are making a baby, there is an interest in investing in
• 45:59
  your own genetic offspring versus investing in a child who is not biologically worse. There you
• 46:05
  get a lot of the hence the higher rights of violence from step parents. Right. There's an entire
• 46:10
  there's a name for that phenomenon. It's called the Cinderella effect that an adult who's
• 46:15
  raising a baby who is not theirs or a child who is not theirs is going to have lower levels of
• 46:19
  investment protection and connection with them. So this is what I would call self-evident,
• 46:24
  right? Whether you're looking at it from a biblical perspective or an evolutionary perspective.
• 46:28
  But then something changed in 2005. And from 2005 until 2015, conveniently, when we had a
• 46:35
  burger fell that legalized gay marriage, suddenly there was this bizarre new consensus that actually
• 46:41
  biology wasn't relevant and mothers and fathers didn't matter. And it was okay if there was some
• 46:46
  kind of traumatic loss of the mother or father due to divorce or death or abandonment or reproductive
• 46:51
  technologies. And so that's where you're getting all of those studies. Some of them are actually
• 46:56
  distinct and unique. Like the one in the Netherlands, I think was a good study. The one that showed
• 46:59
  higher levels of academic. I didn't actually raise the Netherlands one yet because I think that
• 47:03
  that one's good. I wanted to make sure that I could address one point that I know that you make,
• 47:08
  which is a legitimate one in criticizing some of these things, which is that they're not randomised.
• 47:12
  Some of them are self-selecting, right? So of course, if you go out into the field and you go,
• 47:17
  hey, we want to talk to a whole bunch of happy same-sex families about how great it is to have
• 47:22
  same-sex parents. And then you say, look, they're all great. Then, of course, you're missing the ones
• 47:27
  who aren't. So that's a problem. That's a methodological problem. Some studies have tried to get around
• 47:33
  that by making it randomised. It's difficult to do randomised studies of this because it's a fairly
• 47:37
  small cohort of the population. So it's hard to get a, you know, a whole birds eye view, but some
• 47:42
  places have done it. So then there's the Dutch one that you're talking about in 2020. This is the
• 47:46
  American Sociological Review. They reported on this administrative data from the Netherlands. So
• 47:50
  the Netherlands basically just took the entire population. And that's the way you need to do it.
• 47:55
  You've got to do the government data. So we did it, at least in the Dutch case. And they compared
• 48:02
  children from same-sex families to children from different-sex families and found that the kids
• 48:06
  in same-sex parent families perform better in school. And they even adjusted for socioeconomic
• 48:11
  factors to make sure that there wasn't a skew in the data, which I think is actually a little bit
• 48:15
  unfair. I'm not sure you should adjust for socioeconomic factors because, you know, you might say,
• 48:19
  well, how could it be the case that children of same-sex families do better than, like,
• 48:24
  how can it be better to not have a biological mother or a biological father? That's the great
• 48:29
  mystery. It's not that much of a mystery because you're self-selecting for people who really,
• 48:35
  really, really wanted kids and didn't accidentally have children and invested a huge amount of
• 48:39
  resources in getting those children. So it isn't, and they had, and they're middle class,
• 48:44
  or I thought, I thought they had the resources to be able to bring those children into existence.
• 48:48
  So it doesn't strike me as crazy that if a cohort of people have resources and commitment that
• 48:54
  the children are going to have better outcomes than the random population, where a 16-year-old can
• 48:59
  get knocked up in the back of a car to drive in and that, and where bam, you've got a family.
• 49:05
  There's a 2010 study published in Demography Journal that used a big nationally representative
• 49:10
  data set to analyze the educational outcomes of children raised by our name-sex couples.
• 49:15
  I haven't drawn it that down, but it's Demography Journal 2010, so we're going to look it up.
• 49:19
  That found that children had comparable educational outcomes to children with different sex
• 49:23
  parents. And the last big randomised one that I could find was in population research and policy
• 49:28
  review. A comprehensive review found no significant differences in various aspects of child well-being,
• 49:35
  including academic performance and psychological health. Now, I want to grant you that none of this
• 49:40
  says that there isn't something lost when you don't have a connection to a biological mother
• 49:47
  and a biological father, right? It just says that whatever that loss is is a signal,
• 49:53
  there's a sort of a noise that's drowned out by the signal of all of the other factors that
• 49:56
  go into having a flourishing childhood. So the reason why I'm asking which studies these are
• 50:01
  is because if you actually were calling studies that used the gold standard of social science,
• 50:09
  it wouldn't just be randomized participants. It would be large sample studies with adequate
• 50:13
  control groups. It would be longitudinal over a long period of time. Well, one of them is the
• 50:17
  Dutch one is. The Dutch one is, which is why it's worth looking at. It still doesn't show what
• 50:22
  you're trying to show. In terms of what do you mean? Like a deleterious effect for children.
• 50:27
  Yeah, so with that one, you probably can say in fact, because I asked two different sociologists
• 50:32
  about that, like what's going on with the Dutch study. And they said very clearly it's wealthier
• 50:36
  lesbians. And when you are, honestly, when you are going to the marketplace of sperm and egg donor
• 50:42
  catalogues, you are selecting for different attributes, intelligence, education level. So they do
• 50:47
  think that there's a genetic aspect of that. Yeah. Which is why, you know, you pay a little bit more
• 50:53
  for a Yale egg donor than you do for a Washington state egg donor because it's true, right? People
• 50:58
  are recognized as part of building the designer baby. So if we were to, if you were only to have
• 51:03
  brought me studies that use the gold standard, the gold standard of social science research,
• 51:07
  we'd be talking about four or five. That's it. All of which would still prove my point.
• 51:11
  No, because you didn't mention rigorous and you didn't mention Dr. Salons who's currently at the
• 51:17
  Catholic University of America. And he looked at government data and examined different aspects,
• 51:24
  especially emotional aspects of children raised by same sex parents. And what did that find?
• 51:28
  Higher rates of emotional distress, daily fearfulness and crying increased.
• 51:34
  Regnarus was the first guy to do this using the gold standard. And here's the other big thing.
• 51:39
  Most of those studies, because as you said, very hard to find these families.
• 51:43
  Like it's only 10% of LGBT couples in the United States are married and a small percentage of them
• 51:48
  have children. So it's very hard to find these couples at random. One that surprised me was that
• 51:52
  a lot of these studies go back a long time because long before marriage, same sex couples were
• 51:57
  having kids informally, mainly lesbians, right? Because they can, biologically, it's a lot easier.
• 52:02
  Well, or most of the kids who are 30, 40, 50 who have an LGBT parent are the product of a
• 52:09
  heterosexual relationship that broke up, which a lot of, so then that's the explanation.
• 52:14
  Then that's the founding, right? Yeah, if there is some kind of damaging effect or diminished
• 52:19
  outcomes, it was the heterosexual breakup that did it, not the same sex parenting. So the other
• 52:26
  big problem with most of these studies is they don't wait for the kids to grow up. They don't wait
• 52:30
  and ask the child who's 19 or 29. Were you on welfare? Did you experience any kind of abuse?
• 52:36
  Were you connected to your parent? Were you on an IEP or did you have a, but like most of them
• 52:42
  will go. If you go back and look at those studies, which I'm glad you mentioned the names,
• 52:46
  because I want people to go back and look at, go back and look at the methods. They did not evaluate
• 52:51
  the children's, you know, how many of them were on medications when they were young? They
• 52:57
  went to the parents and said, how does your kid like having gay parents? Like, are they doing well?
• 53:02
  Are they doing, do they feel connected? Are you connected to them? Are they connected to you?
• 53:05
  Are they doing well in school? Are they successful? Are they depressed? And so really what you're
• 53:09
  getting is you're getting the adult's idea of how the children are fearing. That's not nothing,
• 53:14
  but it also is not the kind of data that should override what does not.
• 53:20
  Not true in most of those studies. They're not, they're not interviews with the parents.
• 53:23
  Are you sure? Yeah, I mean, how are you going to do that then with if you're evaluating a child
• 53:29
  who's six or eight years old by looking at their school reports? So that's what the Dutch study did,
• 53:35
  which was great. Yeah, and looking at their medical records and seeing whether or not they're being,
• 53:38
  you know, diagnosed with things. Most, most researchers didn't do that. So I'm just saying,
• 53:43
  like when I have these, and you suspect that when that does happen, we will find
• 53:47
  a narrative that contradicts the mainstream narrative about the well-being of children
• 53:51
  of six. So this is the, this is the bizarre thing about the family's structure debate.
• 53:58
  Whenever you're not talking about same-sex parents, anytime you're not talking,
• 54:02
  if you're not studying same-sex parents, sociologists agree that biological parents
• 54:07
  advantage children in terms of they invest more money, they spend more time. The children report
• 54:13
  feeling more connected to the biological parent. Whenever you're not studying same-sex parenting,
• 54:19
  there is a consensus that fathers offer distinct benefits to children that mothers do things
• 54:24
  different than fathers do. Whenever you're not talking about same-sex parents and you just study
• 54:28
  children created through sperm or egg donation raised by heterosexual couples, you see that those
• 54:32
  kids do tend to struggle with identity issues. They have higher levels of family fragmentation, for
• 54:38
  example, the biggest study that was ever done on this that compared sperm donor kids to adopted kids,
• 54:42
  to children raised by their own married biological mother and father was called my daddy's name
• 54:46
  is donor. And it showed that these, and it was a big sample size, and it actually interviewed the
• 54:50
  children themselves. It wasn't just self-reporting adults. It found that those kids suffered. They had
• 54:56
  diminished outcomes. So what's so strange to me is that when you're not talking about same-sex
• 55:01
  parenting studies, mothers and fathers do distinct and complimentary things that benefit child
• 55:07
  development, that if there's a clear agreement, the biological parents' advantage children and
• 55:13
  unrelated adults' disadvantaged children, and that any form of parental loss hinders children and
• 55:20
  can create some level of primal wound. And for some reason, none of those three things matter
• 55:26
  when you're talking about same-sex parents. Why do you think that is? I think you're right to smell
• 55:32
  a rat. I think you're right to smell a rat in the way that politics and cultural change can
• 55:37
  influence science. It influences what people get, what you're allowed to do your PhD thesis on.
• 55:42
  You know, it influences the social environment at what gets published in journals.
• 55:47
  And you're probably right that in the first decades of this century, there was such an eager
• 55:53
  egonus to try to normalize same-sex marriage and an egonus to try to equalize the rights of gay
• 56:01
  people that there was, it was regarded as unseemly to focus too much on those facts. In fact,
• 56:09
  you wouldn't get funded. Yeah. So there's that. I think it's also worth trying to be specific
• 56:17
  about why it is that the traditional claim was that a mother and a father who are biologically
• 56:23
  related to the children are is optimal because we've mentioned step parents and, you know,
• 56:31
  high rates of violence. We've mentioned broken homes, and we went down the rabbit hole about
• 56:35
  what a nuclear family is, but I think we understand intuitively and just conversationally and
• 56:38
  rhetorically what we mean by the difference between a broken home and a cohesive home even if it
• 56:43
  has a higher rate of 17 Muslim women. But you mentioned dramatically being robbed of a parent
• 56:53
  in what you were just saying. And I think a lot of what we intuitively and traditionally have
• 56:58
  understood to be undesirable about not having a biological mother and a biological father
• 57:04
  is that to not have a biological mother or a biological father up until three seconds ago
• 57:11
  in technological and cultural time was to have a parent ripped away from you or to have some kind
• 57:18
  of otherwise dysfunctional scenario that you were being forced to raise it would be raised in.
• 57:24
  So the downsides of living with an alcoholic or abusive or detached step parent,
• 57:31
  the downsides of living with only a single parent, the downsides of having your childhood
• 57:36
  full of turmoil as you get swapped between foster parents and biological parents, the downsides.
• 57:41
  Or two divorced, warring parents. Exactly. That's right. Or I mean, I would say two married
• 57:46
  warring parents who can't get a divorce because they're living in the world that you want to create
• 57:50
  by having parents who can't divorce each other. My solution to that is not for them to war.
• 57:56
  My solution for them is to do the hard thing so they're not at war and their children don't have to
• 58:01
  live in split homes, split lives, and in 50% of cases develop split personalities. My solution is
• 58:06
  the adults do the hard thing. No, I get that. I get going. Yes, no, I understand that you're not
• 58:10
  being facetious. But so all of the what I think has happened is that three seconds ago we found
• 58:18
  a technological and scientific solution that is offensive to religious people because it is
• 58:24
  playing God to some extent in which we can essentially decouple the biological fact of the heritage
• 58:32
  of a child, not a child, but like a zygote from all of the other downsides of the kind of
• 58:42
  traumatic broken home phenomenon that you're talking about. This is not to say that there's no downside
• 58:48
  to my children having two dads. I find there there is there may be, I don't know. But it is to say
• 58:56
  that I think a lot of your concerns are piggybacking on downsides that are no longer relevant
• 59:03
  because they're associated with a whole bunch of other dysfunctions that existed prior to the
• 59:07
  invention of gay marriage IVF and sorry I see. So you're right. We now have a technological work
• 59:16
  around that allows us to manipulate children in ways that the biological our human bodies don't,
• 59:25
  especially as it relates to motherhood. So in the past, there was no way to separate genetic
• 59:31
  mother from birth mother. In a hundred percent of cases, they were the same woman. But now we have
• 59:37
  the technological ability to not bifurcate but try for Kate mothers into three different roles.
• 59:45
  You've got when most of us think of our mother, we look back and we say well she was the woman
• 59:50
  that gave me my green eyes. She is the woman that gave me my Irish heritage and my chin looks just
• 59:57
  like her and I cough the same way. That is the sweetness that you probably see in your children
• 1:00:03
  that they kind of look like you that they might have the same kind of like hitch in their voice
• 1:00:08
  when they speak and it's sweet and it's wonderful and it's important to you and it's important to
• 1:00:12
  your kids too. So you've got the genetic mother. But then you also have the birth mother,
• 1:00:16
  right? The woman that we formed that critical bond with for the first nine months of our life.
• 1:00:21
  It is the one who statistically soothes the baby, especially in the first couple hours, days and
• 1:00:28
  weeks of their life in a way that no other person can. So the practice in hospitals whenever you're
• 1:00:35
  not talking about surrogacy is to immediately place the child on the chest of the birth mother
• 1:00:42
  because she is the only thing in the world that the baby knows. Now that's a really critical bond
• 1:00:49
  and we can talk about adoption and why even though adopted children are raised by adults who
• 1:00:55
  largely are wealthier, better educated and statistically have more stable marriages,
• 1:01:00
  adopted children still struggle overwhelmingly with externalizing disorders,
• 1:01:05
  struggle academically. And I would say a lot of that is because they had that primal bond disrupted
• 1:01:11
  even if it was the first day of their life. Do we have data on whether that depends on what age
• 1:01:16
  they were when they were adopted? So we have data on adoptees who were adopted at birth having
• 1:01:22
  longer term, more externalizing disorders, more anxiety, depression, self-harm, and a lot of
• 1:01:28
  that. They would say more than people who were adopted when they were conscious when their life. So
• 1:01:34
  then it's hard to parse out what part of the trauma was. Well, it's hard to know what kind
• 1:01:41
  of trauma you're dealing with. If you have a revolving door of foster homes, it's a whole
• 1:01:46
  another level of trauma. So we look at those kids and we say, well, it makes sense that maybe they're
• 1:01:51
  struggling in school or they have anger issues, but we also see that kind of lower levels of thriving
• 1:01:57
  even in children that were adopted at birth. So genetic mother, birth mother, and then the social
• 1:02:03
  mother is the woman that provides that daily female love every day that complements sort of the
• 1:02:11
  complements the everything of the fathers, the critical aspect of the fathers, but does something
• 1:02:15
  really, really different when it comes to nurturing attachment, child development, the way they
• 1:02:20
  speak, the way they discipline, the way that they orient the child towards the world or toward
• 1:02:24
  others, the one that emphasizes equity and fairness and routine and dad does really,
• 1:02:29
  really different things. So yes, we are now to place where technologically we can split that woman
• 1:02:35
  up into three. So we're exempting children maybe from the traumas of ripping them away from
• 1:02:41
  their mother through a divorce situation or because she's a drug addict, but to me that's not
• 1:02:48
  a common sense approach to making a family isn't common sense to align with how the body is naturally
• 1:02:55
  designed for mother to be both the genetic and the birth and the social doesn't it make sense
• 1:03:02
  from a common sense perspective or even an evolutionary perspective that we probably should not
• 1:03:07
  split up the primary relationship that all of us have I would say the only relationship it is
• 1:03:12
  the only relationship that all of us have for the first nine months of our life just because we
• 1:03:17
  found a way to technologically tinker I would say to satisfy what adults want. Do you really think
• 1:03:24
  that that's in the best interest of children? Well, you're speaking as if there's again there's a
• 1:03:30
  universe in which the child has the option of having a biological mother and a biological father
• 1:03:37
  and a happy stable prosperous home. The child doesn't have that option because the adults are
• 1:03:42
  purchasing and designing. Well, the child doesn't have that option because that child wouldn't be
• 1:03:45
  brought into existence were it not for the fact that it was being brought into a scenario that
• 1:03:50
  doesn't have that biological parent. So it strikes me that you're creating a false binary right that
• 1:03:55
  you're you're saying here's the ideal why wouldn't we opt for the ideal. I'm saying we live in a
• 1:04:03
  world in which that ideal is not on the table in the cases that we're talking about. It's not on
• 1:04:09
  the table because an adult doesn't it's not in the so what sort of a table because our sorry
• 1:04:16
  didn't want any more kids. It's not that she wasn't going to bring a child into her family. Yeah.
• 1:04:21
  She had three fabulous children. She'd had enough. She was not going to have any more children.
• 1:04:26
  A better way to look at it. We stepped in and created life who are enjoying a flourishing
• 1:04:32
  family. That flourishing family you can argue is suboptimal in comparison to the fantasy that you're
• 1:04:38
  creating in your walk when you're brain. That fantasy family wasn't on the cards. The fantasy
• 1:04:44
  family that I'm creating in my brain is the one that has been accepted throughout society
• 1:04:50
  that is except for that. Yes, and none of them are being deprived. We're not we're not
• 1:04:55
  preventing the existence of any of those families. Lots of people having sex in the world. They
• 1:05:00
  can create all the families they want. It doesn't diminish any one of none. There is no net loss
• 1:05:06
  of the family that you're talking about when we bring into existence other forms of families.
• 1:05:11
  I'm not talking about saying everybody should. I'm not here to defend the family. I mean,
• 1:05:15
  here to defend children. I'm here to say that children should not be intentionally motherless
• 1:05:20
  and fatherless. Then your duty would be to prove that there's a harm to the child who's
• 1:05:24
  being brought into the world. Not to say that it's inferior to a family that that child never
• 1:05:30
  has had the option of accessing. There's a harm to the children in the world. Yes, that it's
• 1:05:36
  actually worse for that child. It's worse for the child. Yeah. Not worse than for them to have
• 1:05:41
  a perfect platonic ideal of a family, but it would be better never to have existed.
• 1:05:46
  So one of the things we do at them before us is we catalog the stories of children who have lost
• 1:05:51
  their mother or father. One category of those children are children created through third-party
• 1:05:56
  reproduction, sperm or egg, donation or surrogacy. You can imagine that a lot of these kids are faced
• 1:06:02
  with the if they say I kind of feel like I wish I had a dad or you know, I really would like to
• 1:06:09
  know the identity of my biological mother. You can imagine that a lot of these kids here,
• 1:06:14
  yeah, but shouldn't you just be grateful to be alive? You wouldn't exist if I had not paid
• 1:06:19
  $50,000. That's not a very tactful way of putting it. But you can imagine that a lot of these kids,
• 1:06:25
  a lot of these kids have faced that exact objection that look, you should be grateful.
• 1:06:32
  You should be grateful. So to me, I think... Well, no, you shouldn't say that to a child. I mean,
• 1:06:35
  that's a ridiculous thing to say to a child, but I'm not saying it to a child. I'm saying,
• 1:06:39
  I'm trying to understand how you get from your love of the family in your head to it should be
• 1:06:50
  the only model. I love the structure of married permanent mother and father because it is the
• 1:06:58
  delivery system that we know leads to maximum child thriving. I'm not here to protect like this
• 1:07:04
  family unit. This is who children are. They are made from a man and woman. They get their
• 1:07:09
  identity from that man and woman. Statistically, they're most likely to be thrived when they're
• 1:07:13
  raised by that man and woman in a permanent relationship. The family serves the child,
• 1:07:17
  not the other way around. So what I think is going on in the world of reproductive technologies,
• 1:07:22
  and it's not just same sex couples. I mean, this is... I mean, heterosexuals. We're doing this
• 1:07:30
  long, long before gay couples began. So that's why I say this is a perspective that confronts
• 1:07:36
  everybody. Single married, gay, straight, frontliners. I mean, the majority of IVF situations that I
• 1:07:40
  know, and I'm sure you as well, and the majority of people who I know who are unable to conceive,
• 1:07:45
  so they use a donor egg, for example, but then the mother is the birth mother far exceed the
• 1:07:53
  number of same sex. A hundred percent. And that's why the GOP in the United States is really
• 1:07:58
  struggling with this because they are people. Yes, because you're more consistent, actually,
• 1:08:03
  because the... Yeah, I mean, it's harder. Your position is more, I think, ethically and religiously
• 1:08:10
  consistent, although I disagree with it, than the claim that there's something uniquely bad about
• 1:08:14
  same sex, marriages and parenting. Is it your claim that a couple, a straight couple, who can't
• 1:08:25
  conceive and therefore use an egg donor, but the birth mother is the mother that those children
• 1:08:34
  are at such a disadvantage that they shouldn't have been allowed to do that, to bring those children
• 1:08:40
  to the world. What you're doing when you're using reproductive technologies to create children,
• 1:08:44
  and intentionally cutting them off from their mother or father is you're actually exploiting a
• 1:08:48
  child's vulnerability. The child cannot defend themselves, right? The child cannot defend their
• 1:08:53
  life. They cannot defend their relationship with their own mother and father, because they're at
• 1:08:57
  the height of vulnerability and weakness, we exploit them. And we say, because I want something,
• 1:09:03
  this heterosexual couple where she, for whatever reason, decided to get pregnant at 44. And now,
• 1:09:10
  you know, maybe because she didn't find the right guy, maybe because she put her career first,
• 1:09:13
  maybe because she really has... Well, maybe she's 24 and she is, you know, she can't, she has a
• 1:09:18
  condition that where she can't conceive without an egg donor. Edge case, but possible. Very rare,
• 1:09:23
  for a genuine 24-year-old to have an infertility issue that cannot be solved by seeking to identify
• 1:09:31
  and resolve the underlying issue. Most of those things are treatable at the age of 24, so it's
• 1:09:35
  much more common for women to turn to IVF because they have bypassed their prime reproductive years.
• 1:09:41
  Yeah, I don't really get the antipathy towards edge cases, because when you construct laws,
• 1:09:45
  you have to be mindful of all the cases. When you construct laws, you have to recognize the rule
• 1:09:50
  first, in my opinion, because if you want to create a law based on edge cases... No, no, you just
• 1:09:55
  have to take into it, like it's very important to take into account edge cases when you're
• 1:09:59
  crafting a law, because a law that might be great for 90% of people, but, you know,
• 1:10:05
  you're just spilling water on the couch for people who are just losing a lot of drinks.
• 1:10:09
  It's not trivial to say that if you are constructing a law which was only going to punish people
• 1:10:22
  who had been too lazy to bother having children until they were in their 40s, and it also annihilated
• 1:10:27
  the ability of a certain number of people in their 20s to have children, then it would be valid
• 1:10:32
  to take that into account. I mean, by definition, the people who object to laws are universal. The laws
• 1:10:38
  don't have exceptions unless you write them in, so the whole point of pointing out edge cases is
• 1:10:42
  to go, well, is this really just or is it just have unintended consequences that affect, you know,
• 1:10:48
  even these edge cases in ways that we find morally untenable? Totally happy to address the edge cases,
• 1:10:52
  but I think that when you say the edge case is going to... So here's something that I've noticed.
• 1:10:59
  The victims determine the policy. So we spend an awful lot of time making adults who don't get what
• 1:11:04
  they want the victims, and I don't think that that's the way to which go. I think children are the
• 1:11:09
  victims, children who don't make it through the IVF process alive, which is about 97% of lab-made
• 1:11:15
  babies, children who are intentionally denied their mother or father. By children, you're talking
• 1:11:19
  about five day old blaster cysts. How would you define when does human life begin? What's the spectrum,
• 1:11:24
  I think? A spectrum? At what point? Nail it down. I can't. And we know that we can't because this
• 1:11:31
  debate has been raging for so long, and obviously both sides are quite strident about their own
• 1:11:36
  dogmas. So it's one of those things where, for me, it's obvious that there is no easy answer.
• 1:11:40
  There's no easy answer because an easy answer would actually mean that a lot of adults would not
• 1:11:45
  get what they want. It's complex. No, there's no easy answer, because if I present you with a
• 1:11:53
  blaster cyst, the size of a pinhead in a petri dish, and a crying baby one day before the nine
• 1:12:01
  month gestation period was up, who was born a day early, you do not relate morally the same way to
• 1:12:09
  both of those things. If I threaten to kill one or the other, you will have a preference, which
• 1:12:13
  means that you too agree that it is a spectrum. So biologically, those are both humans.
• 1:12:19
  And they're both members of the species, homo sapiens, I guess. They're both stages of human
• 1:12:23
  development. And embryologists, there really is not a whole lot of confusion among embryologists
• 1:12:28
  that life begins at fertilization. That is when a brand new human is created, the two chromosomes,
• 1:12:35
  slight mother and father's gametes form a brand new human human life begins. There's no place where
• 1:12:42
  you can then arbitrarily say that's not a life, but this is a life. You can look at different levels
• 1:12:47
  of dependence. You can look at person who developed, like so I'll grant you that you've got
• 1:12:54
  a living entity, but personhood is different from the living entity. And whether you claim to or
• 1:13:01
  not, you believe that as well, because if I threaten to kill the eight month and 30 day old baby
• 1:13:07
  or the blaster cyst, are you saying you'd have no preference? Well, I would do whatever I could
• 1:13:11
  rescue whatever child is immediately in front of me. That's for sure. So if you come,
• 1:13:15
  I'm going to kill one of them. Oh, yeah, well, I'll grab whatever I can. And yeah, I will grab
• 1:13:21
  the screaming baby. Yeah, but I don't think that that invalid is what I'm saying at all. And
• 1:13:25
  actually, it applies that you have, you give greater sort of life vitality and right to life
• 1:13:32
  to the older baby than you do to the. I don't know if it's right to life. I think it's like,
• 1:13:35
  what can I immediately do? Let's say it's slightly easier to, slightly easier to rescue the
• 1:13:40
  blaster cysts. Oh, I'll grab both of them. I'm like, so you can only grab one of them. So
• 1:13:46
  let me go back to this, what you're saying is okay. I'm gonna grant you the question. Oh,
• 1:13:49
  you're dodging the question. I want to go back to this. You're saying that they're humans,
• 1:13:53
  but they're not persons. Okay, so this is a really, this is actually, I mean, I'm saying not only
• 1:13:59
  do I believe that, but you believe that because you can't answer the question that I just asked.
• 1:14:03
  I said, I will get whatever kid that I can. I mean, I've lost friends over saying that
• 1:14:11
  I don't think that you should eliminate IVF babies. I mean, there is a cost for me to saying,
• 1:14:17
  I actually don't think that you, sweet Christian heterosexual couple, should be screening out the
• 1:14:21
  undesirables. I don't think you should be grading your embryos. I actually think all of those
• 1:14:25
  children are worthy of life. So I haven't had to do because I was trying to clarify for the
• 1:14:30
  listener because most people would be confused because you're using language in a funny way,
• 1:14:34
  that when you're saying children, you're talking about a five day old blastocyst that you can
• 1:14:38
  barely see with the naked eye. That's right. But if we agree that we're gonna call those children,
• 1:14:43
  then even though you won't admit that you would treat that ethically exactly the same way as you
• 1:14:49
  would another child, which implies to me that you agree that there's a spectrum of sort of rights
• 1:14:54
  and a spectrum of personhood throughout gestation, we can continue it. We can sort of put that
• 1:14:59
  to rest and you can continue to do that. So you are a blastocyst. When did you become a person?
• 1:15:03
  It's I said it's a spectrum. So it's a spectrum because that allows adults to do what they want to do.
• 1:15:09
  And I will say that the separation because there are things that a baby can feel that a
• 1:15:13
  blastocyst can't feel because there are ways things that a baby is operating on the
• 1:15:17
  blastocyst isn't. So once you have a certain amount of feeling, then it's a person.
• 1:15:22
  I mean, I think we all know, we all know intuitively that there is a difference between
• 1:15:28
  being a fully fledged human being who has, I mean, even between being a newborn baby and having
• 1:15:33
  the full rights of a human being. That's exactly so that's exactly right. There's a spectrum of
• 1:15:38
  dependence, of consciousness. But once you have the point where you're saying the humanity is
• 1:15:44
  separate from personhood, that is the recipe built that is the foundation for every genocide,
• 1:15:52
  every commodification, right? That is the metric that was used for the Holocaust,
• 1:15:57
  for justifying slavery, for justification, for genocide is when you separate human from person.
• 1:16:04
  And that is a power play on behalf of those that are in power that have volition, that have the
• 1:16:08
  ability. And I would say that's exactly what's going on in the world of reproductive technologies.
• 1:16:12
  Like and abortion that you would say, look, it might be human because you're a fool to deny that
• 1:16:18
  that is a member of the human species. It is really just the very, very beginning of a lot of
• 1:16:22
  different stages of human development. The only difference between you and a blastocyst is time.
• 1:16:27
  You also wear a blastocyst at one point. But if we can say, but they're not really human,
• 1:16:33
  but there really is a distinction, a moral distinction. Katie, here you are. That means that I can
• 1:16:38
  create 20 embryos and I can deselect the girls or the boys because I want a specific child.
• 1:16:44
  It means that I can go to this bougie fertility clinic in California where 90% of the clientele
• 1:16:49
  don't struggle with infertility. They simply want to select the eye color of their baby.
• 1:16:54
  And if embryos aren't children, then of course you can do whatever you want with them.
• 1:16:58
  So I just think that that's a problem. When you're acting like there's like nuance and we don't
• 1:17:02
  really know, we do know. But knowing and being morally consistent about that means that a lot of
• 1:17:07
  adults won't get what they want. Well, being morally consistent about it would mean that you have to
• 1:17:12
  save the blastocyst as much as the nine-month-old child, which you're not willing to do.
• 1:17:16
  Well, I'm willing to lose friends over talking about how I think IVF is...
• 1:17:22
  I mean, I admire your moral clarity and certainty and courage. I think we're getting a little
• 1:17:30
  bit confused, conflating natural rights with outcomes with a consequential or still utilitarian ethic
• 1:17:38
  because when you throw around things like the Holocaust or slavery or so on, many secular
• 1:17:44
  philosophers will have reasons for objecting to the Holocaust. And those will have to do with
• 1:17:49
  human well-being and human flourishing and pain and suffering. You're frowning at me as if this
• 1:17:54
  is used to you. No, I keep talking. I guess I would say that the objection to the Holocaust or the
• 1:18:02
  objection to slavery is we degraded and dehumanized an entire group of people, right? Yes.
• 1:18:09
  Okay. And why is that bad? Yes. Why is that bad? So you could have a sort of a religious kind of
• 1:18:19
  almost Kantian sort of attitude to it, which is like you're breaching certain rules and those are
• 1:18:23
  the rules of the cosmos and those are rules that are embedded in the very fabric of what it means to be
• 1:18:28
  human. And then a consequentialist or utilitarian could say rules aside, you're just causing a
• 1:18:33
  tremendous amount of pain for people and you're thwarting their ambitions. And I think what's
• 1:18:39
  happening here is that there's an you could imagine a consequentialist or utilitarian case against
• 1:18:47
  designer babies. We don't want to live in a society in which the rich tapestry of what it means to
• 1:18:54
  be human is flattened out for superficial reasons. This is a debate that's going on as I'm sure you're
• 1:19:00
  aware in some Scandinavian countries where the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become
• 1:19:05
  prevalent. You know, do you want to create a society in which there are no people with Down syndrome,
• 1:19:10
  right? The Danes are struggling with this because they may be about to create a society where
• 1:19:15
  there's no people with Down syndrome. Iceland bursts of it. Iceland has said, well, we've eliminated
• 1:19:19
  Down syndrome. You just killed all the people with Down syndrome. So you could make a case that
• 1:19:28
  like we don't want to go down, we don't want to start our way down the slippery slope of using
• 1:19:34
  trivial reasons to try to jury rig society and culture and humankind to make it look as
• 1:19:40
  blue-eyed and blonde-haired or, you know, athletic as we want it to be, that there's something that
• 1:19:46
  we lose about our own humanity when we embark down that path. And to me, that's a separate claim
• 1:19:52
  from the claim that the destruction of every blastocyst for any reason is wrong, which strikes me as a
• 1:19:59
  more frankly religious claim, which you're perfectly entitled to hold, but unless we live in a
• 1:20:05
  theocracy, you're not necessarily entitled to impose on everybody else. When is it okay to select
• 1:20:10
  which children are born? How do you do that? Because you're saying you're saying it shouldn't be
• 1:20:17
  elimination of Down syndrome babies. So why? Well, I'm not sure that I'm saying it. I honestly
• 1:20:22
  don't have an opinion about it. I mean, I don't know. I'm just saying that they're thorny moral
• 1:20:25
  problems that don't have the easy moral answer that I think you think they have. Well, again,
• 1:20:32
  I think that that, but we're not going to let it get that because you're religious. And so it's
• 1:20:37
  impervious to reason. You know, it's really interesting. Like I respect you. This whole conversation,
• 1:20:42
  have I raised any Bible verses or used any kind of religious? No, no, but I just happen to know
• 1:20:46
  that you're deeply religious. And so therefore, but you correct me if I'm wrong. I'm assuming that
• 1:20:49
  your belief in the sanctity of life from the moment of conception is a religiously derived belief.
• 1:20:54
  Well, I would say that it happens to also be reflected in scripture, but it's biologically based.
• 1:21:01
  So that's the incredible thing about the word of God. Is it reflects the world of God that you're
• 1:21:06
  not going to find a lot of inconsistencies between revealed truth and that what we call special
• 1:21:10
  revelation, what is revealed in scripture and general revelation, what you can see around you
• 1:21:15
  based on nature. And so I do think that it is not an accident that those of us who are arguing
• 1:21:22
  against designer babies, those of us who are arguing against abortion, also those of us that are
• 1:21:27
  arguing against things like doctor assisted suicide do happen to come from a religious world view
• 1:21:34
  that says that it's not about utility. It's not about convenience. It's not about what they can add
• 1:21:40
  to or detract from society that makes somebody worth defending or worth being born or worth
• 1:21:46
  preventing from doctor assisted death that there is an innate dignity that humans are made in
• 1:21:52
  the image of God that Imago Day is the thing that has been the precursor for any level of advancement
• 1:21:59
  of human rights. That's not an accident, but it's also reflected in the real life world that we do
• 1:22:04
  think that just because you're not as we don't believe in useless in useless eaters, right? We think
• 1:22:09
  that people are eaters and that even if you are somewhat disabled or old or in firm or very
• 1:22:15
  young, that it's our job to defend you because you're a part of the human species and you are made
• 1:22:20
  in the image of God, black or white or young or old or able or disabled. I can make this case
• 1:22:27
  without appealing to scripture. The fact that scripture best reflects the principles that lead
• 1:22:33
  to human flourishing just makes me love God more. Got it. Coming back to children, I also understand
• 1:22:42
  I do appreciate the fundamental question that you're pushing for is in the
• 1:22:49
  balance of who we give standing to and deciding on who's well-being we ought to prioritize,
• 1:22:58
  that we've gotten a bit too skewed towards grown-ups. The children, as you say, they can't file
• 1:23:04
  amicus briefs, they can't come on podcasts. There is a tendency for us to give credence to our
• 1:23:10
  own preferences and try to write or universalize them and we would probably be better off if we
• 1:23:16
  tipped the balance a little bit back towards what are in the interests of the children versus
• 1:23:20
  what are in the interests of parents. I would also say that in the same way that I said that
• 1:23:26
  in the first decade or two of this century, it's likely that the push for gay rights steam
• 1:23:31
  rolled some concerns for children. We've lately seen a flowering, shall we say, or a kind of
• 1:23:39
  explosion of fairly heedless gender craziness, sensoriousness around biology and I'm sure this
• 1:23:48
  is feeding partly into your sense of mission about this, this sense that culture is there's a big
• 1:23:54
  push from the LGBTQIA plus kind of universe and from academia to kind of heedlessly just sort of
• 1:24:04
  complicate what it means to raise children, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a
• 1:24:10
  woman, what it means to be a sexual being, what it means to have responsibility, what it means,
• 1:24:16
  what the role of the family and the state and the church ought to be and we ought to pay a little
• 1:24:22
  bit more, we ought to be a little bit more mindful of the impact that that could have on children.
• 1:24:28
  Where it comes, what it comes down to fundamentally is how we balancing the harms and how we
• 1:24:37
  balancing the upsides. Children are not going to remain children forever, they're going to grow up
• 1:24:42
  into adults, some of them will be gay, some of them will want to start families, some of them will
• 1:24:48
  be infertile, some of them will want to access IVF, right? How do you think about that trade-off?
• 1:24:57
  Yep, it's a trade-off. Somebody is going to do the hard thing, right? In all of those scenarios,
• 1:25:03
  somebody will do the hard thing. So with the 16-year-old having sex in the back of the car,
• 1:25:10
  you know, the oopsie pregnancy or whatever, and then, you know, someone's going to do the hard
• 1:25:14
  thing. So what happens in that scenario? Does the child lose their life? Because the adults
• 1:25:21
  participated in a baby-making activity but weren't ready to have a baby. What are the options there?
• 1:25:27
  Either that 16-year-old and the 18-year-old guy reorient their life around each other and around
• 1:25:34
  the baby, they do the hard thing or the baby does the hard thing by dying or by losing a relationship
• 1:25:42
  with their mother and father and being relinquished for adoption, which obviously is the lesser of those
• 1:25:46
  two options, but still involves loss for the child. Well, maybe the lesser of the three options,
• 1:25:52
  depending on how badly the 16-year-old and the 18-year-old are, it do as parents.
• 1:25:56
  Well, and that's why I said reorient their lives. It would be a reorientation. You would have to
• 1:26:01
  learn to prioritize one another and the child. Your confident that everyone will do that at such
• 1:26:06
  a large scale that that will be the better of the three options. Not necessarily confident it would
• 1:26:11
  happen at an individual level, but generally throughout history, there have been plenty of people
• 1:26:16
  who have gotten married as teenagers or young adults and raised great kids, because obviously
• 1:26:22
  it is the commitment to one another and to become adults. Well, I mean, when it does work,
• 1:26:28
  it's usually because there's a village. It's usually because there's an extended family,
• 1:26:31
  because the grandparents cheap and because, you know, coming back to the nuclear family question,
• 1:26:36
  it's usually because there's an extended family who will chip in and help. But just to be clear,
• 1:26:40
  there's no extended family without the nuclear family. A lot of people say, oh, nuclear family,
• 1:26:44
  that's a 1950s US invention. No, nuclear just means sort of the irreducible, like the smallest
• 1:26:50
  unit, right? But obviously you want a nuclear family surrounded by other aspects of the nuclear
• 1:26:55
  family, the aunts, uncles, grandparents, 100% absolutely agree with that. Love it. But in that
• 1:27:00
  scenario, you've got, you're kind of saying like you've got adults that have grown up who had an
• 1:27:04
  unplanned pregnancy. So what are you going to do? My answer is the adult sacrifice for the child.
• 1:27:09
  Let's talk about the world that I'm in, you know, lots of Christian married, heterosexual couples,
• 1:27:18
  marriage is hard. And you get to a point, you know, where you're seven years in or 12 years in,
• 1:27:23
  and you hit those rocky years. And sometimes there's a really big problem, you know,
• 1:27:27
  sometimes he's addicted to porn or maybe sometimes she's reliving, you know, unearthing some
• 1:27:32
  childhood issues and makes her completely unavailable as a mother or a wife for a couple of years.
• 1:27:37
  I mean, like these are not small problems that adults are dealing with. So what do you do?
• 1:27:42
  Well, someone's going to sacrifice. Either it will be the adults who go to therapy and have
• 1:27:46
  accountability and work it through or grow and mature or it will be the kids. The kids where,
• 1:27:52
  you know, one of them says, you know, I'm out. I've just, I've done this too much or
• 1:27:55
  you need to be my true self or, you know, I need to finally do, you know, put me first. I mean,
• 1:27:59
  like go to Instagram, you'll see like thousands of reals of women who are like, even though there
• 1:28:03
  wasn't abuse or anything, I just felt so shackled, but like screw you. Okay. And so someone's going
• 1:28:09
  to do the hard thing. It will be the adults or it will be the child. Those kids grow up and they
• 1:28:15
  have same sex attraction or they identify as gay and they would be incredible fathers. I bet you and
• 1:28:20
  your husband are great fathers. And so there's a choice to be made. Do we form a family where our
• 1:28:27
  children lose a mother or two or three so that we can have the family that reflects our romantic
• 1:28:33
  attractions or if I desire to become a father or mother, do I create a family where their child
• 1:28:39
  doesn't have to lose anything to be in that family? Who is going to do the hard thing? Which is what?
• 1:28:45
  Which is marrying a woman. Yep. Or not having kids. Like why should the child, why should the child
• 1:28:52
  think that a gay, you think that when gay guys say in the 50s had to marry women and have a family
• 1:29:00
  that those loveless marriages with a contorted and dysfunctional psyche in the role of the patriarchy.
• 1:29:08
  Many of whom had to go off on the side into filthy and potentially dangerous sexually transmitted
• 1:29:14
  you know, environments in order to cheat on their wives. Their wives who didn't understand
• 1:29:18
  why their husband was so distant or maybe they did on some level understand it.
• 1:29:22
  They had to keep it hidden from their own souls. These tight-lipped, tight-assed 1950s households
• 1:29:30
  where closeted men had to eke out an existence that that was better for those children
• 1:29:35
  than the children would be today in a loving, same-sex household.
• 1:29:40
  So I sympathize with a lot of my friends and family that identify as LGBT,
• 1:29:46
  LGBT, no a few tea, mostly LGBT. And I do think that they've personally suffered in a lot of ways
• 1:29:54
  and the ones that are willing to share their story with me. They've really had some a lot of personal
• 1:29:59
  personal... These are gay people who've chosen to be in heterosexual relationships.
• 1:30:03
  I know a couple of them, but most of the ones that I'm talking about haven't. They're not
• 1:30:07
  necessarily married or have children, but they've really endured some pretty significant
• 1:30:10
  personal challenges. The solution is not to make a motherless or fatherless child.
• 1:30:16
  Whatever it is that you've struggled with, I hope that if you identify as gay or you have same
• 1:30:21
  sex attractor, however you want to label yourself or identify yourself, I hope you have wonderful
• 1:30:25
  people in your life that are offering you community and friendship and bearing your burdens.
• 1:30:30
  But the solution for somebody who experienced the same sex attraction is not to create a child
• 1:30:36
  who has to lose a relationship with their mother or father. So, again, here we have.
• 1:30:40
  Who is going to do the hard thing? Who is going to do the hard thing?
• 1:30:41
  Who is going to do the hard thing? Who is going to do the hard thing?
• 1:30:43
  So, you see a sunny picture of a same sex couple with their children and so on,
• 1:30:49
  and what is hiding behind that from your perspective is the absent mother or the absent father
• 1:30:56
  in the case of a lesbian couple. By definition. The child has lost a biological parent.
• 1:31:03
  Pull a full or partial relationship. They do not have their own mother and father in their home
• 1:31:08
  every day, 100% of the time, which like from a child development standpoint is sort of the
• 1:31:14
  social emotional staples. Like mothers love fathers love instability. Those are kind of the
• 1:31:18
  social emotional staples of child development from a development perspective. Leave aside the
• 1:31:24
  conveyor. There are masculine ways of fathering and feminine ways of parenting that don't
• 1:31:28
  necessarily need to be embodied, I don't think, in the biology of a biological mother or a biological
• 1:31:33
  father. I think we can follow that rabbit hole down for another day. The point that I'm making
• 1:31:39
  is to give you some credit for noting that like, yeah, okay, sunny lesbian family, lesbian couple,
• 1:31:46
  they've got their kids. What we're not seeing in that picture is that a father, a biological
• 1:31:50
  father has been erased from that picture. And so, to some extent, you could say those children
• 1:31:57
  have lost a parent. Those children have lost a parent. Sounds very emotionally evocative.
• 1:32:03
  To me, it's a bit like saying we all know that like, so you might say the worst thing,
• 1:32:11
  we all know intuitively that it's really terrible to lose a parent, but we're hiding that fact
• 1:32:15
  when we're talking about same sex parents. That's a bit like saying we all know intuitively that
• 1:32:21
  when a hurricane or a wildfire rips through a community, it's terrible to lose a house
• 1:32:27
  that you've lived in for decades. And yet nowadays, thanks to modern society, people just buy
• 1:32:35
  houses off a plan and then they flip them and they sell them and they have no sort of emotional
• 1:32:42
  connection to their house. Like, haven't we all know fundamentally how terrible it is to lose
• 1:32:48
  the house that you've lived in or your life to a wildfire and yet now people are just going around
• 1:32:52
  buying houses off a plan and flipping them. Well, yeah, but what's meaningful about the
• 1:32:59
  house is the fact that you built a relationship with that house. What's meaningful about a parent
• 1:33:04
  is that you built a relationship with that parent. What's meaningful about the house is that it
• 1:33:08
  contains all of the things that you love. What's meaningful about your relationship to a parent,
• 1:33:13
  which makes the loss of a parent so devastating, is the accumulated history that you have with them,
• 1:33:18
  the connections that you have with them. As I say, three seconds ago, we've been able to
• 1:33:24
  technologically and culturally isolate the biological link and sort of transplant it into a new
• 1:33:30
  family structure. And I think what you're doing is you're carrying along all of the negative
• 1:33:38
  connotations of losing the house that you've spent your life building in a wildfire
• 1:33:44
  and you're claiming that the person who buys a house off a plan and flips it
• 1:33:48
  is inflicting that same level of damage. And it's just not true. We're just talking about different
• 1:33:53
  phenomena. I think you're exactly right that the connections that we have with the people that
• 1:33:59
  raise us, the bonds, the memories, the relationships, that daily interaction is really meaningful
• 1:34:07
  and it's really, really important. And that is a huge aspect of what it means to be a parent.
• 1:34:14
  But if you want to exclude the biological aspect, I think that you're doing that. I mean, to me,
• 1:34:20
  that's a religious argument. I'm not making the religious argument. I'm making a argument that is
• 1:34:25
  consistent not just with the human body, not just with how families have always been made, not just
• 1:34:31
  with the decades of social science research. I'm like, I'm making the argument again.
• 1:34:35
  The decades of social science research relate to how painful it is to lose a house that you've
• 1:34:41
  lived in all your life, not to how painful it is to buy a house off the plan. The decades of
• 1:34:45
  social science research, in other words, are about the bad impact on kids for losing a parent who
• 1:34:51
  they love, for having a step, but abusive step parent for living in a dysfunctional family.
• 1:34:58
  So all of the data that we talked about earlier, which have to do with your situations in which
• 1:35:04
  a stable, loving, well-off couple choose to bring life into the world in the context of a
• 1:35:10
  broad loving, both nuclear family and extended family, especially in cases where the children
• 1:35:15
  know the birth mother or know, you know, have some relationship to their genetic lineage,
• 1:35:21
  that those social studies all don't prove, don't prove what you say that what you're claiming.
• 1:35:27
  So there's, so again, there's very few reliable studies on children created,
• 1:35:35
  children raised in same-sex-headed households, like they're very fused. I'm not saying
• 1:35:39
  red about a dozen of them. You read a dozen that used really poor methodologies that seem to be
• 1:35:44
  rushed to production to advance a political cause. There are so many of them, some many of them
• 1:35:49
  are good, including the Dutch one. A handful of them are good, and then you have to compare them
• 1:35:54
  against the decades that show that mothers and fathers offer distinct and complementary
• 1:35:59
  benefits that unrelated adults generally do not bring the same level of of advantage to children.
• 1:36:04
  So that's because most of the unrelated adults in those studies are not committed, same-sex
• 1:36:09
  parents or committed parents who brought the children into existence. If you include all of the
• 1:36:14
  people, all of the infertile couples who've had an egg donor, but in every other respect the
• 1:36:19
  family is the same, then all of those differences go away. They don't. I mentioned the largest sperm donor
• 1:36:26
  study that we have that did use robust methodologies that did compare sperm donor children
• 1:36:32
  who were very often raised, 100% of cases, raised by biological mothers. So we don't end up
• 1:36:36
  going around and searching for data. Let me grant you what I don't believe is true, that it's worse
• 1:36:42
  for kids to be in families that don't have a biological mother and a biological father, even if
• 1:36:48
  you were just for all of the other factors, right? So let's forget about the cohorts of families
• 1:36:52
  from kids from broken homes and so on. Is it also the case that it's bad for children to grow up in
• 1:36:59
  poverty? So there's all different kinds of traumas and disadvantages that children can face.
• 1:37:07
  Poverty is one of them certainly abuse. So should we have a means testing for children? I don't
• 1:37:13
  understand why this particular metric of well-being is the one that you're a dog with a bone.
• 1:37:21
  There are so many ways for children to flourish or not flourish. And interestingly,
• 1:37:25
  most of those ways of flourishing are connected to family structure. That if you want to exempt
• 1:37:29
  children from poverty, you will in whatever case you can unite them to their own mother and father
• 1:37:36
  married together for life. But should we exempt children from a variety of... Should we oppose
• 1:37:40
  grindingly pool of people from having kids? I think that there's a difference between
• 1:37:44
  permitting and promoting, right? You can permit adults to make all different kinds of decisions.
• 1:37:48
  And we have mechanisms to remove children from situations of significant abuse or neglect
• 1:37:53
  those scenarios and those systems need to be... Obviously, I have a lot of struggles to them,
• 1:38:01
  but that is the kind of complexity when you're seeking to strip children of their mother or father.
• 1:38:05
  It should be... It actually should be hard to separate children from their biological mother
• 1:38:09
  and father. It should be hard to reattach them to biological strangers. That's what CPS in the
• 1:38:13
  United States really has to wrestle through. It should be hard for a reason. Reproductive
• 1:38:17
  technologies makes it easy to cut and paste children into any and every adult relationship,
• 1:38:21
  even if the parents aren't vetted, even if there's no genetic relationship. A poor dysfunctional
• 1:38:27
  couple who are just struggling to make ends meet are much more likely to bring life into this world.
• 1:38:35
  By having sex than they are by going through IVF. We know that there are ACEs at first childhood
• 1:38:42
  experiences, a variety of different things that actually can impact children, affect their psyche
• 1:38:47
  for life, and it's things like having a mentally ill parent or seeing a domestic violence situation
• 1:38:53
  or having a parent that's incarcerated. All of those different eight divorce is also an ace,
• 1:38:58
  right? Like what you're saying, the house that has burned down and you've built all these
• 1:39:01
  memories in it. But interestingly, the best system that humans have found across religions,
• 1:39:08
  across eras, is a child raised by their own married biological mother and father seems to be
• 1:39:14
  the best vehicle so far that we've discovered as a species to exempt children from a lot of the
• 1:39:19
  other kinds of harms, poverty, abuse, things like that that human children have always been vulnerable
• 1:39:24
  to. So I concede that there are other really major issues that children can face. But I feel like
• 1:39:30
  it's a bit of a red herringtization. We focus on that without focusing on the vehicle that tends to
• 1:39:35
  deliver children away from a lot of those social ills because it does. Yes, but we've got an alternative
• 1:39:41
  model of the vehicle contains a lot of parts, right? The loving structure, stability,
• 1:39:48
  care for the children, you know, that may be the different dynamics between a maternal instinct
• 1:39:53
  and a paternal instinct. I'll grant you that. There are lots of things that are good about a
• 1:39:58
  nuclear family. And you're saying that traditionally that has been proven to, you know, enhance
• 1:40:05
  the wellbeing of kids, which I agree with. And it's probably why, you know, we still retain
• 1:40:10
  the structure of a two-person household, even in same-sex partnerships. We've only just, again,
• 1:40:20
  three seconds ago, created the cultural and legal and technological ability to take that nuclear
• 1:40:27
  family and replicate it whilst tweaking just one of those variables, which is the sex of the
• 1:40:34
  parents. It's a massive experiment. And so far, and so far so good, according to the studies,
• 1:40:40
  right? Except for the two random ones that you've cited that my research did not bring up,
• 1:40:46
  but I'll look into it, but I would be surprised if they were perfectly impartial. So I mean, you've
• 1:40:49
  got the, you know, we are doing an experiment. You're right. And we should be cautious. I think
• 1:40:56
  you're right to say, like, let's not, let's just be careful about what we're doing here. Let's not
• 1:41:01
  assume that our right to our own self-fulfillment, you know, and to have children trumps the wellbeing
• 1:41:08
  of the kids. But in order to argue for a radical inhibition or prohibition on the ability of
• 1:41:18
  consenting adults to construct a family, you would also need to show significant downsides
• 1:41:24
  for the children, or really any downsides for the children. It's the lack of those downsides that
• 1:41:29
  I find unpersuasive. There are many downsides. We've discussed some of them. But they all apply to
• 1:41:37
  non-relevant scenarios. No, the identity struggles, the intentional and commercial separation of
• 1:41:43
  children from one or both genetic parents, overwhelmingly harms children. I mean, this is, it literally
• 1:41:49
  flies in the face of all of the adoption best practice that we have developed over a couple
• 1:41:54
  different decades and getting to the point where we want to make sure that children have a
• 1:41:59
  relationship with or biological knowledge of their parents and as much contact as possible as
• 1:42:04
  it's safe for the children. It flies in the face of what we know that children benefit from a female
• 1:42:09
  parent and a male parent that men do not mother and women do not father and kids. We can grant
• 1:42:15
  all of this and we can also say that it's better for children not to grow up in poor households.
• 1:42:19
  So why aren't we banging on about how poor people shouldn't have children?
• 1:42:23
  We are banging on about how if we want to create a thriving society, we do need parents who are
• 1:42:29
  committed and married to one another because that is the best anti-poverty weapon. So in the United
• 1:42:34
  States, we have, well, I mean, you could also just stop poor people from having kids.
• 1:42:38
  Well, so now you're getting to the point where we're saying, look, the solution to poverty,
• 1:42:43
  it's actually, there's something called the success sequence and it's very well-known and it is
• 1:42:50
  that if you want to not live in poverty, you have to do three things. Graduate from high school,
• 1:42:54
  get married and then have children. If you do it in that order, 93% of adults will not live in
• 1:43:01
  poverty and by extension their children will not live in poverty. You get that out of order and
• 1:43:05
  you're going to have poverty cases. I mean, we're talking about norms here, right? The norm is,
• 1:43:09
  the norm is 93% of people and their children will not live in poverty. So the norm is that most
• 1:43:15
  people who have a child at the age of 16 when they're in poverty are not going to do those things.
• 1:43:20
  Right, because they have not followed the sequence. So we need to be clear that there is a sequence,
• 1:43:25
  that you're not a victim. You do not have to live in poverty. You do not have to have children
• 1:43:29
  who live in poverty. You have a listen. You have agency. There are choices that you can make to
• 1:43:34
  make sure that neither you nor your children are going to live in poverty. But what does it take?
• 1:43:38
  There are choices that gay people can make to ensure that their children are well.
• 1:43:42
  There are choices that give you. You're arguing for an absolute position on one and a flexible
• 1:43:48
  position on the other. There are groups of people who are in your world view,
• 1:43:53
  inimical to the well-being of children. One of those groups might be gay parents. Another
• 1:43:57
  might be poor parents. In the case of gay parents, you say we should just prevent them from having
• 1:44:02
  kids altogether. I'm not preventing you from having children. Your body is
• 1:44:07
  preventing you from having children. You're preventing it. Yes, you are preventing
• 1:44:11
  from having children, because I have to avail myself of technologies that need to be legal in
• 1:44:15
  order for it to happen. But you're saying that we should allow with poor people. Well,
• 1:44:20
  it's complicated. They should follow a three-step program. It's not complicated. I just said
• 1:44:23
  there's a sequence. Why not just ban them from having kids? Well, first of all, because
• 1:44:28
  if you're in the business of banning people from starting families, then why are you being
• 1:44:32
  selective about gay people? I'm not banning. So I'm not banning you from having children.
• 1:44:37
  Your choices and your body has made it difficult for you to have a family. That's
• 1:44:42
  trivially true. Like, I have a family that I wouldn't be able to have in your regime.
• 1:44:48
  I think that children's right to their mother and father should be respected,
• 1:44:51
  and you guys bypassed that right. You're working outside of the system that your body has set up.
• 1:44:58
  But does it have a right to three meals a day and to a loving family?
• 1:45:04
  So the good news is if they are statistically, if they are raised by their own mother and father,
• 1:45:08
  they are much more likely to get three meals a day. When I talk about likelihood, we're talking
• 1:45:11
  about like absolute rules. We're talking about who's allowed to do that. Then the absolute
• 1:45:15
  rule is you and your husband shouldn't have children. That's the absolute rule. Good. And then
• 1:45:19
  the absolute rule should also be that if a poor family can't provide three meals a day and a
• 1:45:23
  loving environment, they shouldn't be allowed to have children either. Well, the amazing thing is
• 1:45:27
  that we've had an awful lot of children created in my husband and I lived in poverty, very close
• 1:45:32
  to the poverty line for a long time. Poverty can be an ace, but it is not necessarily an ace.
• 1:45:38
  It is not necessarily the case that a gay family can't raise well-adjusted kids. We're not
• 1:45:43
  talking about probabilities. We're talking about what is permissible. And if a moral principle is
• 1:45:47
  that children have to be raised by loving parents who can feed them three meals a day and give them
• 1:45:54
  support and raise them just as well-adjust as anybody else. Then buy and sell kids on the open
• 1:45:59
  market. When we see families who are obviously incapable of doing that because they're
• 1:46:03
  grindingly poor, why don't we prevent them from having children? We tend to remove them. If
• 1:46:07
  they're grindingly poor and it's leading to abuse and neglect, we remove them. And we should remove
• 1:46:11
  them. We do remove them very often. But your one is saying all about how important it is for a
• 1:46:16
  child to be with their biological parents. That's why it should be very difficult, why it is very
• 1:46:21
  difficult to remove the child from their biological mother or father because it's very hard to find
• 1:46:25
  another scenario and another couple that is going to be able to replicate statistically the
• 1:46:30
  level of benefit. Now we're talking about exceptions. There are exceptions. You have to address
• 1:46:33
  the exceptions. And let me say, I'm not saying that you guys are not loving your children.
• 1:46:38
  I'm sure you guys are. I mean, from all that I've read, quickly, before you know in the last 24
• 1:46:45
  hours when I knew that we were doing this, your children are beautiful. And it looks like you guys
• 1:46:49
  are very invested in them, very committed to loving them. You just want to create a world in which
• 1:46:55
  it's not possible. I want to create a world where they don't have to lose their mother to come
• 1:46:59
  into existence. And to me, that is not the fanatical perspective. The fanatical perspective seems
• 1:47:05
  to be that we are going to be able to buck everything that every society all throughout history
• 1:47:09
  and our own bodies lead us to conclude. To me, I'm just arguing for the common sense position.
• 1:47:16
  To me, the world that says that two men can manufacture a child through commercial processes,
• 1:47:20
  what is very often commercial processes, intentionally deny children a relationship with their
• 1:47:25
  mother. To me, that's a religious and ideological perspective, not mine. Mine is just the biological
• 1:47:30
  perspective. So I think what happens is, and this comes back to what I was saying earlier about,
• 1:47:38
  like there is no universe in which my children were raised by their biological mother. So the
• 1:47:45
  alternative is they don't exist, right? And I take your point that it would be extremely unproductive
• 1:47:51
  to tell a child, well, you should be grateful for what you're just existing, right? I mean,
• 1:47:55
  that's not very tactful. And it shouldn't be a rationale either. You shouldn't bring a life
• 1:47:59
  into a bad situation, a situation that you know is going to be terrible for them, just so that you
• 1:48:04
  can then retroactively say, well, if it wasn't for me, you wouldn't exist. I mean, that's almost
• 1:48:08
  like the logic of a factory farm or something, right? Well, we can mistreat the animals because
• 1:48:12
  if it wasn't for us, they wouldn't exist in the first place. It's not very compelling. But I do
• 1:48:16
  think what's happening is you've got your platonic ideal of a family. I have this, I have an
• 1:48:22
  ideal that's based on how children come to be. I don't think so. I don't think it's just that.
• 1:48:27
  I think you've got an ideal about a family. And if this is not a bad thing, we should all have
• 1:48:32
  ideals of things. We should have aspirational idealistic visions of what we're aspiring towards
• 1:48:39
  and what we will always fall short from. As a Christian, you know this. I mean, this is the one
• 1:48:43
  of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is that we are fallen and, you know, we have to
• 1:48:48
  pay penance to some extent for our sins and seek forgiveness for them. Thankfully, I don't have to.
• 1:48:54
  Somebody did it for me. So there's a, well, there you go, exactly. But that's the crucial part,
• 1:48:59
  right? I mean, you know, without his, without his having done that, the whole edifice of Christianity,
• 1:49:04
  as it doesn't exist. So, ideal family, mother, father, they're loving, they love each other.
• 1:49:12
  The children are happy. The children, no one is suffering from disabilities. The father is not
• 1:49:17
  an alcoholic. The mother isn't popping pills. They have a stable community. They live in a culture
• 1:49:24
  that is thriving and flourishing and non-discriminatory and non-pregudicial and that is supportive
• 1:49:30
  and communal, right? There's this family. And I understand that what's happened over the past
• 1:49:38
  few decades with the rise of workness and perhaps extreme gender, let's say, playfulness to be
• 1:49:45
  charitable to it or gender, you know, disruption, is that there's been an attack on that as an ideal.
• 1:49:52
  That that ideal has come under fire from an extreme secular left. And my suspicion is
• 1:50:02
  that you are justifiably as a Christian conservative, motivated to oppose this attack on, as you say,
• 1:50:12
  the most fundamental and useful unit that has ever been devised in culture, which is the loving
• 1:50:19
  family. And losing a parent is terrible. We've made it much, much, much, much less terrible.
• 1:50:32
  There are all kinds of ways in which real life families fall short of the ideal of the family.
• 1:50:38
  One of them might be going through mental health problems. Their marriage might be
• 1:50:44
  really, really full of animosity that is rubbing off on the kids. They might be arguing all the time.
• 1:50:48
  They might be encountering financial problems. They might lose their home. And there are all
• 1:50:53
  kinds of different ways in which that in which families can fail to live up to our expectation of
• 1:50:58
  an ideal family. But your antipathy to wokeness may be coupled with your religiosity is driving you
• 1:51:05
  to focus on one particular way in which families can fall short, which to me seems to be an undue
• 1:51:14
  focus, given how flourishing and thriving families like my own can be. And you seem to have a lot
• 1:51:21
  of blind spots toward the other ways in which families fall short. And the only example of a modern
• 1:51:26
  incarnation of a fallen family that you're focusing on and comparing to the ideal is mine.
• 1:51:33
  Except that I rail on an awful lot about IVF and how we are screening children out of existence
• 1:51:39
  through IVF. And how I think that it's unacceptable for heterosexuals to use sperm and egg donors as
• 1:51:45
  well. And how we talk about I have an entire chapter in my first book about divorce and the harms
• 1:51:50
  of divorce and how divorce is the thing that kicked off the the waves and waves and waves of trauma
• 1:51:56
  that children experience, especially through the 80s and 90s. And that I also harp on an awful lot
• 1:52:01
  about polygamy as well. And that I'm very critical about how even the pro-life world talks about
• 1:52:07
  adoption. How adoption is not the fix for unplanned pregnancy parenting is. And that adoption is not
• 1:52:14
  an infertile couple's solution to having children. Adoption should be child-centric and it's not
• 1:52:19
  about adults. So you and I are talking a lot about gay parenting and things like that obviously
• 1:52:24
  because this is kind of where it intersects with your world. But I really am an equal opportunity
• 1:52:31
  defender. I really will critique any adult who is asking a child to sacrifice their right to life
• 1:52:39
  or their right to their mother and father. I mean I do all kinds of Instagram reels about
• 1:52:44
  the divorce industry of these all these female influencers who are talking about how your kids
• 1:52:49
  are going to be fine. If you leave their father and go because you're the real guy who really
• 1:52:54
  understands you, he's out there and now you're going to be free and you know what's nice is
• 1:52:57
  then you can have three days to yourself and you can have get all your reading done and you can
• 1:53:01
  do travel and your husband's watching the kids but you don't have as much housework to do. So
• 1:53:07
  I understand why you're characterizing it this way but it's not accurate. If you go to my
• 1:53:11
  Twitter you'll see that I actually offend everybody or critique all of that. Let me then remove
• 1:53:16
  the component of being selective about gay people and just leave in the component about being
• 1:53:22
  selective then about I suppose the artificial creation of children and this focus specifically
• 1:53:30
  on the biological link with biological parents. I still think that's an undue focus given all of
• 1:53:35
  the constellation of other things that can go wrong with a family and I think one of the missing
• 1:53:42
  jigsaw pieces is that as I said children I can remain children forever. One of the things that
• 1:53:47
  creates a flourishing family like one of the things that we would want out of this platonic
• 1:53:51
  ideal of a family would be a community that is nondiscriminatory and thriving where adults are
• 1:53:57
  well adjusted and oh you totally want well adjusted adults that's true and I'm not sure that a
• 1:54:02
  vision of the world in which gay people's aspirations are thwarted or they're in loveless
• 1:54:08
  straight marriages in which people who are infertile and can't avail themselves of reproductive
• 1:54:14
  technologies in which all of those people are living lives of quiet desperation is like do you
• 1:54:21
  factor that in at all does that count at all in your thinking about the relative
• 1:54:26
  upsides or downsides of the world into which you're bringing a child I'm really really empathetic
• 1:54:30
  for people that wish they could have a baby and can't but does it have an impact on children
• 1:54:34
  for those children to be surrounded by a large cohort of adults aunts and uncles and so on
• 1:54:40
  who will feel that way so the interesting thing is the adults are choosing loss for children
• 1:54:46
  I don't think they're choosing what for children loss their children they're choosing loss for
• 1:54:51
  children the heterosexual couple that wants to have a baby that is going to create 15 embryos but only
• 1:54:55
  in plant 2 and the other 13 are going to be donated to research or thought or you know frozen and
• 1:55:00
  then thought and discarded as medical waste I whatever experience you're having whatever feelings
• 1:55:06
  you're having or desires or longings or losses I don't think you should make kids sacrifice for
• 1:55:10
  you I don't think any adult should force children to sacrifice for the sake of their mental or
• 1:55:15
  emotional so I think you're yes all right so if you bring into the into the moral equation the
• 1:55:19
  well-being of the blastocyst who are going to get flushed down the toilet because through the IVF
• 1:55:23
  process then I can see what you're saying that you would rather have a world in which a significant
• 1:55:28
  minority of adults are thwarted in their aspirations and society is more judgmental more prejudicial
• 1:55:35
  more discriminatory in order to save the lives of the blastocysts but if you're only focusing on
• 1:55:41
  let's suppose that you grant me the secular version of who should be in our sphere of moral concern
• 1:55:46
  and we're only talking about real living children who are outside the womb and who are living
• 1:55:51
  conscious lives do you think that the world is still better for them to be in an environment in which
• 1:55:57
  all of those adults are thwarted I think that the worldview that says I decide whether children
• 1:56:03
  live or die come into existence have their mother or father in their lives that mentality of children
• 1:56:09
  exist for me I don't think that that's good for adults or children and that really is what's
• 1:56:13
  going on both in the world of adoption I'm sorry in the world of abortion in the world of IVF
• 1:56:18
  in the world of creating intentional intentional homes where you're separating children from
• 1:56:21
  their mother or father it is this mentality of the kids exist for me and I don't think that that's
• 1:56:27
  just um ultimately it might meet the adults immediate needs but it's at the expense of fundamental
• 1:56:33
  child rights I mean I would not I would not support it either if I thought that were true if I
• 1:56:36
  thought that it would only met adults needs and it was inimical to the well-being of children
• 1:56:41
  can we talk about discrimination because you kind of threw that in there like yeah if I get what I
• 1:56:45
  want it's a discriminatory um world and I just think that it's interesting that a lot of the
• 1:56:51
  different advancements of adult so-called equality results in child inequality that if an adult
• 1:56:59
  is going to have the equality that they want or that they desire in marriage or parenthood
• 1:57:03
  it results in child inequality that children are going to lose something that they have a right
• 1:57:09
  to their mother or father so that adults can have what they want and so there again I think you
• 1:57:14
  see the choice the trade-off who is going to be put first is it going to be them or is it going
• 1:57:19
  to be us and I'm not saying it's a small thing for a gay couple or an infertile couple or a
• 1:57:24
  struggling marital couple um to put them before us we're talking about some of the biggest things
• 1:57:31
  that adults are going to deal with I just don't think that it means that children should struggle
• 1:57:34
  so we don't have to not away if it were true that children were struggling as a result specifically
• 1:57:40
  of the things that we're talking about and not extraneous things that have traditionally been
• 1:57:45
  associated with them um lastly so in the future is there what's your sort of ideal outcome and would
• 1:57:52
  there be any data that would persuade you otherwise or is this a belief that's impervious to
• 1:58:01
  so so far the data um is pretty well aligned with biological reality um and the data that um
• 1:58:10
  supposedly shows no differences in children I mean really like your audience can go a little
• 1:58:14
  just hypothetically well let's not rehash the data that we've been talking about yeah hypothetically
• 1:58:18
  if it you know if it came out that there were studies that that show I don't think because my
• 1:58:22
  suspicion is that you wouldn't be swayed either way that this is not a argument based on facts on
• 1:58:27
  the ground but it's a principle for you it's a moral it's a moral principle well this position
• 1:58:31
  that you can create children that are intentionally missing their mother or father like you said
• 1:58:36
  arrived in the last five seconds of history um and so what we're talking about is something that
• 1:58:42
  re-oriented all of the data the common sense the biological realities of like the the mother's
• 1:58:48
  body in relation to infants both in utero and after the baby is born what you're talking about is
• 1:58:53
  data that aligns with uh an understanding of the human person that rejects biology biological
• 1:59:00
  reality now we are moving towards a place where we're going to be able to have things like artificial
• 1:59:05
  wounds um and create children in mass we are looking at things like uh in vitro gemito genesis where
• 1:59:12
  you can create egg cells from a man's skin or saliva and you can have two adults that are biologically
• 1:59:20
  related you can have a man who's both the mother and the father of the child I mean we're we're moving
• 1:59:24
  into we're really overhauling the nature of humanity and the nature of what it means to be a child
• 1:59:30
  in a variety of different ways we've started down that route with IVF and surrogacy it's going to
• 1:59:34
  continue to go um what is the data going to say about that well I mean those are all scary things
• 1:59:41
  and there are good reasons for secular people to be worried about some of those incarnations as well
• 1:59:46
  I'm just saying let's suppose hypothetically that it came out that actually what is the most
• 1:59:52
  salient metric for a child is that they have a stable household two loving parents of either uh
• 1:59:57
  of either sex and that we see consistently over time and studies whose methodology you support
• 2:00:03
  that's superior then but you still wouldn't back it well let's say that that was the case it's
• 2:00:09
  interesting you know one of the things that I do is catalog the stories of children in a variety
• 2:00:13
  of different family structures many of them have LGBT parents or same sex parents some of them feel
• 2:00:18
  like I was connected to both of my mothers um but it's interesting because a lot of those kids many
• 2:00:24
  of those kids will say even though my needs were met and it was loving and I was raised in a
• 2:00:29
  non-discriminatory tolerant community I wanted a father I wanted to be loved by a man
• 2:00:34
  saying hypothetically what I'm saying is I think that the data doesn't tell the whole story I think
• 2:00:41
  that children long to be loved by a man and a woman they long to know their mother and father
• 2:00:48
  and that this goes right down to the court some of these things are hard to measure but suppose
• 2:00:51
  you had a good measure I mean suppose you could do the measurement and you could ask the people
• 2:00:55
  and you could do all the polling and you did the longitudinal studies and you followed up and it
• 2:00:59
  turned out that they were at least as well off as children of biological parents and it overturned
• 2:01:05
  all of the death the decades of data that we have on family structure well then that would be
• 2:01:09
  really something no we'll never turn the decades no we'll never turn anything I already read all
• 2:01:12
  of the studies about you know how it's not once you adjust for all of the things that we know
• 2:01:17
  about dysfunctional families violence all of that stuff and you just focus exclusively on loving
• 2:01:24
  two parent households then all of the differences evaporate now you say they don't I'm saying
• 2:01:29
  hypothetically if they did would you drop your opposition I think that it would be really
• 2:01:36
  you could make it if the data was there you would really have to re-examine wouldn't you
• 2:01:41
  you would have to re-examine I don't think you would have no no I'm saying I would have to re-examine
• 2:01:46
  if the data completely lined up you had these methodological lives of studies what do you
• 2:01:53
  what I'm saying is I've met too many kids I've met a lot of kids with same sex parents
• 2:02:01
  well I mean anecdotes or anecdotes we've got to go with data sure the anecdotes are
• 2:02:06
  anecdotes yeah I mean they're self-selecting kids who come to you right that's true definitely the
• 2:02:10
  kids that feel like they cannot talk to their parents or the media or anybody else under their
• 2:02:15
  own name 100% come to me yeah yeah a lot of them feel like they're in the closet yes yeah yeah
• 2:02:21
  I mean I get that you know life's tough in lots of ways my suspicion is that you wouldn't change
• 2:02:26
  your mind that nothing would change your mind because it's a fundamentally a moral conviction of yours
• 2:02:30
  which means it's basically a religious conviction it's a at all I'm asking for is you should leave
• 2:02:35
  your theocracy in your own home and let the rest of the world so like sort itself out it's just
• 2:02:40
  amazing to me that that's your perspective because I am the one that is arguing based on the biological
• 2:02:47
  realities and the decades of social science you're the one that's saying I'm the one that's
• 2:02:52
  religious when you're promoting a worldview that has existed for five minutes of history
• 2:02:58
  that takes incredible technological tinkering to advance that overrides everything that we know
• 2:03:02
  about the nature of the parent child relationship you are the one with the religious worldview here not
• 2:03:08
  me Katie I'll leave you with a last word thank you no I want to say something please you're
• 2:03:13
  really great host oh thank you you're great interviewer you're gracious you came really well
• 2:03:19
  prepared you obviously are a good guy and I wish you and Sean and your kids the best thank you Katie
• 2:03:25
  I wish you the best to you thanks for giving me a time yeah