The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 527. Gay Marriage, Surrogacy, Divorce & Hookup Culture

00:00:00.120 This is a worldview that does not discriminate between single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile.

00:00:05.520 This is a world where if you're going to put children first, all adults must conform to those fundamental rights.

00:00:10.640 Let's wrestle that out.

00:00:11.840 That means that it is going to run up against all of our self-interest at some point.

00:00:15.680 I have a friend, and he wasn't interested in children, but his partner was interested in children, and so they had children with surrogacy.

00:00:24.180 There's one demographic in this country that's truly in the closet.

00:00:26.840 It's kids with same-sex parents who desperately miss their mother or father.

00:00:31.560 Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that?

00:00:35.680 Forcing children to sacrifice something so adults can have what they want.

00:00:39.940 Nobody has a right to a child.

00:00:42.360 Children have a right to their mother and father.

00:00:44.940 And that glans us back into the, well, is it better that the child exists or not argument?

00:00:49.200 It all comes down to the same thing, and the question is, what does it mean to be human?

00:00:53.260 I'm going to scrap this out with you.

00:00:56.840 Hello, everybody.

00:01:11.640 I had the opportunity today and sit down and talk to Katie Faust.

00:01:15.440 Katie is an author.

00:01:16.560 She wrote Them Before Us, published in 2021, Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, 2023, and Pro-Child Politics.

00:01:29.400 Katie is the founder and president of an organization called Them Before Us.

00:01:34.620 And she advocates on behalf of the intrinsic and inalienable rights of the child.

00:01:44.080 Her contention, which we discussed at length in the YouTube conversation,

00:01:49.240 is that family policy, educational policy, economic policy, policy surrounding marriage should prioritize the natural rights of children.

00:02:02.600 And partly because children have inalienable natural rights, partly because they're voiceless and need to be defended,

00:02:11.520 and partly because it seems self-evident that nothing that is harmful to children can be good for adults or for society.

00:02:25.980 And so if you optimize your social policies in relationship to the well-being of children,

00:02:34.420 you move a long ways towards optimizing your social policies for the flourishing of everyone.

00:02:40.760 And so we fought that through, I would say.

00:02:47.440 Katie is not an admirer of surrogacy, for example, really regardless of the reasons.

00:02:55.120 And so I pushed back on that, and we hashed that through.

00:03:02.160 And you can evaluate the consequences of that for yourself.

00:03:06.940 We talked about the fact that not all families are created equal and that love does not define the family.

00:03:17.320 You could think of it as a necessary but insufficient precondition for what actually constitutes a family.

00:03:23.640 And Katie comes down pretty hard on both the religious and the biological side, arguing that,

00:03:28.900 and I think rightly so, that there isn't an ideal that can replace long-term, committed, monogamous, child-centered, heterosexual marriages,

00:03:44.540 as primarily as the foundation for successful and joyful, stable rearing of children.

00:03:55.740 And if you accept the doctrine that what's good for children is good for adults and for the state,

00:04:03.900 then institutions that focus on the well-being, the flourishing of children, the prioritization of children,

00:04:11.300 those institutions have to be foundational and prioritized.

00:04:16.700 And that's certainly one of the doctrines of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,

00:04:21.700 which is this organization.

00:04:24.020 Katie sits on its advisory board, and one of our fundamental principles is that healthy psyches

00:04:33.560 and healthy societies are made possible by the establishment of healthy, child-centered marriages.

00:04:43.520 So, you'll see how we argued and how we laid out the facts and the opinions.

00:04:53.480 Katie's very articulate and well-informed, and she's a tough contender.

00:04:59.240 And so, if you're interested in how you navigate your marriage and your children

00:05:04.200 and how you might orient yourself in the world in relationship to your attitudes towards such things,

00:05:09.680 then this is the podcast for you.

00:05:11.860 So, Katie, let's talk about kids.

00:05:16.560 Start by telling everybody what you do and why.

00:05:20.580 Yeah, my name is Katie Faust.

00:05:22.540 I'm the founder and president of the children's rights nonprofit, Them Before Us.

00:05:27.900 The idea is we put them, the children, before us, the adults, in all matters of marriage and family.

00:05:34.020 So, what I do is I trigger people.

00:05:37.460 That is what I do.

00:05:38.320 So, when you say that children's rights to life and right to their mother and father need to come before adult desires,

00:05:46.440 really what you're saying is every adult has to accommodate and sacrifice at some point.

00:05:50.840 So, I tell people, give me enough time and I'll piss you off, too, because this is a worldview that does not discriminate between single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile.

00:06:00.180 This is a world where if you're going to put children first, all adults must conform to those fundamental rights.

00:06:05.600 And that means that it is going to run up against all of our self-interest at some point.

00:06:10.600 So, I think it's a necessary message.

00:06:13.380 I think that it's critical not just to, you know, national thriving but national surviving.

00:06:18.380 But it does come at an individual cost for all of us.

00:06:22.160 So, let me ask you about that, you know, because that idea of self-interest and that self-interest is, say, at odds with the long-term interest of children

00:06:34.520 is actually predicated on a pretty narrow view of what constitutes self-interest.

00:06:40.060 Because my suspicions are that in a society that's properly constituted and with a psyche that's properly integrated,

00:06:49.040 the interests of children and adults truly align, but they align over the long run.

00:06:54.580 And so, what's sacrificed isn't so much self-interest as narrow, selfish, hedonistic, gratification-in-the-moment self-interest.

00:07:03.420 Exactly, exactly.

00:07:04.620 That's right.

00:07:05.240 Right.

00:07:05.580 Well, that's an important thing, important point to make because it's a big mistake that modern people make

00:07:11.740 to identify their self with their hedonistic whims because that isn't their deepest self.

00:07:18.460 Their deepest self, I would say, their most profound self, their best self, is the self.

00:07:24.720 It has to be the self that's aligned with children because, well, how could it be otherwise?

00:07:30.000 I mean, if we were fundamentally at odds with our children, we'd be fundamentally at odds with ourselves.

00:07:36.380 And there's no survival and certainly no happy survival under those conditions.

00:07:41.100 So, let's see if we can figure out what it means to organize ourselves and our societies around the long-term interests of children

00:07:50.880 and make the presumption that that would be best for men and women by far, all things considered as well.

00:07:57.220 Is that reasonable?

00:07:58.740 Yeah.

00:07:59.140 And I will say that I think that there's a lot of people that are talking about how good marriage is for men, for example.

00:08:06.160 Like, thank God there's been a resurgence of interest in, actually, this is a vehicle of maturation for men.

00:08:11.980 This is a wealth-creating institution for adults.

00:08:14.340 This is good for women in terms of aligning with kind of the natural design of their body.

00:08:18.800 And I'm so grateful for those voices.

00:08:20.420 I want to be the voice that speaks for kids.

00:08:23.680 Kids don't lobby.

00:08:25.940 They can't hire lawyers.

00:08:27.220 They don't submit amicus briefs.

00:08:28.440 They don't speak at conferences.

00:08:29.680 They don't submit articles and papers and op-eds.

00:08:32.100 That is what, to me, is missing, is representing the rights and well-being, interests, and desires of children.

00:08:39.120 And it's because it's so easy to steamroll their interests because they can't speak for themselves.

00:08:43.340 They are literally just at the mercy of whatever it is adults decide for them, whether it's in the cultural, legal, or technological space.

00:08:51.320 So, obviously, I think that what's good for kids ultimately is going to redound to the benefit of all of society.

00:08:57.060 I don't think it's an accident that what's good for kids also, in the long term, ends up being good for men and women and all of society.

00:09:03.960 But to me, the missing piece is accurately representing the interests of children in all of these conversations.

00:09:10.060 So, if I do my job, that's what we're going to be talking about today.

00:09:13.340 So, why did you become obsessed, let's say, with developing yourself as an advocate for the rights of children?

00:09:24.080 And then there's a question that's intelligently allied with that, is that what makes you believe, what gives you the conviction, or the delusion, for that matter, perhaps,

00:09:36.100 that you are entitled to and able to appropriately speak for the best interests of children, right?

00:09:45.280 Because that's what your skeptics, obviously, the people who are skeptical about any mission such as yours,

00:09:50.880 are going to make the case, like the postmodernist types always do,

00:09:54.160 that you're just masking your own self-interest with, you know, putative care for children

00:10:00.300 and pushing, let's say, a conservative agenda using, yeah, yeah, using your love for children as a camouflage.

00:10:08.800 So, how did you get interested in this first?

00:10:11.260 Like, when did you start to become aware that this was a problem?

00:10:13.880 And then, I guess, you need to justify your stance and say why, tell people who might be skeptical, you know,

00:10:22.640 why you think that what you're doing should be regarded as credible.

00:10:27.000 Well, I think that a lot of people are going to say,

00:10:28.720 well, are you sure you're not just advancing your own religious agenda or your own self-interest

00:10:32.320 in the name of child protection?

00:10:33.880 And I would say, you suspect that because you are massively projecting.

00:10:37.640 That is literally what progressives have been doing on every single issue for decades,

00:10:41.880 is cloaking some of the most child-destroying ideologies in the name of child protection or even child rights.

00:10:47.620 So, I understand why that's a suspicion.

00:10:49.480 It's because it's a very well-known playbook, especially on the left.

00:10:53.220 Why am I doing this?

00:10:55.320 Yeah, and also, why, how are you not falling into that yourself, right?

00:10:59.820 Because.

00:11:00.840 Well, yeah, we'll find out.

00:11:03.360 You can let me know.

00:11:04.100 We'll have a little JVP evaluation at the end of this, and you can let me know.

00:11:07.920 You can give me the big Caesar pass-fail.

00:11:12.300 So, I didn't get into this by choice.

00:11:15.380 Like, in the world of sort of Christian, and I'm like, I'll just state right up front,

00:11:20.560 I am like a Bible-thumping evangelical to the max.

00:11:24.460 Like, you want evangelical credentials, I got you, okay?

00:11:28.160 So, on that spectrum, I think that most Christians fall into either the truth-tellers

00:11:33.840 that are just constantly hammering away at the truth, or the grace-givers,

00:11:37.720 the people that want to keep the peace and bring together, you know, all different kinds of people.

00:11:42.400 I am a grace-giver.

00:11:43.760 I avoided this for a long time.

00:11:46.380 I don't like to make waves.

00:11:48.360 I like to be loved.

00:11:49.560 I hate to be hated.

00:11:51.360 It took me a long time to get into the public battle, because honestly, I was busy with my four kids.

00:11:56.920 My husband was the senior pastor of our church for a long time.

00:12:00.120 Honestly, if the world wasn't crazy, I would just be reading the Bible with people and shepherding women.

00:12:04.760 That is what I would be doing.

00:12:06.820 But, but, the marriage debate is what, like, flipped the switch for me.

00:12:13.360 You know, I took your big five personality test, and I'm, like, 100% on extrovert.

00:12:21.900 Conscientious, kind of.

00:12:24.780 Agreeable, 85%.

00:12:27.100 Like, I will go along with almost anything.

00:12:31.000 But, when it is injustice against children, I see red.

00:12:36.040 I just can't handle it.

00:12:37.560 And that's what happened in the marriage debate.

00:12:39.400 What I saw, especially when the gay marriage discussion came to my state, Washington state, I saw this progressive agenda being pushed on the backs of child brokenness.

00:12:52.640 You know, when they dared to connect marriage with parenting, which it wasn't always.

00:12:57.580 A lot of times they advanced to gay marriage on the total separation of the procreative aspect that has always been sort of the foundation for marriage idea, marriage policy, you know, social ideas about marriage through millennia.

00:13:10.860 So, a lot of gay marriage was disconnecting those two.

00:13:13.960 This isn't about kids.

00:13:14.920 Oh, there's a lot of heterosexuals that can't have kids.

00:13:16.940 So, you know, so gays can be married, too.

00:13:18.920 So, but when they did connect it to kids, what they said, what I heard them saying is, kids don't care if they have two moms or two dads.

00:13:27.240 But, functionally, what that means is kids don't care if they have lost their mom or lost their dad.

00:13:34.020 That's what you're talking about.

00:13:35.220 When you see the picture of a child with two moms, you're looking at a picture of a child who has lost their dad.

00:13:40.300 When you're looking at a child with two dads, you are looking at a little girl or a little boy who has lost their mother.

00:13:45.880 Now, sometimes that happens through tragedy.

00:13:50.120 We used to experience that kind of, especially father loss on a mass scale.

00:13:54.180 For example, after wars.

00:13:56.260 Before modern medicine, we used to experience mother loss at the time of birth.

00:14:01.040 But, thank God, due to modern warfare and modern technology, we are not seeing father and mother loss to tragedy on a mass scale like that.

00:14:08.400 What we are now seeing is mother and father loss intentionally.

00:14:12.320 And now, due to reproductive technologies, commercially.

00:14:15.700 But, we're not looking at it as tragic anymore.

00:14:18.020 Now, we're looking at it as a step of progress.

00:14:21.880 So, my husband and I had been working with kids in a variety of different ways for a couple decades at that point.

00:14:27.780 And I will tell you, I had not met a kid who lost their mother or father or who, at minimum, was not curious about the identity of that missing man and woman.

00:14:37.760 But, very, very often, it was the primal wound.

00:14:41.400 It was the thing that you could barely touch, that you couldn't even get near without them flinching, without them crying.

00:14:47.380 You know, when we were doing the lock-ins for the kids in middle school and high school,

00:14:51.400 and there's that one kid that wants to stay up at 3 a.m. and talk with you in the middle of the gym floor when all the other kids are sleeping.

00:14:56.220 You know what they want to talk with you about?

00:14:57.420 Well, where is my father?

00:15:00.900 Why doesn't he love me?

00:15:02.380 Where did he go?

00:15:03.960 Where is my mother?

00:15:05.400 Why did she leave me?

00:15:06.320 Why did she divorce my father?

00:15:07.560 Why did she move across the state?

00:15:08.920 It must have been me.

00:15:10.220 There must have been something wrong with me.

00:15:11.720 And so, this idea that you can just casually cut out a child's mother or father, and it's going to not affect them at all,

00:15:19.780 and that you were going to push some ever-widening, progressive goalposts on the backs of fundamental harm to children,

00:15:28.000 that was sort of the tipping point on the other side of the 85% for me, where I said,

00:15:33.960 get behind me, Satan.

00:15:35.200 Now we roll.

00:15:36.700 When did that happen to you?

00:15:38.860 What years was that?

00:15:40.580 That was 2012.

00:15:42.340 2012, when I actually decided to start an anonymous blog, because I am a peacekeeper, and I'm a chicken,

00:15:49.220 and I know what these people will do to you, you know, they will make you pay.

00:15:53.140 So, I wasn't out there with my name up front.

00:15:56.660 I just thought, I just want to talk to the world about why marriage is actually about justice for children,

00:16:02.100 and the pain that they experience when you cut their mother or father out of their life,

00:16:05.960 and the harms that go along with that, harms to their physical body, harm to their emotion, their academics.

00:16:11.720 Their future relationships.

00:16:12.880 I went to a talk by University of Ottawa, Janice Fiamengo, who was an English professor at the University of Ottawa,

00:16:25.180 who realized, who was a progressive, and who realized, while lecturing, that the things that she was saying were hurting the boys in her class.

00:16:36.500 She could see it.

00:16:37.340 And it was really at that moment that she became a serious scholar, and she's become, I don't know anyone,

00:16:45.960 who's done a better job of taking apart the feminist narrative, especially historically, than Janice Fiamengo.

00:16:54.600 She's quite the monster.

00:16:56.580 And I saw her at the University of Toronto.

00:16:58.960 She did a series of lectures before she resigned to take care of her husband, her ailing husband, and she was protested madly.

00:17:10.060 She was a very early person in the culture war on the academic side, and she paid a big price for it.

00:17:15.420 And the lecture I went to at the University of Toronto was interrupted by half-wit, you know, cluster B psychopathology types pulling the fire alarms and packing the audience with false tickets and then leaving.

00:17:31.260 And one of the things that really shocked me during that display, and this was before I was in the public eye to any great degree,

00:17:40.760 was that the whole audience seemed absolutely convinced that fathers, for example, weren't necessary, right?

00:17:48.340 That a single mother, on average, could do just as good a job as a married couple raising a child.

00:17:54.100 And I knew that that was false.

00:17:56.640 It's false.

00:17:57.740 Yes, there are some single mothers who do a credible job, and there are some married couples who do a dismal job.

00:18:04.000 But on average, children with two parents do much better.

00:18:08.080 And fatherlessness is a complete bloody catastrophe across multiple dimensions.

00:18:13.960 And it's been a disaster.

00:18:16.280 And it's really...

00:18:17.440 Do you mind if I jump in there?

00:18:19.700 Yeah, go ahead.

00:18:19.780 Because you said parents with two kids do better.

00:18:22.640 But I want to challenge that and say it's not two parents.

00:18:26.000 Yeah, I...

00:18:26.800 Well, that's what I'm getting at.

00:18:29.220 That's what I'm going to get to.

00:18:30.420 Yeah, so please go ahead.

00:18:31.660 Well, then...

00:18:32.920 Well, if this isn't what you were going to get to, then please get to what you're going to get to.

00:18:37.700 But I will say that there has been some increased courage and boldness from the right and the left to say children need two parents.

00:18:45.020 Like, the data is now so strong that we're not able to reject that anymore.

00:18:49.260 The myth of the single mother, you know, doing just as well.

00:18:52.200 That is absolutely unsubstantiated.

00:18:55.120 But I will say that it is not just two parents.

00:18:57.100 It's not a two-parent home that advantages children.

00:18:59.720 It is two married biological parents who advantage children.

00:19:05.500 And that's a really important point.

00:19:09.160 Unfortunately, I think because...

00:19:11.280 Go ahead.

00:19:11.600 Well, let's wrestle that out because...

00:19:15.220 Okay, so I have a friend, Dave Rubin.

00:19:20.460 So I'll start with Rubin.

00:19:21.820 I don't think he'll mind.

00:19:23.820 And Dave's gay and he's married to his husband, who's also named Dave.

00:19:30.700 And Dave Rubin came along with me on my tour.

00:19:33.840 And I talked a lot about kids.

00:19:35.740 And he wasn't interested in children, but he listened.

00:19:40.180 And his partner was interested in children.

00:19:42.660 And so they had children with surrogacy.

00:19:46.660 And I talked to Dave very forthrightly on a podcast about how insanely difficult that was.

00:19:54.780 And Dave wasn't afraid to delve into the moral quandary, let's say, that surrounds surrogacy,

00:20:03.120 which I would like to talk to about you.

00:20:06.280 And the tremendous expense.

00:20:10.020 And he was aware of the fact that, well, with two fathers, you don't have a mother.

00:20:15.680 And so his mother and his partner's mother participated and his sisters.

00:20:21.520 And they did everything they could to formulate an environment.

00:20:26.680 Exactly that.

00:20:27.840 But what was evident, this at minimum was evident.

00:20:31.500 And I would like to talk to you about this because it's sort of at the core of the matter.

00:20:35.920 The pathway they chose is not replicable as a basis for a stable society.

00:20:42.260 It was very, very difficult for them to do what they did.

00:20:45.260 It cost a tremendous amount of time and money.

00:20:47.920 They were insanely committed.

00:20:49.240 They had the resources and they had the family support to flesh out the missing pieces.

00:20:57.400 Maybe, right?

00:20:58.660 And so...

00:20:59.520 Maybe.

00:21:00.080 Well, that's the issue.

00:21:02.660 Maybe.

00:21:03.100 Now, you know, Dave told me that he wasn't particularly interested in contemplating a...

00:21:10.380 What did he say?

00:21:11.100 He didn't...

00:21:11.880 What did he tell me?

00:21:12.920 He didn't want to be wandering around Beverly Hills with a little dog in a, you know, purse

00:21:18.740 when he was 60.

00:21:20.480 You know what I mean?

00:21:21.500 No, I remember the conversation you guys had where he said, I kind of feel like I'm at the

00:21:25.220 end of what the maturation that I can achieve without having children, in essence, is how

00:21:31.400 that conversation went.

00:21:32.740 And that is true.

00:21:34.180 Children do mature you in ways that other relationships and other demands do not.

00:21:38.820 But children are not a function of your maturation.

00:21:42.300 You should be a function of theirs.

00:21:44.260 So I understand...

00:21:45.600 First of all, let me say Dave Rubin, incredibly talented, absolute champion of Western values,

00:21:50.540 probably one of the most talented interviewers that I know of right now.

00:21:55.640 And what he did to those children is 100% unjust.

00:21:58.120 Unfortunately, he forced the smallest, the weakest, the most vulnerable to sacrifice for

00:22:04.460 two grown men.

00:22:06.000 And even though they can try to make up for it with freezers full of breast milk, nighttime

00:22:10.860 nannies, and the mothers in their life, they have denied their children not just one mother,

00:22:16.560 not just two mothers, but I would argue all three mothers, all three roles that a mother

00:22:21.800 provides.

00:22:22.440 Number one is the genetic mother who provides 50% of the child's biological identity, and

00:22:29.720 that is a critical piece of identity consolidation and formation.

00:22:35.100 It is very hard for kids to answer the question, who am I, if they cannot answer the question,

00:22:41.700 whose am I?

00:22:43.220 And unfortunately, Dave and David have severed their children from 50% of the answer to that

00:22:49.120 question.

00:22:49.520 So there's number one mother that they've cut them off of.

00:22:52.780 Number two, the birth mother.

00:22:55.280 This is not only the most critical, but the only relationship that children have for the

00:23:00.660 first nine and a half months of their life.

00:23:03.600 And the day that the child is born is the day when they're supposed to see the mother they

00:23:07.780 already love for the first time, not the last.

00:23:11.000 Why is it that we put children, newborns, on the chest of their mothers?

00:23:15.600 It is not so they can form a bond.

00:23:17.320 It is because children have an existing bond with that woman.

00:23:21.200 It is her body, her smell, her voice that soothes the baby.

00:23:26.200 She is the only thing that that child knows.

00:23:28.860 We have measured, and it is her presence that decreases baby's cortisol levels, especially

00:23:34.400 in the first couple of days and weeks.

00:23:36.580 Her presence specifically, okay, yeah, go ahead.

00:23:39.020 Random moms.

00:23:39.660 Her presence specifically.

00:23:41.680 Random people, even the child's father, do not decrease cortisol levels and increase

00:23:47.340 oxytocin levels in children the way that the child's own birth mother does.

00:23:51.360 So that's mother number two.

00:23:52.580 And then mother number three is the social mother, the woman that is providing the daily

00:23:57.920 maternal love that satisfies children's souls and maximizes their development.

00:24:02.940 So what surrogacy does is it splices what should be one person, mother, into three purchasable

00:24:10.020 and optional women.

00:24:11.560 The genetic mother who provides the egg, the birth mother that gestates the child, and the

00:24:16.420 social mother that provides all of that female distinct nurturing that will, in essence, lead

00:24:23.300 the child to that place of balance, thriving, and independence later on in life.

00:24:28.480 And unfortunately, Dave and his husband, David, have starved their children of all three of

00:24:34.860 those, not because of tragedy, intentionally and commercially.

00:24:40.300 Okay, so I'm going to scrap this out with you.

00:24:43.340 And it isn't because I disagree with you, you know, it's because it's very complicated.

00:24:47.640 And, okay, so I guess the most logical, perhaps, and empathetic, possibly, objection to the points

00:24:57.160 that you made, which doesn't invalidate the points you made, by the way, and we can discuss

00:25:03.120 them in detail, is that, well, these children that Dave has wouldn't have existed without

00:25:07.800 this set of circumstances.

00:25:11.240 And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about the early days of the internet.

00:25:14.980 Remember when it felt like this vast, open frontier?

00:25:17.540 A place where you could truly be free, free from corporate oversight, free from tracking,

00:25:21.520 and free from somebody looking over your shoulder.

00:25:23.600 Kind of like America itself used to be.

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00:26:32.280 From what I can observe, the boys are very well loved.

00:26:38.620 And I'm also not claiming for a moment that such arrangements can't go dreadfully wrong.

00:26:43.180 And I'm perfectly aware of cases where that's been the case.

00:26:47.520 So I'm not trying to be naive about this.

00:26:50.060 But I'm also trying to take into account the fact that, well, and we can also talk about

00:26:54.680 this.

00:26:54.900 So they seem to have done as good a job of this as it's possible to do.

00:27:00.400 Now, that's not replicable as a pathway for most people.

00:27:04.660 I don't think it's replicable as a pathway for most gay men.

00:27:08.820 It's too difficult.

00:27:10.880 But insofar as it could be done, they did it as well as they could.

00:27:14.360 And now they have these two children, which who are apparently thriving and who wouldn't

00:27:20.720 have existed had this not occurred.

00:27:23.080 And there's something to be said for the fact of their existence.

00:27:26.660 And you could say, well, they've been deprived of these three dimensions of maternal care,

00:27:32.320 or those have at least been substituted.

00:27:34.880 But better to be deprived across some axes, you might say, than not to exist at all.

00:27:42.900 And so, well, I'll throw that at you.

00:27:44.720 And I'm not sure that's exactly fair, but it's harsh in the other direction.

00:27:49.620 I would rather have you ask me the hard questions because everybody in the audience is thinking

00:27:55.280 that too.

00:27:55.780 Do you know how?

00:27:56.780 Because one of the things we do at Them Before Us is we catalog the stories of children who

00:28:00.380 have lost their mother or father to a variety of different adult interests, not due to tragedy,

00:28:05.160 but because some adult wanted it that way on some level, what I call desire-based maternal

00:28:10.500 or paternal losses.

00:28:11.600 And so one major category of that is children created through reproductive technologies,

00:28:16.640 sperm and egg, quote unquote, donation, which is a misnomer.

00:28:19.840 Nobody's, this isn't a benevolent nonprofit.

00:28:21.960 Nobody's donating their egg or sperm.

00:28:23.680 Everybody is buying or selling or children created through surrogacy.

00:28:27.780 And so you can imagine that many of the kids get these kinds of objections where they talk

00:28:33.300 about how they're troubled by the fact that they have dozens or hundreds of half siblings

00:28:37.860 because their father was a serial sperm donator, or maybe their mother donated her eggs to

00:28:44.120 somebody.

00:28:44.580 And so then they have questions like, who is my mother?

00:28:46.860 Very normal questions, very human child.

00:28:49.240 The kind of questions that every human child asks at some point, who is my mother?

00:28:53.820 Who are the people that are responsible for me?

00:28:55.660 This is questions that adoptees have.

00:28:57.960 Overwhelmingly, these are questions that children created through sperm and egg donation have.

00:29:02.000 Unfortunately, many of them, when they voice their concerns, when they voice their loss,

00:29:05.920 when they voice their pain, what they hear is, would you rather be dead?

00:29:10.780 So I think that this is pretty manipulative.

00:29:13.080 I think it's a manipulative tactic to say, you do not get to ask the questions or feel

00:29:17.560 the kind of loss that every other human child has experienced throughout history, because

00:29:22.100 otherwise you wouldn't exist.

00:29:25.020 So I say, look, there's other situations where we can be.

00:29:29.040 For sure.

00:29:29.720 Well, let me just say, we can be grateful for, recognize the dignity and the worth of

00:29:36.320 these individual little lives, Dave and David's two children, that they are precious, worthy

00:29:41.980 of life and protection.

00:29:44.040 And I would actually say that means that we require that we be critical of the circumstances

00:29:48.600 of their conception.

00:29:49.920 The exact same way we would handle a child conceived through rape.

00:29:54.120 Your life is altogether good.

00:29:55.680 But I can be critical of the circumstances of your conception, because you were brought

00:29:59.880 about in a way that actually did not respect and protect your fundamental rights as a human.

00:30:07.280 What about surrogacy in general?

00:30:09.740 Like, you have people who are buried, who fulfill the other criteria that you described, who are

00:30:18.840 infertile, and who turn to surrogacy as a, well, as the pathway forward that's presented to

00:30:25.960 them because of their lack of options.

00:30:28.420 What's your, and I know what we're trying to do here, you see, we're trying to draw this

00:30:33.340 fine line between social policy that's replicable and iterable and productive en masse, and the

00:30:42.460 particular interests of particular people, you know.

00:30:44.960 And it's, well, that's a tight, that's a very difficult balance to attain.

00:30:51.060 And something can certainly be good for people at an individual level and not good at an iterating

00:30:58.780 and social level.

00:30:59.920 And we have to always consider that when we act, you know.

00:31:04.520 That's what, isn't that Kant's maxim?

00:31:06.900 Act as if your action becomes a universal principle.

00:31:10.320 And there's something to that that's very profound as a general ethical maxim.

00:31:16.300 So let's talk about surrogacy in general.

00:31:19.080 I don't necessarily think that there is a delicate, nuanced line.

00:31:23.200 And can it be iterated?

00:31:25.100 And if you are going to do one thing that is going to be extrapolated for the general population,

00:31:29.760 I'm kind of a simpleton in that I'm not a thought leader.

00:31:33.800 I read the thought leaders.

00:31:34.680 I listen to you and John Anderson, and I love Carl Truman, but I'm a translator.

00:31:40.340 I listen to what you guys say.

00:31:42.600 I respect the policymakers, but I want to translate it down to something that is accessible and

00:31:47.740 applicable for everybody.

00:31:48.900 And I will tell you, I can use the same metric and rubric, and I think this is great for personal

00:31:53.680 decisions and policy decisions.

00:31:55.360 And that one rubric is adults should sacrifice so kids don't have to.

00:31:59.240 We should not force children to do hard things on behalf of adults.

00:32:02.860 And ultimately, any form of surrogacy is forcing children to sacrifice something so adults

00:32:08.960 can have what they want.

00:32:11.040 Nobody has a right to a child.

00:32:14.600 Children have a right to their mother and father.

00:32:17.960 Well, that's an interesting point.

00:32:20.120 Let's see if we can take that apart a little bit.

00:32:22.260 So you're contrasting two hypothetical rights, and you're giving one clear primacy.

00:32:30.120 Okay, so let's see if we can sort that out.

00:32:33.540 So you said adults don't have a right to children, but children have a right to-

00:32:40.000 They don't have a right to acquire a child.

00:32:42.300 You have a right to your own biological child.

00:32:44.840 I mean, when you leave the hospital, you don't want to just leave with any baby.

00:32:48.620 You want your baby.

00:32:49.820 And you have a fundamental, natural, pre-political right to that baby.

00:32:53.620 But you don't have a right to acquire a child that then has to lose their genuine right to

00:32:59.440 their mother or father so that they can be taken home by you.

00:33:03.260 So there is not a nebulous right.

00:33:06.000 That's fine.

00:33:07.420 So, but if I said, well, if I can acquire that economically, if I have the means at my

00:33:13.360 disposal, then why doesn't that translate into a right?

00:33:18.140 Now, your argument, I think, is that because it comes at the expense of the child, and then

00:33:23.480 that lands us back into the, well, is it better that the child exists or not argument, right?

00:33:27.980 That lands us back in that domain.

00:33:30.440 So you think that it isn't appropriate for someone to acquire that right.

00:33:37.040 Why exactly?

00:33:38.580 Let's go into that more.

00:33:40.340 It's because it violates the child's pre-political right to biological parentage.

00:33:47.020 Yeah.

00:33:47.520 So first, let me say, I think that there's an abuse of the word rights in our world, you

00:33:53.600 know, and it's very much like a Mr. Incredibles thing.

00:33:55.820 When everything's a right, nothing is a right.

00:33:57.700 And unfortunately, it seems like whatever adults really, really, really, really want is

00:34:02.160 conveniently framed as a right.

00:34:04.300 But if you're looking at things from a natural law perspective, not necessarily what we would

00:34:09.620 even consider to be a civil law, because civil laws can be out of step with natural laws.

00:34:13.380 And again, I'm not a natural lawyer.

00:34:14.800 Thank God, one of the most well-renowned natural law scholars, Robert George, wrote

00:34:21.220 the foreword for our first book, Them Before Us, Why We Need a Global Children's Rights

00:34:24.920 Movement.

00:34:25.800 So there is natural law precedence for this.

00:34:29.060 But like I said, I'm a translator.

00:34:30.660 And so I don't think in these kind of first principle ways, I will tell you how to determine

00:34:35.800 whether or not something is a natural right based on sort of my simplified understanding

00:34:40.340 of natural rights.

00:34:41.220 And then we'll be able to figure out pretty easily whether or not you have a right to

00:34:44.420 acquire a surrogate-born child, even though you're purchasing egg and renting the womb

00:34:48.700 and taking the children across borders without any kind of background check, even though you've

00:34:53.280 got a criminal history and you're a known pedophile, which has happened in surrogacy cases.

00:34:57.540 So let's figure out to what children and adults have a natural right.

00:35:02.500 So when I, my understanding of natural rights and my co-author, Stacey Manning, and I kind

00:35:07.840 of detailed this out in our first book, there's three rules that make something a genuine natural

00:35:12.720 right.

00:35:13.600 Number one, it needs to exist pre-government, right?

00:35:16.480 And that's kind of what our country was founded on is this idea that government doesn't give

00:35:21.040 you rights.

00:35:21.360 They just recognize and protect rights.

00:35:23.180 So a genuine natural right exists pre-government.

00:35:25.920 So like your right to life, your right to life existed before the government, government's

00:35:30.140 not there to give it to you, they're there to protect it.

00:35:32.780 Number two, nobody has to provide it for you.

00:35:35.620 So if it has to be like dug up from the ground, bottled, labeled, shipped, and put on a shelf,

00:35:40.720 it's not a natural right.

00:35:42.440 You might even need it to survive, but it's not necessarily a natural right.

00:35:47.000 Number three, a natural right is given an equal distribution.

00:35:51.960 So if there's a differentiation in terms of the level of attainment or achievement, a

00:35:57.680 GED versus a PhD or a dorm versus Mar-a-Lago, it's not a natural right.

00:36:04.960 If it's a genuine natural right, you have it in equal measure.

00:36:08.960 Everybody gets exactly one life.

00:36:11.100 Everybody has the same ability, should have the same ability to defend themselves, should

00:36:15.160 have the same ability to speak.

00:36:16.580 And all of us, regardless of the technological tinkering that was done in some laboratory

00:36:21.860 somewhere, have exactly two parents, one mother and one father.

00:36:27.320 So children have a fundamental natural right to the two people responsible for their existence.

00:36:33.460 Do adults have a right to acquire a child that is not biologically theirs?

00:36:38.520 No, they don't.

00:36:39.460 Because that violates the fundamental natural rights of kids.

00:36:44.160 Okay, so let me ask you this then.

00:36:46.640 These natural rights of the child, why, let's see if we can investigate why those are important

00:36:55.540 or even crucially important.

00:36:57.300 And that will also help us set them against the hypothetical rights of adults.

00:37:02.340 Now, you know, you can imagine, you could make a case, I suppose, that maternal longing is

00:37:11.420 something that existed before the government, like it's an intrinsic part of human nature.

00:37:17.280 And the government's there to ensure that its manifestation is made, is realized.

00:37:28.280 And you can imagine an argument for surrogacy on that basis.

00:37:32.940 But your claim is that you're violating something more fundamental, which is the child's right to two parents.

00:37:40.940 Okay, so let's take that apart.

00:37:43.000 Okay, and I'll do that as critically as I can.

00:37:45.600 As far as I can tell, and we have to look at the nuances of this, children are pretty good at bonding with multiple people.

00:37:59.260 They're not good at bonding with multiple people sequentially if the previous person they bonded with disappears.

00:38:06.800 So, for example, you could bring a nanny into your house and the child could bond very nicely with that nanny,

00:38:12.640 but you can't, it's hard on the child to replace the nanny, let's say, especially when the children are under three.

00:38:21.180 But children can bond with multiple people, and we know that partly, too, because our past was in all, well, self-evidently tribal,

00:38:29.680 and many people participated in the raising of a child.

00:38:33.480 Now, that doesn't mean that the mother and father don't have some primacy, but it means that many people can participate.

00:38:39.980 And so you could imagine, well, the argument would go that these relationships are,

00:38:47.280 the maternal and paternal relationships are substitutable, as they are to some degree.

00:38:54.060 Your argument is that they're not as substitutable as people would like to presume,

00:39:00.260 and in that substitution, something of transcendent value is lost.

00:39:04.440 Well, here's a possible example on the biological side.

00:39:08.040 You know that babies and mothers swap DNA, and they do that at a level.

00:39:14.960 Yeah, it's called mycochimerism.

00:39:16.260 That level that's so profound that, like, a baby will donate stem cells to its mother

00:39:21.440 so that the mother heals better during pregnancy, right?

00:39:25.480 And the mother will, here's something very interesting, too.

00:39:30.120 So a mother's breasts can detect calcium shortage on the part of the babies,

00:39:38.500 and mothers who detect calcium shortages will extract calcium from their own bones

00:39:44.300 to fortify their milk, to fortify their children.

00:39:48.840 And so there are a lot of biological nuances in the maternal-infant relationship that we don't understand.

00:39:55.680 We understand, too, for example, that babies who are born by C-section often have impaired immunological systems

00:40:03.660 because they didn't pass through the vaginal canal.

00:40:06.420 I mean, there are a lot of things going on biologically that are complex and sophisticated beyond belief,

00:40:12.140 but also beyond understanding.

00:40:13.820 And these are the sorts of things that you're pointing to that a child is deprived of.

00:40:17.740 But, and fair enough, but it's also harsh, perhaps necessarily harsh, but definitely harsh,

00:40:26.600 to say to someone who's 35 and desperate for a child and who has the means to pursue surrogacy

00:40:34.840 that that that is off the table by fiat, despite the fact that the technology is there

00:40:41.440 and the opportunity is at hand.

00:40:45.420 So, I know we're going over the same territory to some degree, but...

00:40:49.800 That's okay.

00:40:50.840 Well, let me ask you, if you don't mind,

00:40:52.880 what are the studies that we have on maternal loss and the impact that it has on kids?

00:40:59.860 What are the studies that you know of, of kids that grow up without their mothers and how they fare?

00:41:04.700 Well, I know that the, that period of time, especially between zero and nine months is critical for,

00:41:17.580 it's foundationally critical.

00:41:20.960 And that if those relationships are disrupted,

00:41:24.020 it produces wounds that are deep and potentially irreparable.

00:41:31.040 The reason I asked you that is you couldn't think of any off the top of your head, right?

00:41:36.120 Not specifically.

00:41:37.380 No, not, not any more specifically than what I just laid out.

00:41:41.620 Right.

00:41:42.320 And that's because mother loss,

00:41:45.300 it used to be that if the mother was gone, the baby's dead.

00:41:48.420 Yes, yes.

00:41:49.060 Well, the mother loss,

00:41:50.540 the mother loss is so antithetical to our species, right?

00:41:55.140 That, that mother and child are bonded so tightly,

00:41:58.320 both in the ways that you're talking about in terms of like responsiveness of,

00:42:01.820 of breast milk formulation.

00:42:04.100 I mean, I always joke that mother's breast milk will change whether or not she's nursing a boy or a girl.

00:42:09.520 So mom's boobs know male and female when a lot of Yale University professors do not.

00:42:15.260 Okay.

00:42:15.480 I mean, like mother infant bond and reciprocity between the two of them is, is, is primal.

00:42:21.800 I mean, that's really the only word that you can have for it.

00:42:23.820 And so we don't have a lot of studies of mother loss in children

00:42:28.440 because it goes against the grain of what it means to be human.

00:42:33.020 And now we think we are just going to casually say,

00:42:36.060 you know what, we can intentionally and commercially sever that bond between mother and child

00:42:40.840 because we have the means to do it.

00:42:43.620 And who am I to say that a woman who's 35 that has the means that desperately wants to be a mother

00:42:48.960 who is going to take home her own genetic child,

00:42:51.320 who am I to say that she shouldn't do that?

00:42:54.120 Well, I'm here to say as best as I can, that I am representing the interest of that child.

00:43:00.240 And the interest of that child is to not be intentionally separated from the only person

00:43:04.400 they know that the day that they are born.

00:43:06.780 And I would say that the best example, the best proof that we have of the harms of that

00:43:11.700 is adopted kids.

00:43:13.900 And I say this as an adoptive mother.

00:43:15.900 I say it as a woman who is the former assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency

00:43:21.060 in the world, somebody that understands that adoption is an institution centered around

00:43:25.520 the well-being of children.

00:43:26.780 And it is an act of justice for children who have lost their parents.

00:43:29.660 So I'm not anti-adoption.

00:43:31.180 I am telling you that adopted children have more externalizing disorders than the general

00:43:37.480 population, even though they are raised by homes that are statistically more stable, wealthier,

00:43:46.800 and adults who spend more time and money on them than the average population.

00:43:50.960 So why is that?

00:43:52.400 It looks as though disruption of that primal bond with the birth mother has some kind of

00:43:58.860 lifelong consequences and fallout.

00:44:01.140 Well, there's another explanation too there.

00:44:04.580 I mean, because there's also the high likelihood that children who end up in a position to be

00:44:11.420 adopted come from families with genetic histories that predispose them to disruption.

00:44:18.240 And so that, well, those are the two possible sources of the outcomes that you described.

00:44:25.660 How much is attributable one to the other?

00:44:28.100 That's a very complicated thing to sort out.

00:44:30.000 But I don't think it bears directly on your, it doesn't bear necessarily directly on your

00:44:37.040 fundamental argument that there's additional consequences.

00:44:40.840 Well, and we do know, to be more precise in responding to your question about studies,

00:44:46.520 well, we actually do know the studies, there are studies that have been done on maternal

00:44:51.180 disruption.

00:44:52.460 First of all, we know that prior to the 19th, 20th century, the one-year mortality rate,

00:45:00.000 for children who had no mother in orphanages was 100%.

00:45:04.680 They all died.

00:45:07.040 And that was changed by a woman nurse, a female nurse, and a researcher whose name I can't remember.

00:45:15.460 Her name was Fat Anna.

00:45:17.060 And she had a ward in Germany where the children didn't die.

00:45:21.500 And, or at least all of them didn't die.

00:45:24.600 And the investigator, whose name I can't remember, went to Germany to see what was going on there.

00:45:29.860 And the only difference he could see in the ward was that a nurse would take the babies out of their crib

00:45:35.260 and carry them around on her hip for some amount of time every day.

00:45:41.820 And that amount of direct contact was enough to entice them into life.

00:45:46.600 And then there's an immense literature that was founded most profoundly by this animal researcher

00:45:54.180 named Yach Panksep, who looked at the effects of maternal deprivation, mostly on animal behavior,

00:46:00.120 and it's cataclysmic.

00:46:03.080 Right.

00:46:03.420 Well, and that's where most of what we have in terms of maternal harms is in rat populations.

00:46:09.100 Why is that?

00:46:10.220 It's because it's absolutely unethical to test this on human children.

00:46:14.340 Because even brief maternal deprivation we know, based on those rat studies,

00:46:18.900 can permanently alter the structure of a child's brain.

00:46:21.880 So, like, when we start tinkering with the maternal-child bond, because some adults are sad,

00:46:29.440 or maybe they have an identity that leads them to a place where they do not have an egg or a womb between them.

00:46:35.640 And so, then we're going to just bypass and ignore everything that we know about the nature of the human child

00:46:42.000 and maternal deprivation and the harms that go along with maternal loss.

00:46:45.860 Maybe also everything that we know about the mother.

00:46:48.320 Like, you described yourself earlier as an evangelical Christian,

00:46:52.280 and I've spent a lot of time looking at the imagery of Mary, right?

00:46:57.320 If you think Mary is the archetypal female, you can make that case.

00:47:01.960 That's a reasonable case to make.

00:47:03.620 But the thing about Mary is that Mary isn't an individual.

00:47:07.700 Mary is mother and infant.

00:47:10.100 And I think that the human female nervous system is actually adapted to the mother-infant dyad

00:47:19.280 and not to the best interests of the mother.

00:47:22.020 Because women are differentially sensitive to negative emotion, which makes them suffer more.

00:47:28.480 And so, you have to ask why.

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00:48:49.960 Women sacrifice their own emotional stability and happiness to be there as alarm systems for their infants.

00:49:01.360 And that's how tightly wired they are together.

00:49:03.740 And so it could easily be that the proper image of woman, in for a penny and in for a pound, let's say,

00:49:10.120 the proper image of woman isn't individual woman the way it is individual man.

00:49:15.440 It's woman plus infant.

00:49:17.820 And that now you agree with that, do you?

00:49:20.960 Yeah.

00:49:21.320 Okay.

00:49:21.840 I agree.

00:49:22.340 I mean, just because I'm a mom and I'm an observer of reality,

00:49:26.280 and I'm around a lot of women and children and husbands and children,

00:49:31.080 all of which, I mean, mothers and fathers offer distinct and complementary benefits to children.

00:49:36.460 Neither of them are replaceable.

00:49:37.800 Kids need a mom and a dad.

00:49:39.400 And, you know, it's so interesting because then I'm sure some of the objections that we're getting from some of the people that are listening to this,

00:49:47.020 they'll say, well, and, you know, Dave Rubin said this in your conversation with him, too,

00:49:51.140 that his husband, David, is very nurturing and very empathetic.

00:49:54.840 Yes, yes, which is true.

00:49:55.860 And that he's going, yeah, sure.

00:49:58.360 Well, you know, one of the other categories of children whose stories we try to catalog at Them Before Us is children with same-sex parents.

00:50:07.720 Our website, thembeforeus.com, probably has the largest story bank of kids with LGBT parents.

00:50:14.060 And for a while, I had a very active group chat of kids with two moms or two dads who could just talk amongst themselves.

00:50:20.220 Because I'll tell you, if there's one demographic in this country that's truly in the closet,

00:50:24.260 it's kids with same-sex parents who desperately miss their mother or father,

00:50:30.220 but cannot say that out loud because they are accused of being bigots and homophobes, even by people in their own family.

00:50:36.640 So the place where they can talk to each other is sort of in these anonymous spaces.

00:50:40.420 And there were a lot of those kids who would openly admit, I mean, most of them had two moms.

00:50:45.660 There was only one that had two dads at one point, and they didn't stay too long.

00:50:50.060 But many of them would say, look, I had a femme mom and I had a butch mom.

00:50:54.720 I mean, those words, their words, not mine.

00:50:56.600 And, you know, the butch mom worked on cars, shaved her head, was stockier.

00:51:02.980 And the femme mom, longer hair, kind of slim, worked in the kitchen.

00:51:07.700 And I asked them, I said, did any of those butch moms meet your need for a father?

00:51:13.980 And they're like, no, she was my butch mom.

00:51:16.940 And I loved her, I appreciated her, I respected her, but I craved male love.

00:51:21.600 So this is not the kind of thing where a man can put on sort of a feminine presence.

00:51:28.160 Kids actually want, crave, need, deserve, and have a right to their mother and their father.

00:51:34.020 They don't want somebody that acts masculine or acts feminine, at least from the kids that I know.

00:51:38.380 And obviously, I probably have a slanted sampling because the kids that are coming to me,

00:51:44.000 many of which are going to come after this interview, too.

00:51:47.760 We get tons of letters and testimonies from kids who cannot say this kind of thing out loud anywhere else.

00:51:54.400 Do you know of any data that isn't biased pertaining to that?

00:51:59.500 Because you clearly have a sample bias problem.

00:52:02.380 That doesn't mean that the problems that your people are communicating aren't real.

00:52:06.380 But it doesn't allow you to specify, because what you'd really want is a random sample of children with two moms and two dads.

00:52:15.160 And that's going to be a small sample to begin with.

00:52:18.040 And you'd want to see if their attitudes towards their parents and their life differed in any important way from the norm,

00:52:26.340 or maybe even differed in any important way from the experiences of the adoptive kids that you described,

00:52:32.980 because maybe that would be a more appropriate control group.

00:52:35.320 Like, that's a pretty tough study to do.

00:52:37.520 And maybe one's been done.

00:52:38.620 I don't know of one.

00:52:39.800 That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

00:52:41.660 But you have your chat groups.

00:52:43.920 They're incredibly rare.

00:52:45.580 Yeah.

00:52:46.440 A quick note on same-sex parented studies.

00:52:50.000 It's very rare to have high-quality studies.

00:52:53.020 Interestingly, up until about 2005, there was a consensus among the social scientist community

00:52:57.740 that children raised by their married biological mother and father fared best in a low-conflict marriage.

00:53:04.980 I mean, like, that is what they tended to say in unison.

00:53:07.520 And then, strangely, in the lead-up to Obergefell in those 10 years,

00:53:11.380 there was an explosion of studies that said that kids with two moms or two dads fared no different or even better than kids raised by heterosexual parents.

00:53:21.900 Right.

00:53:21.980 And then when you look at it, right, those 79 studies or whatever, many of which used the same data set and then reinterpreted and spun it to create multiple different studies,

00:53:32.120 when you look at them, they all had very serious methodological problems.

00:53:35.360 Like you said, not randomly derived.

00:53:37.740 They were volunteered, recruited.

00:53:39.580 There weren't adequate controls.

00:53:40.880 They were very small sample-sided.

00:53:42.360 They weren't longitudinal.

00:53:43.420 They couldn't replicate them.

00:53:45.160 And most of them had to do with the self-reporting of adults.

00:53:48.800 Like, there was even a study that came out last year in Italy.

00:53:52.420 You know, gay fathers' children, you know, did just as well as heterosexual parents.

00:53:57.000 But you look at it and it's like, gay fathers report that their children under 10 love having gay dads.

00:54:02.480 I'm like, what you're saying is heterosexual parents are more honest about their shortcomings than gay fathers are.

00:54:07.700 That's what you're talking about there.

00:54:09.360 So it is going to be a long time.

00:54:11.340 Well, first of all, there hasn't been a whole lot of studies since Obergefell, since gay marriage was legalized,

00:54:18.200 because it was very obvious that there was a political push towards advancing those kinds of studies in the lead-up to the Supreme Court's decision.

00:54:25.980 Well, and you can imagine how difficult it would be to even to publish a study that showed negative results, man.

00:54:32.600 Oh, absolutely.

00:54:32.780 I mean, your career as an academic would be over.

00:54:36.800 The research journal that published it would be pilloried, like there'd be homophobic hell to pay on every bloody dimension.

00:54:46.000 And so—

00:54:46.280 Yes.

00:54:46.620 And that would be assumed you could get it funded.

00:54:48.800 He did this.

00:54:49.580 What's that?

00:54:50.480 Yes.

00:54:51.340 Mark Regneris did that.

00:54:52.780 He published a study in 2012, and he did.

00:54:56.660 He used the gold standard of, you know, social science.

00:54:59.280 He got randomly derived participants.

00:55:01.260 He asked the children themselves as adults what their outcomes were.

00:55:04.860 Were they more likely to be sexually abused?

00:55:06.640 Were they more likely to suffer emotional distress or depression?

00:55:09.600 Were they more likely to be on welfare benefits?

00:55:12.220 And the, you know, the no difference study actually turned out to be a massive difference.

00:55:18.060 And he almost lost his job.

00:55:20.760 They came after his credentials.

00:55:22.820 They made his life a living hell.

00:55:24.400 And since then, just like you said, there's been a queering of family studies.

00:55:29.900 And so now you don't get funded unless there is a pre-political conclusion that you've already assigned to, subscribed to, and are advancing through that study.

00:55:38.180 So wouldn't it be nice if we had good data?

00:55:40.820 That would be great.

00:55:42.320 We don't.

00:55:43.360 There's very few studies that apply that gold standard of sociological social science methodology.

00:55:50.280 Paul Sullins did do it where he evaluated some government data.

00:55:54.380 And no surprise, those no differences ended up being major differences, especially as it related to things like daily fearfulness, daily crying, higher levels of emotional distress, much higher levels of children who had educational, you know, IEPs, that kind of thing.

00:56:12.660 And why are we surprised by this?

00:56:14.500 You know, anytime sociologists are not studying same-sex parenting, anytime they're doing any other kind of family structure study, they generally agree that biological parents advantage children in terms of they are more connected, more invested, and more protective of children.

00:56:31.700 They generally agree that men and women offer distinct and complementary benefits to child rearing.

00:56:36.900 They generally agree that losing a parent to death, divorce, abandonment, results in child harms.

00:56:44.900 They generally agree that an unrelated adult increases the child's risk of abuse and neglect.

00:56:51.360 By a lot.

00:56:51.960 By a lot.

00:56:53.360 By a lot.

00:56:54.280 By a lot.

00:56:54.780 Like step-parent presence is unbelievably, unbelievably, an unbelievably massive risk factor.

00:57:01.600 It's really quite terrifying.

00:57:03.600 They have a, we have a name for it.

00:57:05.520 It's called the Cinderella effect.

00:57:07.680 Like that's how well-established it is, you know, and Wilson and Daly, you know, the Canadian sociologist.

00:57:12.600 Yeah, they're great too, Wilson and Daly.

00:57:14.520 Very, very solid research.

00:57:15.600 They're so good.

00:57:16.260 Yeah.

00:57:17.100 And yeah, what did they find?

00:57:18.640 That rates of fatal beatings in kindergartners in Canada between the ages, between the years of like 1979 and 1990, 150 times greater at the hands of a stepfather.

00:57:33.100 And so I just, I'm like, okay, look, we know that the most dangerous place a child can find themselves in America today is in the home of an unrelated man left to care for the child himself.

00:57:43.340 And so, but now somehow we're normalizing all of these other modern family forms where there's always an unrelated adult in the home, where the child's always being deprived of a biological parent, where they're very often missing the maternal or paternal love that maximizes child development.

00:57:58.000 And somehow we're supposed to believe that these kids fare no different.

00:58:02.320 I mean, unfortunately, it's just one more example of why we cannot trust the institutions.

00:58:07.000 They've been captured by this woke ideology and it's kids that are suffering.

00:58:11.740 Let's move to practicalities, if that's okay.

00:58:14.960 And if there's other particular areas of concern that we should delve into, divorce, for example, I'd be happy to do that.

00:58:25.580 I would like to talk to you about divorce actually, but tell me about your practical strategies.

00:58:33.180 What exactly does your organization do?

00:58:36.400 How widespread is it?

00:58:38.040 What effect have you had?

00:58:39.720 What are your plans?

00:58:41.100 Flesh that out.

00:58:41.980 And maybe in a way too, that enables people to determine if they would like to help or whether they could help.

00:58:49.720 And if so, how?

00:58:51.280 So tell me more about your organization, about what you're up to.

00:58:55.620 What I'm up to is a global takeover.

00:58:58.120 That is what I'm up to.

00:58:59.280 You and Klaus Schwab.

00:59:00.320 I do, that's right, me and Klaus can go toe-to-toe, baby.

00:59:05.000 Yeah, do you have a naked cat?

00:59:06.280 Actually, one of the reasons why I was-

00:59:06.580 Do you have a naked cat that you like carry around?

00:59:08.960 No, no, but I do have cats.

00:59:13.600 I've got multiple cats.

00:59:14.740 Okay, okay, well, that's close enough.

00:59:16.240 So when you come over for your-

00:59:16.840 That's close.

00:59:17.600 Yeah.

00:59:17.940 I think that's offset by the fact that you have children.

00:59:22.040 I do have children, thank God.

00:59:23.940 Great children.

00:59:24.500 Okay, so global takeover.

00:59:25.880 Yeah, global takeover is what we're after.

00:59:28.260 In fact, that's one of the reasons.

00:59:29.400 That was the first thing I said to John Anderson when he invited me to join the advisory board.

00:59:34.060 And you guys hadn't even named it yet, but he's like, we're doing this thing.

00:59:38.000 I was like, what are you doing?

00:59:39.200 And he kind of described it, and I'm like, ah, the righteous inverse of the world economic

00:59:43.620 forum.

00:59:44.180 Please let me in.

00:59:45.540 So I love it.

00:59:46.680 Like, let's do that same global influence, but not top-down elitism, bottom-up personal

00:59:52.180 responsibility.

00:59:53.340 But it does need to be global.

00:59:55.000 This movement to protect kids has to go into every country of the world because children

01:00:00.280 in every country are- their rights are under threat from the same cultural, legal, and

01:00:04.540 technological forces that are seeking to deconstruct their fundamental rights and relegate them

01:00:10.220 to the status of accessory, to be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship, to the

01:00:15.320 detriment of their identity formation, to the detriment of their safety and security, the

01:00:20.240 investment, connection, protection that all children deserve.

01:00:23.340 So how do we do it?

01:00:24.500 What does the global takeover look like?

01:00:25.980 And it has to be two things.

01:00:28.340 We want to change hearts, and we want to change laws.

01:00:32.500 It has to be both.

01:00:34.020 So last year we did, you know, a hundred interviews published on dozens of platforms making the

01:00:41.180 case that all adults need to sacrifice for children because the only alternative is for

01:00:46.740 children to sacrifice for adults, and that is an injustice.

01:00:50.120 Any time you have the weak sacrificing for the strong, that's all the evidence that you

01:00:57.440 need that something unjust is taking place.

01:00:59.740 That is never the pattern of justice.

01:01:01.900 It always needs to be the strong sacrificing for the weak.

01:01:04.940 So you want to talk about practicality?

01:01:06.280 You'd think that would be an argument that would be music to the ears of the typical leftist,

01:01:12.380 right?

01:01:12.560 Because that is, in principle, the fundamental orienting point of someone who

01:01:19.720 stands for the oppressed and the poor, which is, in principle, the classic leftist stance.

01:01:25.380 And it's also the case that you are, in a way, objecting to the commodification of children,

01:01:34.200 which you would also assume would be an attractive principle to those on the left who are anti-corporate

01:01:43.280 commodification, although that seems to be a commitment that's honored mostly in the breach when

01:01:49.560 it comes to, let's say, pharmaceutical companies and reproductive freedom, right?

01:01:57.400 Because that freedom comes with commodification, as we've seen in the case of Planned Parenthood,

01:02:02.360 for example.

01:02:03.600 Yes.

01:02:04.140 I think that there, again, you get into the waters of mislabeling adult desires as rights.

01:02:11.000 A right to choose, a right to reproductive freedom, a right to parenthood.

01:02:14.980 All of those things really just mean, I'm going to cut the child's mother or father out of

01:02:19.540 their life, or I'm going to snuff out a child's right to life.

01:02:22.420 So it's very important that we properly define rights.

01:02:25.320 Children's right to life, children's right to their mother and father.

01:02:28.000 You could add to that children's right to innocence, not to have their, you know, not to be

01:02:34.880 adulterated by sexualized or whatever.

01:02:39.940 A certainly a right to an intact, unmedicalized body, not to have their healthy organs amputated

01:02:46.460 or chemically sterilized through transgender treatments.

01:02:48.800 I mean, the truth is that if you prioritize kids, if you defend their life, family, mind,

01:02:54.200 and body, you kind of win the culture war.

01:02:56.320 You get the right answer to all of the major issues that we're facing, especially culturally,

01:03:00.180 especially whenever it intersects with the primary question of what it means to be human.

01:03:04.880 If you can elevate and exalt the rights of children, you get the right personal decisions

01:03:09.000 and you get the right policy decisions.

01:03:11.140 So we are absolutely out there to change hearts, but we also want to change laws.

01:03:16.460 So many of these child commodifying, child victimizing ideas, technologies, and laws go

01:03:24.420 completely unchallenged.

01:03:25.980 There is nobody to speak up on behalf of children.

01:03:28.720 And maybe, very likely, I'm not the most qualified person to do this, but nobody was doing it.

01:03:34.760 And so that's what we aim to do, is we aim to represent children well, give them a voice

01:03:41.780 when it comes to battling back bad legislation.

01:03:44.260 We're at the place this year where we're able to propose some policy recommendations, especially

01:03:49.020 for state-level lawmakers who want to claw back some of the lost territory when it comes

01:03:54.620 to losing the marriage and family battle, you know, state after state and nation after nation.

01:03:59.840 So you said that if you prioritize the natural rights of children, you obtain victory in the

01:04:11.900 proper direction in the culture war.

01:04:14.360 And so that would say put a stop to power mongering for the sake of hedonistic gain, which is really

01:04:23.060 in many ways how I see the LGBTQ power nightmare.

01:04:27.940 It's the acquisition of power to prioritize sexual identity and sexual gratification, though

01:04:37.980 the entire identity structure is predicated on sexual identity.

01:04:42.400 And so that's obviously associated with sex.

01:04:44.840 And that's associated with free sex, which of course doesn't exist and is certainly not

01:04:50.540 something that's in the best interests of children, but it also seems to me that not

01:04:55.340 only, let's say, by prioritizing the rights of children, so the interests of children,

01:05:01.000 the natural interests of children, not only does the culture war sort itself out properly,

01:05:05.940 but you actually serve, this goes back to the beginning of our discussion, the interests

01:05:10.280 of the long-term, sophisticated interests of men and women better.

01:05:15.820 And so let's wander down that road a little bit, because this pertains to some of the

01:05:21.760 issues that are going to be discussed at the ARC conference on February 17th to the 19th

01:05:27.340 in London, which you're going to and I'm going to.

01:05:29.940 You're on the advisory board of that, as you indicated earlier, and thank you for that.

01:05:36.660 My wife is going to be doing a panel there.

01:05:38.860 I don't know if you're involved in that panel.

01:05:40.600 Well, but if you're not, well, you're going to be involved in similar enterprises at some

01:05:45.860 point, and you're doing that all on your own anyways.

01:05:48.940 But, see, we watched a documentary by one of the people who's going to participate on

01:05:55.500 involuntary childlessness, and he laid out some, the director, writer of this documentary

01:06:03.700 laid out some very stark facts.

01:06:06.160 And so one of them, maybe the starkest, is that the typical 30-year-old woman in the West

01:06:14.500 is now childless.

01:06:16.560 Half, more than half are childless.

01:06:19.640 Okay.

01:06:20.500 And we already know that one in three couples at the age of 30 have fertility problems.

01:06:26.780 And so that is defined as being unable to conceive within a year of attempting it and

01:06:33.280 trying to conceive.

01:06:35.160 Okay.

01:06:35.420 So by 30, it's one in three.

01:06:37.820 His data indicate that 50% of the women who don't have children at the age of 30 will never

01:06:44.220 have a child.

01:06:45.700 So that's one in four women is now destined to childlessness.

01:06:50.580 And that 90% of those eventually childless women will regret it.

01:06:56.720 And so we've doomed one in four women to...

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01:07:58.820 The last, to a solitary existence for the last five decades of their life.

01:08:04.460 And I can't imagine what kind of cataclysm that's going to be when those women are 70

01:08:10.480 and older, because they'll have no one to speak for them, right?

01:08:15.940 When they're most vulnerable and least economically productive.

01:08:20.260 So you know, of course, in Canada that we've turned to government-assisted suicide as a partial

01:08:26.860 solution to that problem.

01:08:28.720 And I think that's the fifth leading cause of death in Canada now.

01:08:32.180 It's something like that.

01:08:33.540 Tens of thousands of people.

01:08:34.880 And we're expanding that, of course, to people who are in economic distress, people who are

01:08:39.280 in, who are having psychological problems like depression.

01:08:43.380 Virtually everybody who's seriously depressed is suicidal, by the way, because they believe

01:08:47.780 themselves to be a burden.

01:08:49.680 And so, okay.

01:08:51.060 So anyways, the issue here, I think, at hand is the degree to which the interests of children

01:08:58.520 and the interests of the true interests of men and women align.

01:09:02.640 So we know that men are likely, they have a proclivity for antisocial behavior and substance

01:09:10.080 abuse.

01:09:10.580 And that tends to ameliorate around the age of 25 or 26.

01:09:15.280 They desist, most of them.

01:09:16.760 And the reason for that is they take on responsible jobs or they get married.

01:09:21.060 So men grow up when they get married and, well, they grow up because, well, they have to

01:09:25.800 civilize themselves enough so a woman can stand having them around, but also in preparation

01:09:31.620 for having children.

01:09:32.720 And then what do you think that having children, what do you think that having children does

01:09:38.600 for women?

01:09:39.120 And why do you think that we lie about all of that to young women all the time, constantly?

01:09:45.780 Mm-hmm.

01:09:47.520 So much in there to unpack.

01:09:49.640 First of all, we certainly are seeing an increase in infertility struggles.

01:09:54.540 Obviously, a lot of that is environmental, but a lot of it is because women are squandering

01:09:58.860 their primary childbearing years doing other things.

01:10:02.460 I mean, you are hyperfertile in your 20s and somewhat in your early 30s, but not so much

01:10:06.880 in your late 30s and definitely not in your 40s.

01:10:09.260 I mean, once you get to be 35 and you're pregnant, that's a geriatric pregnancy baby.

01:10:13.900 I mean, you've got a really narrow window to have children.

01:10:17.060 And so, especially if you want more than one, you have to get started sooner.

01:10:20.620 So a lot of, I think that a lot of the infertility crisis that we're seeing is actually just a

01:10:25.340 marriage formation crisis.

01:10:26.760 And because people are starting too late.

01:10:30.120 And so, you know, I tell young women when I speak to them, you really can have it all.

01:10:34.960 I mean, I have the most blessed, incredible, rich life.

01:10:43.080 I mean, I have an incredible career where I'm doing what I feel called to do, even though

01:10:47.120 obviously there's a cost and it's uncomfortable and all of that.

01:10:50.180 But I also have four incredible kids who are 21, 19, 17, and 15.

01:10:56.660 And I tell women, you can have it all, but you can't have it all at once.

01:11:00.520 And you better have marriage and kids first.

01:11:03.000 Do that first.

01:11:04.080 Now, sometimes you don't get to choose.

01:11:06.940 I know a lot of wonderful women that are those 30-year-old women who don't have kids yet,

01:11:10.860 who desperately want to and wish that they were married and wanted to be married when

01:11:13.920 they were 22.

01:11:14.920 But I also know women who could have been married when they were 22 or 25 or 27 or 35 and put

01:11:21.520 it off because the world was telling them you have plenty of time or actually really quality

01:11:27.200 means getting your master's degree or making partner at the law firm.

01:11:30.440 And then you discover woefully too late that you were lied to.

01:11:36.220 And now you have a life of emptiness and solitude ahead.

01:11:41.780 And it is incredibly dark.

01:11:43.580 And some of those women, I pray, find fellowship, community, and family in a body of believers

01:11:49.400 at church.

01:11:50.380 But you are shortchanging women, especially the ones that long for it, of something that

01:11:56.420 really will bring them alive and bring them long-term joy, protection, investment, connection

01:12:04.100 in a way that somebody that you're paying to care for you is never going to be able to

01:12:09.460 provide.

01:12:10.680 Ultimately, like all of the different questions, you know, you talked about MAID.

01:12:13.620 We're talking about the population crisis.

01:12:15.480 We're talking about, you know, all of these reproductive technologies and these different

01:12:19.220 forms of family.

01:12:20.760 Ultimately, they all have the same source.

01:12:22.540 It's the same question.

01:12:23.760 It all comes down to the same thing.

01:12:25.480 And the question is, what does it mean to be human?

01:12:28.240 What does it mean to be human?

01:12:30.040 And honestly, like a word for the Christians out there, you are the ones with the right answer

01:12:34.380 to this.

01:12:35.300 I mean, the humanists did not get it right.

01:12:37.100 The postmodernists did not get it right.

01:12:38.920 The evolutionists don't get it right.

01:12:42.140 You, the ones that understand the Imago Dei, you, the one that understands who gives and

01:12:47.080 who takes life, you who understands that we are made in the image of God, male and female.

01:12:53.080 He created them.

01:12:53.820 You who understand that Job, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were all set apart in the womb.

01:12:58.740 You who understand that Christ came incarnate as a child, as an infant, and said, let the

01:13:05.280 little children come to me.

01:13:06.500 And if you want to attain the kingdom of heaven, you have to become like one of these.

01:13:10.720 You who understand that God has devised serious corporal punishment if you cause one of these

01:13:15.940 little ones to stumble.

01:13:17.080 You are the ones, Christians, who have the right answer to what it means to be human.

01:13:21.820 And the world is desperate for us to take that truth into all these conversations about marriage,

01:13:27.300 family formation, death with dignity, abortion, IVF, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, marriage,

01:13:33.600 transgenderism, every single thing, every hot button topic, everything that gets you canceled

01:13:38.120 on Facebook and everything that gets you banned from Thanksgiving dinner ultimately comes down

01:13:43.100 to what does it mean to be human?

01:13:44.220 And that is a life-saving answer.

01:13:47.960 That is a child-protective answer.

01:13:49.760 It's a civilizational defending answer.

01:13:52.860 So you need to increase your knowledge and then increase your voice in the public sphere.

01:13:57.800 It probably is the thing that is going to save the nation.

01:14:00.620 So one of the things that we're wrestling with at ARC is identity in a digital age, and that's

01:14:09.380 the topic that you just very eloquently expanded upon from a religious perspective.

01:14:17.840 And we're trying to do some of this in the most practical possible manner.

01:14:22.720 And so one of the questions that my wife is trying to address at the moment is, while she's

01:14:28.840 trying to investigate the nature of femininity and not from the postmodernist or feminist

01:14:35.600 perspective, let's say, what does it mean to be female and how is that distinct from

01:14:41.920 being male?

01:14:43.180 And this is a very complicated problem.

01:14:45.840 And one of the ways to make that practical is to lay out something approximating a timeline.

01:14:52.100 Like the timeline, as you've pointed out, there's an implicit timeline for women in modern

01:14:56.260 society now.

01:14:57.200 And the implicit timeline for ambitious women, let's say, is establish yourself as an independent

01:15:05.860 creature between 20 and 30 so that you don't have to depend on a man.

01:15:10.580 Prioritize your education and your career, which is a very weird thing for lefty progressives

01:15:15.680 to be telling young women, since in principle they're opposed to the corporate kleptocracy,

01:15:20.620 and yet insist at the same time that women should bow down to it and serve it during their youthful

01:15:27.660 years, which is a paradox I just can't reconcile.

01:15:30.520 But the problem with that, as you've pointed to already, and as we've discussed, is that

01:15:37.500 the window of reproductive opportunity for women is actually pretty damn short.

01:15:44.720 It's about, it's a maximum of 20 years, and practically it's less than that.

01:15:50.360 I would say optimally it's more like 10.

01:15:52.880 And then I've thought, I've kind of tried to think that through arithmetically too, because

01:15:56.840 what that means for the typical woman, I think, and this is for the typical high-functioning,

01:16:02.580 attractive woman, is that she probably only has the opportunity to assess about five partners.

01:16:09.640 You know, if it takes you, if people are actually interested in you, which is not a given,

01:16:16.540 how long does it take to investigate a relative stranger to determine whether or not they're

01:16:27.040 a suitable partner, assuming that's what they want?

01:16:30.340 And I think you're fortunate if you do that five times in 10 years, like that's a stretch

01:16:35.400 goal.

01:16:35.800 And so you have to solve that problem pretty early, and maybe we need to be more pointed.

01:16:41.420 It's like, you know, the Victorians believe that a woman should be married by 22, something

01:16:48.660 like that.

01:16:49.140 I think that was threshold for old maid.

01:16:51.520 It was something pretty young.

01:16:55.740 That has a harshness about it, let's say.

01:16:58.520 But so does being involuntarily childless at 35, by the way, right, which is the fate of

01:17:05.640 one in four women now.

01:17:07.160 So it's also the case, interestingly, that women live about seven years longer than men,

01:17:13.480 you know?

01:17:13.800 And so you could imagine you could just have that seven years for your little kids, because

01:17:20.560 that's, you could have, you could do a pretty good job with little kids, making them their

01:17:24.760 priority for seven years.

01:17:26.080 So if you're thinking this through, if you were setting up an optimal life course for

01:17:32.940 a young woman in an advisory capacity, like, how do you view the role of a young woman in

01:17:40.280 her, let's say, from 15 to 19, and then from 20 to 25?

01:17:45.100 Let's break it into five-year periods and tell me what you think.

01:17:48.540 Mm-hmm.

01:17:49.400 Yeah, I've got a couple of those in my house.

01:17:51.340 Well, passing through my house, I've got a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old daughter.

01:17:56.560 And, you know, what we tell them is, especially during the teen years, your job is friendship.

01:18:02.160 Like, I think we have a marriage crisis in this country because we have a dating crisis,

01:18:05.680 and we have a dating crisis because we have a friendship crisis.

01:18:08.340 It is very hard for young people these days to have, to form and maintain healthy peer

01:18:13.660 relationships, obviously, because the digital space has taken over a lot of their peer-to-peer

01:18:19.900 communications.

01:18:20.900 And so you really do have to train your kids to maximize and develop their same-sex friendships

01:18:27.320 during the teen years.

01:18:29.060 A lot of that is going to be modeling.

01:18:30.840 Are you modeling good same-sex friendships in terms of vulnerability, but good boundaries

01:18:35.040 where you need it with different people?

01:18:37.060 Are you being, are you showing them the transparency, how you need one another, how you rejoice when

01:18:41.220 they rejoice and mourn when they mourn?

01:18:42.660 I mean, you become what you behold, okay, for better or worse.

01:18:46.340 And so model great friendships, obviously.

01:18:49.380 I am of the persuasion.

01:18:51.320 I am not one of the kind of kissed, dating, goodbye Christians, courtship only.

01:18:56.280 I actually do think that there is a role for dating in high school and college because I

01:19:02.260 do think that you need to appropriately practice interacting with the opposite sex.

01:19:07.740 So I've told my daughters, you know, when they're juniors and seniors, that if a boy

01:19:12.520 has the guts to say, do you want to go out and get coffee, you should say, yeah, I'd love

01:19:17.600 to.

01:19:18.240 You need to reward him for having the courage to ask you in person to do that.

01:19:24.240 You don't have to say yes.

01:19:25.320 And of course, you never need to do it if you feel creeped out or anything like that.

01:19:28.780 But there is a, you know, you talk about men being civilized.

01:19:31.740 And I would say the proper understanding of that is that women civilize the men.

01:19:36.660 It is women that have the civilizing effect on men.

01:19:41.060 And, you know, the example I always use is when I see, when I'm walking down the street

01:19:45.320 in Seattle and I see three men coming towards me on the sidewalk, I don't care how big they

01:19:49.400 are, what race they are.

01:19:50.420 I will cross to the other side of the street.

01:19:52.080 I'm not going to walk past them.

01:19:53.440 But if I see those three men walking hand in hand with their girlfriend or wives, I'm

01:19:56.820 not going to cross the street.

01:19:58.020 OK, there's just something in me that knows that male behavior has changed because they

01:20:02.260 are now united and they've bonded themselves to a woman in some way.

01:20:06.060 OK, so I tell my girls, you have an incredible power on men to elevate their behavior, their

01:20:14.180 choices, their decisions by how we respond to them.

01:20:16.820 OK, it is the soft power that shapes the world.

01:20:19.840 Right.

01:20:20.100 That's what women really are, the soft power that shapes the world, not the dominant

01:20:23.960 naggy power, the soft, beautiful, alluring power that changes the world.

01:20:28.240 So I do think that there's a role of dating.

01:20:29.980 And I do think that we should encourage healthy dating, not drunkenness, not permanent friend

01:20:35.740 zone, not jumping in and hooking up a slow, careful dating relationship where there's parental

01:20:42.120 involvement, where you can evaluate especially worldview alignment.

01:20:46.160 And then when you get into college, I mean, I told my 19 year old, who is an incredible

01:20:52.060 soccer player and just, oh, my gosh, all of my kids are incredible.

01:20:55.540 My 19 year old was looking for a college.

01:20:57.800 She considered one that had a 75 percent female to male ratio.

01:21:01.920 And I said, you won't even apply to that college.

01:21:04.200 Absolutely not.

01:21:05.060 Like this is your primary age, the primary window for you to find somebody who is like

01:21:10.760 minded, join your life to them in a cornerstone kind of marriage, not a capstone marriage

01:21:15.440 where you figure it all out and then put the cherry on the top marriage.

01:21:18.340 No, we're going to be strategic about who you're exposed to between the ages of 18 and

01:21:23.080 22.

01:21:24.040 This is your chance.

01:21:25.320 And I do.

01:21:26.360 And I think parents have a huge role to play in encouraging early family formation, early

01:21:31.060 marriage, proper dating.

01:21:32.740 You can't control everything.

01:21:34.340 You shouldn't try to control everything.

01:21:35.760 But the messages that you send, the signals that you send, the environments you put your

01:21:40.620 kid in, it can lead them to the place where they are not involuntarily single when they're

01:21:44.780 30.

01:21:45.440 So let's talk about dating a bit more because you talked about the civilizing effect of women

01:21:51.260 and the role of the alluring quality of women and beauty in that.

01:21:57.840 And there's definitely, that's the calling aspect, but there's a conscience aspect too

01:22:02.640 that I think is worth highlighting that's relevant to young women.

01:22:06.760 So there has been a series of recent studies on the personalities of people who prefer short

01:22:15.360 term mating strategies.

01:22:18.380 And so that would be hookup culture.

01:22:20.340 And that's a variant of a widespread biological strategy for reproduction that varies on one

01:22:30.800 dimension, which is investment versus no investment, right?

01:22:35.300 Human beings are high investment reproducers, but some human beings prefer a relatively low

01:22:42.560 investment, high investment strategy.

01:22:45.240 And those are people who-

01:22:46.780 Keep your daughters away from them.

01:22:48.260 That's right.

01:22:48.540 But I want to explain why.

01:22:50.340 Keep your daughters away.

01:22:51.680 We know why now.

01:22:53.560 We know why.

01:22:54.560 Because the personality structure of men who prefer hookup culture has been delineated.

01:22:59.740 So the men who prefer no investment sex are Machiavellian.

01:23:10.200 So they use their language to manipulate.

01:23:12.500 They're psychopathic.

01:23:14.080 So they're predatory parasites.

01:23:16.720 They're narcissistic.

01:23:19.640 So they crave unearned social status.

01:23:23.740 And to cap it all off.

01:23:24.880 And to cap it all off, they're sadistic, right?

01:23:28.160 So one of the things that the sexual revolution did, free love.

01:23:32.080 One of the things that the free love revolution did was hand women over to psychopaths, right?

01:23:38.940 This is not good.

01:23:39.900 So the other thing, I'm curious about this with your daughters.

01:23:43.080 Well, the other thing that women do for men is put limits on their psychopathy and their

01:23:49.760 narcissism.

01:23:50.420 Well, that's part of that civilizing process.

01:23:52.440 But the limits aren't so much.

01:23:54.100 They're partly that beauty and that alluring quality.

01:23:56.300 But they're also partly hell no, right?

01:24:00.200 Because one of the things I've discussed with my wife, for example, you tell me what you think

01:24:03.880 about this.

01:24:04.320 I think almost all the status that women have.

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01:25:22.700 Granted to them from men, like let's say at least in the domain of romantic entanglement

01:25:33.560 and reproduction, comes from the woman's ability to say no.

01:25:38.500 The ability to say no is actually a status marker.

01:25:41.540 And that's especially true if the person who's pursuing you is relatively high status male.

01:25:45.900 Because what you, and women, you know, they're hypergamous.

01:25:49.660 They tend to mate up, across and up hierarchies.

01:25:53.500 And so then you ask, well, what status does a woman have if she's pursuing a high status male?

01:25:58.200 And the answer is she has whatever status is granted to her by her ability to read, to what?

01:26:07.380 To stand inviolate against his advances.

01:26:10.460 That's a marker of her status.

01:26:12.920 And so there's a limit setting there too that's crucial.

01:26:15.900 And it's certainly something that men, there's no doubt that that's one of the ways that men test women.

01:26:22.020 You know, now you could say, well, if I say no,

01:26:24.020 and that might especially be true at a college that's 75% girls and 25% boys.

01:26:30.020 If I say no, I'll never see him again.

01:26:32.360 But the right attitude towards that is if you say no and you see him again,

01:26:36.940 you should be, never see him again.

01:26:38.440 You should be glad he's gone.

01:26:41.060 That's exactly right.

01:26:42.460 Yeah.

01:26:42.960 Yeah, a few things.

01:26:44.020 Another thing that the sexual revolution did, not just handing women over to the worst of all men,

01:26:48.600 but it made women, it made young girls very hungry for any kind of male attention

01:26:53.200 because it disproportionately starved them of the paternal love

01:26:57.360 that was supposed to satisfy that longing for male attention.

01:27:00.840 And so, you know, through the course of the, you know, the last couple decades

01:27:03.880 where we decided to abandon the traditional notions of sex only within marriage

01:27:07.460 was meant children generally being bored to a household

01:27:10.540 where they were going to have daily contact with both their mother and their father

01:27:13.900 is now we have girls who grew up without their father

01:27:16.600 or with a revolving door of different men coming in and out of their mother's lives.

01:27:20.700 On average, as you know, these girls will start their periods a year earlier,

01:27:25.180 a whole year earlier than their counterparts.

01:27:28.720 That's exactly right.

01:27:29.940 So their bodies are literally signaling, I need to search for a man.

01:27:35.700 And so now not only are there more men that are predatory for girls,

01:27:39.980 but now there's more girls that, you know, we call this father hunger in our work,

01:27:43.660 mother hunger or father hunger.

01:27:45.440 Like maybe you've got, you know, two moms or two dads who love you

01:27:48.980 or a single mom who's providing for you materially,

01:27:51.500 but they do not meet your need for male or female love.

01:27:55.000 And so you hunger for it.

01:27:56.180 And this is why you see incredibly high rates of teen pregnancy among girls

01:28:00.840 who are fatherless, right?

01:28:02.200 Because they didn't have that daily male love that they longed for,

01:28:06.180 but they found it.

01:28:07.540 Maybe they only found it for five minutes on a Friday night, but they found it.

01:28:11.180 And so I think the sexual revolution has been bad for women.

01:28:14.180 Of course, my argument is it has been especially bad for children,

01:28:18.500 you know, perpetuating terrible cycles.

01:28:20.380 A note on Tammy's podcast, if you have not watched it, you should go subscribe.

01:28:24.360 She has done some really fantastic interviews on this topic of, you know,

01:28:28.960 a proper understanding of what it means to be a woman, female.

01:28:31.960 The interviews she's done on the effects of birth control on women's brains,

01:28:35.380 I have sent out to tons of people.

01:28:37.060 So it's very worthy of your time and attention for that.

01:28:41.560 In terms of my daughters and limits and elevating the behavior of the men around them,

01:28:46.460 I will tell you that both of them got a lot of attention from guys.

01:28:51.340 Most of the guys were not worthy of a lot of their time and attention.

01:28:56.840 But I will say that there were a few times where they said no.

01:29:01.180 I mean, I'm not talking about to a major sexual advance.

01:29:04.060 I'm just saying, no, you can't have my attention.

01:29:05.760 No, I won't be your girlfriend.

01:29:07.880 No, I won't continue to be your girlfriend if you continue to do these kinds of things.

01:29:12.440 And then they watch the men, the young men, the 16-year-old, 17-year-old reform

01:29:18.560 because the girl has something they want, even if it's just attention,

01:29:23.000 even if it's just saying she is my girlfriend.

01:29:25.000 There's nothing just about attention.

01:29:27.320 There's nothing but attention, right?

01:29:29.620 Attention is everything.

01:29:32.380 Yeah.

01:29:32.520 Yeah.

01:29:32.960 So I just think that, you know, my daughters have seen the incredible power of no.

01:29:37.240 Yeah.

01:29:37.580 And I will tell young girls, because I, you know, I've been involved in youth ministry for decades.

01:29:41.780 I was running the youth ministry at our church until about a year ago.

01:29:44.700 And I tell girls, like, if there's a guy that you really like, and if you want him to pursue you,

01:29:50.080 you say no to pretty much everything.

01:29:51.620 No, I won't hold your hand.

01:29:53.480 No, I mean, be kind, right?

01:29:55.180 Yeah, you can go on a date.

01:29:56.140 But if it has to do with a physical advance, the more you say no, the more your desirability

01:30:01.020 goes up.

01:30:01.800 If you want him to move on, give him what he wants physically.

01:30:06.700 So once girls figure out the power of no.

01:30:09.160 Give him what his whims want.

01:30:10.300 Yes, that's right.

01:30:11.180 Right.

01:30:11.700 Because you're serving the lowest part of him, right?

01:30:14.680 And I don't mean that.

01:30:15.560 Yes, that's right.

01:30:16.200 I don't mean that some sexually prudish element.

01:30:18.180 I'm saying that sexual desire itself is a short-term gratification-seeking mechanism,

01:30:26.200 so to speak.

01:30:26.940 And it has to be integrated into a personality that's forward-looking and future-oriented

01:30:32.920 and social.

01:30:34.200 And if the relationship degenerates to the immediately sexual, then it serves no one's

01:30:41.880 medium to long-term interests, certainly not society's interests, certainly not children's

01:30:47.120 interests, not least because it tends to culminate in abortion.

01:30:51.120 That's right.

01:30:52.060 Yep, that's exactly right.

01:30:53.300 Kids lose.

01:30:53.980 Kids lose.

01:30:54.660 Anytime sex is happening outside of long-term committed heterosexual permanent unions, kids

01:31:02.480 will always pay the price for that.

01:31:03.640 I think that that's one of the reasons why we are where we are in terms of marriage and

01:31:06.960 family is we have pretended like there's no cost.

01:31:10.640 But there is a cost.

01:31:12.000 There's always a cost to kids.

01:31:13.600 We've said if the adults are happy, the kids will be happy.

01:31:16.400 We've said biology doesn't matter.

01:31:18.460 Love makes a family.

01:31:19.900 But that's not true.

01:31:21.720 Somebody is always going to pay the price.

01:31:24.160 It's just the kids who pay it because they can't defend their own rights.

01:31:28.500 Okay.

01:31:28.880 Well, thank you very much for talking to me today, Katie, and for helping us get to the

01:31:33.940 bottom of the metaphysics of the rights of children, I suppose, and to place them in

01:31:39.380 relationship to the rights and needs and wants of adults.

01:31:43.780 And those aren't the same thing at all.

01:31:47.500 I understand that the conversations that you had at AHRQ, at the Alliance for Responsible

01:31:52.800 Citizenship, we had a convention there recently, will be available to everyone.

01:31:56.840 And so if those of you who are watching and listening found this conversation useful and

01:32:02.320 compelling and helped you further your ideas about the roles of men and women and mothers

01:32:07.820 and fathers and children in families and in broader society, then you can check out Katie's

01:32:17.040 contribution to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Convention.

01:32:20.700 At that establishment, we've made focus on family, long-term, monogamous, committed, heterosexual,

01:32:29.220 married, child-centered couples focus because we do think that, well, that's best for children.

01:32:36.280 It's best for mature adults.

01:32:39.220 It's a relationship that provides the foundation for a productive and abundant society.

01:32:47.740 And so, well, there's something in that to annoy almost everyone, but it still happens

01:32:53.060 to be the truth as far as we can tell.

01:32:55.360 Thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:32:57.100 We'll continue on The Daily Wire side.

01:32:58.920 I think I'll talk to you about divorce and family policy and the costs to marriage under

01:33:03.880 the current legal circumstances.

01:33:06.260 Maybe we'll talk about no-fault divorce, for example.

01:33:08.920 For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

01:33:12.380 To The Daily Wire for making this podcast possible, that's much appreciated.

01:33:16.680 To the film crews here in Calgary, Alberta, and in Washington, D.C., thank you for your contribution.

01:33:24.620 And on to The Daily Wire side.

01:33:33.880 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 06, 2025

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

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