Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Katy Faust is the founder and director of the children’s rights organization, Them Before Us, which is dedicated to defending children’s rights around the world. Mrs. Faust is also a contributor for the Federalist Magazine. She’s written numerous articles at outlets like the Public Discourse and the Washington Examiner. Her recent book, Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement, addresses the need for strong families and the presence of both parents, father and mother for child development, and is the topic of our conversation today.
Katy Faust, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Katy Faust:
Thanks for having me. I’m very happy to be here. I’ve been talking about children’s rights for a couple years, and I’m like, any day now, any day, the Baptists are going to find me and they finally have. It’s a joy to be with you.
Albert Mohler:
Some of us have been talking about your book for some time, and it’s great to have a conversation with you. The whole theme of your book is the idea of “Them Before Us”, meaning children before adults. But the reason I want to really start in another place is because I think that’s essential to making this conversation most fruitful. Why don’t you tell us how you came to the convictions and the passion to write such a book and to make such arguments.
Katy Faust:
10 years ago, I wasn’t doing any of this. I was a non-confrontational pastor’s wife. My husband is a pastor here in Seattle. We had just come home from China after adopting our youngest child, and this wasn’t on my radar. I personally, on the spectrum of the grace giver to the truth teller, I am much more of a grace giver. I don’t like to make waves. I don’t like to confront. I don’t like to lose friends.
But what crossed the line for me was when Obama evolved on the topic of marriage in 2012. That is when I saw a huge shift in the public narrative around gay marriage where it felt to me like, “Now that we have the president, we can call everybody that disagrees with us bigots”. I also started to hear this argument that kids don’t need moms and dads, that kids with two moms or two dads love it.
Both of those were problematic for me. The first, is the notion that support for traditional natural marriage was grounded upon bigotry, phobia, and animus towards gay people. That’s a problem because my mom’s been in a relationship with her partner for more than 30 years, and I pray that I am on the top two list of people that love them, that when they think about people that love them, that I make the list.
The other aspect of it is the idea that kids don’t care if they have two moms or two dads. What that means is kids don’t care if they’ve lost their mom or dad. That’s really what they’re saying here, right? Whenever you’re looking at a picture of a kid with two dads, you’re looking at a child who has lost their mother. My husband and I had worked in youth ministry for decades, and I had never met a kid who lost their mom or dad, who at minimum wasn’t curious. Very often this resulted in a lifelong wound. This was the thing that had them up in the middle of the night at the church lock-in, crying when everybody else is asleep on the gym floor, saying, “Where’s my dad?” “Why doesn’t my mother love me? Why did she leave?” These are the deepest wounds.
Now that I run this nonprofit and I gather the stories of even adult children, I still have 50 year old men who will share their story with me in tears because they desperately miss the relationship with the father that they never knew. This idea that you can swap out parents and the kids are going to be just fine, that was really what crossed the line for me. And I said, I have to start speaking up. Somebody has to say that mothers and fathers are not optional in the life of a child. So that’s what in essence got me started on this path.
Albert Mohler:
As someone who’s been dealing with these issues for decades, I simply want to have a slight disagreement with you, and I say that in a friendly way. At least a part of how you introduce this would credit to President Obama prophetic leadership on the issue of saying same-sex marriage according to his worldview, when the reality is he was for same-sex marriage before he was against it and then for it again. He was for it when he was running for the state senate there in Illinois. Then against it when he ran for President of the United States Senate of course. He was against it when he ran for his first term as president and for it in the second term. You remember it was a bit of a soap opera involving then Vice President Joe Biden, supposedly, just accidentally making a statement that President Obama had to come back on.
Even David Axelrod and others in the administration point out that President Obama held back on same-sex marriage in 2008, and then because of the societal shifts that had taken place between 2008 and 2012, he came out swinging for same-sex marriage in 2012. But now the culture’s moved so fast in that direction that there are people in the Democratic Party who think that being for same-sex marriage after you were against it means that you’re just one of those. And so it is very interesting to see what happened here, but I think you agree with this. The problem is actually a lot deeper because we can’t actually just blame President Obama for same-sex marriage. We can blame him for political hypocrisy and progressivist agendas. But the reality is that it’s even scarier to realize he didn’t come out the door saying same-sex marriage until he thought it was politically safe.
Katy Faust:
Absolutely. I just feel like that’s probably been the reason why we’ve seen such a shift is because it has less to do with the arguments, obviously, because the arguments, the reality, the natural law, even the five major religions of the world are on our side when it comes to this. None of that has changed. What has changed is social acceptance and social pressure. We’ve seen that those are tools wielded by the left very powerfully, that the thought of social exclusion, ostracizing from your peer group or your friend group, it is enough to drastically swing people’s opinion in the matter of years for sure.
Albert Mohler:
How did you come to write this book? In other words, here you were the pastor’s wife, you’d rather be non-confrontational, but this is a confrontational book, and so you evidently crossed some Rubicon somewhere.
Katy Faust:
I started anonymous blogging because I’m a chicken and because I know what these people will do to you. I hid for a while, and God was actually very gracious to allow me to forge some of these arguments and figure out some areas of weakness or where I needed to refine and actually point out some blind spots in relative obscurity. Then in 2014, I was outed by a “loving and tolerant” blogger who found my IP address, realized my husband was a pastor, found our church, and then doxed the members of my church to try to silence me. Right off the bat, I was pushed, I didn’t choose to go public, but I went public under the circumstances of “we’re going to hurt the people that you love if you keep this up”. And at some point I think all of us have to figure out, is this where I stop or do I keep going?
Thankfully I had good men, my husband and the leaders of this church behind me who were said, “You keep going. Don’t let this guy push you around.” That’s how it started. And then in 2018 I started the non-profit Them Before Us because I realized we need to have a place where we put all these stories, all of these kids with LGBT parents especially, where we would find each other and we’d share stories privately. There really needed to be a place where the world could hear the stories of kids who experienced mother loss and father loss, look them in the eye and then say, does love make a family? Are the kids happy if the adults are happy?
We look at some of these ideas and the impact they’ve had on their life, the real-life aspect, development, identity of children. We look those kids in the face and say, “Family redefinition, let’s do this.” The other reason I started the nonprofit is because on policy matters, nobody considers the rights of the child. The kids will be included in the conversation if they validate and support what the adults already want. But the reality is that kids actually long to be known and loved by the two people responsible for their existence. They have a right according to natural law, according to the most widely ratified treaty on the planet, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to be known and loved by their mother and father. As we go through extensively in the book, children’s development, their biological identity, and their safety are maximized when they’re raised by those two adults responsible for their existence.
That aspect of these conversations, whether it’s two moms on a birth certificate or the definition of marriage or the possibility of rolling back no fault divorce or passing commercial surrogacy laws, all of those conversations happened without the presence and the voice and the representation of children’s fundamental rights to their mother and father. That’s another thing that we’re trying to do, whether it’s a letter to a legislator, whether it’s presenting at a family structure conference in Albania, whether it’s testifying to Senate committees, we want them to consider the child first. We first want everyone to ask, “What about the kid?” and then move on to what the adults want. But first we have to ask, “to what do children have a natural right?” and then form our personal and policy decisions based on those fundamental rights.
Albert Mohler:
There are some big assumptions in there. I want to press you on some issues for some good conversation. Number one, why frame these issues in terms of rights, whether held by children or anyone else? Why, what Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon would call, “rights talk”? Why is that the talk we’re talking: rights?
Katy Faust:
Number one, because they actually have a right. You and other conservatives are the only people that ask me this question. One friend that does EU politics has said, “Everything’s a right. And when everything’s a right, nothing’s a right. Stop with the rights talk!”
That’s true, that’s a problem. But children actually do have natural rights, and we’ve seen that leveled very effectively in the fight against abortion. We understand that children have a natural right to life regardless of what civil law says. Children have, whether or not it’s recognized by government, whether or not it’s recognized by culture, children have a natural right to life. We build that case based on natural law, biological reality, and common sense. You can use those same metrics to establish that children have a right to their mother and father. I understand the hesitation to use that term when it comes to children’s rights because the other side, the left has so co-opted and distorted and adulterated that term.
Albert Mohler:
I didn’t say it’s the wrong way to do it. I ask you why you chose it. This a good deal of my personal, theological, ethical, and cultural work, defending the notion of rights within a natural and creation order, worldview. We have to talk about rights, otherwise we don’t even know what we’re talking about when we say that we should have the right to free speech or to freedom of religion or right to life. We have to use the language. But conservatives are, I think rightly, quite instinctively and intuitionally concerned that with the proliferation of so-called rights in the 20th century and with the complete perversion of the rights talk in the 21st century. I think it’s clever, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. I think it’s clever to rephrase this in terms of children’s rights, but you are stepping into an argument, and you found that out already.
Katy Faust:
We argue based on children’s natural rights because it’s true, but also because it’s tactically effective. They frame all of their arguments in terms of rights: a right to housing, a right to government funded birth control. It seems like on the other side of the aisle, anything an adult really, really wants is framed as a right. I think that we need to recapture how to define and advocate for natural rights. We are seeking to do that too. But tactically I do think this is the tact we need to take.
Albert Mohler:
I’m a little less sanguine than you are about the power and traction of these arguments. The natural law arguments are completely compelling to the people for whom they’re compelling. I say that as a Christian theologian. I think there are people who blind themselves to reality. Even the argument of the right to life, that’s completely compelling in pro-life states, but it’s evidently completely lacking in compelling power to those who ardently are going to support abortion. But that gets to another issue.
You talk about natural rights, and that’s part of a larger system of natural law. But the natural law argument, natural rights argument was never seriously made even in, for instance, the American tradition, say the Declaration of Independence, without acknowledging that they’re not so natural, because actually they’re supernatural. It’s nature and nature’s God. I want to fast forward and just say that as a Christian theologian and theorist of the culture, I have to come back and say, look what we are facing right now just in the T in LGBTQ, is a sign of the fact that it’s not just natural law or natural rights l being rejected, it’s nature.
Katy Faust:
I make this case. I’m a pastors wife, I carry my Bible around with me everywhere that I go, this is my authority. God’s word is my authority, but it’s not the authority of the world. So you’ll see that there’s a perfect complement here. There’s not one drop of scripture in the book that you’ve got in front of you right now.
Albert Mohler:
I didn’t criticize that because I understand what you’re trying to do.
Katy Faust:
The word that says in Psalm 82, “Maintain the rights of the weak and needy” has the same author as the natural world. We make this case in the book. Our non-profit is built on natural law, social science, the best research, the stories of kids, and what is rationally arrived at, if you talk through these issues using reason. They’re always going to complement one another because the Word of God and the world of God have the same author. You are going to find the greatest foundation for natural rights through supernatural revelation.
Albert Mohler:
Ultimately, natural rights don’t exist without nature, which is a created nature. So again, in other words, the bigger issue I think, is that I think you may be a good deal more optimistic than I am. I will claim authorities of the apostle Paul, Augustine, and John Calvin to say, the problem is not that the natural law is lacking in the power to convince, but that the will is the obstacle. There are people who will not see the truth. They are corrupt, as the Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 1, they prefer the lie to the truth, they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. That does not at all argue against your position nor your strategy. I just want to put it in the context of the fact that we could only wish that the natural law were more compelling than it is to people who are absolutely determined to have their way.
Katy Faust:
I have been tutored by some of, I think, the best natural law thinkers, tutored in the sense of I absorb the materials and appreciate their materials. People like Robert George, who wrote the foreword for the book, and Ryan Anderson, and a good friend of mine, Anna Samuel. They have discipled me in natural law thinking, and I appreciate it. But I don’t necessarily think that natural law arguments alone are going to move the needle or change hearts. What will is the story of kids, what will is when you see the harm that is done to the lives of children who have been willfully and intentionally denied their mother and father because of bad cultural ideas, bad legal ideas, and bad technical developments.
That is when you get people to go, wait a second. This kid is Googling, trying to find who their father is every night for five years. What? That’s horrible. What we try to do in the book and in our non-profit is to lead with story. That is the thing that catches people’s attention. Then we follow up with what I hope is a gut punch of social science and natural law.
Albert Mohler:
I think it is a gut punch. Just about every source you’ve used, I’ve cited either in books or in lectures or conversations like this over the last several years. You are incredibly effective at pulling them together. The book has got a punchy style, which I think is appropriate for the pugilistic energy that you bring to advocacy for children and children’s rights.
In order to get us into some of the issues in your book, I come back to the fact that speaking to listeners, I just want to affirm the fact that even as we understand there is scriptural revelation and general revelation, and even as we will indict a sinful culture for rejecting creation order, they’re not just rejecting the scriptures, they’re rejecting the order of creation.
I am a Reformed Protestant, a Baptist. You mentioned Robbie George who did write the foreword to your book, I’ve been in conversation with him in the last 24 hours and think the world of him. And also you mentioned Ryan Anderson, who was just recently here in conversation with us. They’re some of the most important thinkers of our day and for good. I am the Protestant in the room who has to come back and say that we believe in total depravity, which means that the intellect shows the effects of the fall as well as the will.
The difference is that the Roman Catholic is always far more optimistic than the Protestant, that the natural law is going to be a compelling argument to those who love their sin. Speaking Baptist to Baptist here, we understand that the most fundamental issue is not the rejection of social science, but the rejection of an entire moral order, which is not an indictment of some people, it’s an indictment of all people. That’s Roman’s definition of what it means to be a sinner. From which a rescue only is Christ.
This does mean that Christ’s people are to be out making these arguments. Even as Jesus said, “Suffer not the little ones to come unto me.” We have a real urgency, which I think you have just really well articulated in this book to speak up for children in certain specific issues in particular. They just happen to be the most controversial issues of our age, just by accident.
Katy Faust:
Let me just say that I am really enjoying this conversation because normally I’m the Protestant in the room. I feel like I can just sit back and say amen, preach. Thank you!
Albert Mohler:
The evangelicals and Protestants often forget the fact that we believe in the natural law as much as the Roman Catholics. We don’t believe it is as compelling to sinners as they think it is. But they’re exactly right when they take natural arguments into the public square, which is what I do all the time. That’s what you’re doing in this book.
But that then raises the issue of rights. I ask you why you used the word rights and you said because you like it. I’m kidding with you here, but I want to press a little deeper. That’s not an uncontested word. I think you’re using it not just for the leverage in the culture it gives you, but because there’s a deep issue where rights is exactly the right word. Let me give you an opportunity to say, why is an emphasis upon rights for children the right word?
Katy Faust:
You can see in chapter one where we give a little outline of, we have three rules that make it a rights test. I am not a natural lawyer. Stacy, my co-author, who brought the punch if you want credit for the punch, credit goes to Stacy. We had to sift through a lot. There is not necessarily widespread agreement even among conservatives about some of these questions, especially as it relates to the distinct parent-child relationship. There’s disagreement about what to even call it. It’s so distinct. It’s so critical, it’s so unparalleled in the human experience. And so we chose to call it rights. You can find natural lawyers who disagree and want to call it something else, an obligation or a duty or a claim or whatever it is.
We give our three rules that make it a rights test because you’ve got to measure what makes it a right these days. We arrived at three conclusions. The first one is if it’s pre-government, if it existed before the government, it’s a right. If everybody gets it in equal measure, it’s not like a dorm room versus Mar-a-Lago. Housing is not a right because the distribution changes, but everyone gets one life. Everyone has the same ability to speak up and share their thoughts and argue in the public square. Everyone has the same ability or should have the same ability to defend themselves.
A natural right is something given in equal measure. So you see we each have one life. If you exist, you have two parents. And third, it’s not something that anybody has to deliver to you or dig up on the ground and bottle it and ship it and label it and put it on a shelf. It’s something that just naturally exists. That’s our framework for determining whether or not something is a right, a natural right. I would love to hear your thoughts on it, but that’s sort of our layperson explanation as to why this does fit in the lexicon of natural rights.
Albert Mohler:
No, it’s good. It’s good. Now, there’s no adequate definition of rights, and I’m working on this in a book conception right now, but definitely an intellectual project I’m pretty deeply into.
Katy Faust:
Maybe you should tutor me. Maybe I need to take a little look at that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, let me put it this way, it is really interesting that at this time we have to have these conversations out loud, whereas evangelical Christians did not have to have these conversations out loud at a previous moment. It gets to a basic issue of church history, which is that you often have to formulate orthodox, biblical Christianity into a creed after a heretic has taught something that you have to correct. The misuse of the term rights, which has been endemic over the course of the last say 70 years, it now requires us to say, no, that’s not what rights are. Rights refer to this. And I would say at least a part of it is that a right is a necessary and natural expression of a function and of a status of a being.
In other words, rocks don’t have rights. The Mississippi River doesn’t have rights, but sentient creatures that especially are humans, able to consciously understand these rights, recognize them as the expression of a function that is necessary to the being. And so the dignity of life, the sanctity of life, a right to life is essential for the function of the being.
Even when the framers of the Declaration and the American republic came back and said, “We hold these rights granted by nature and nature’s God,” well, they had specific rights in mind. Those did not include the right to an equal number of bags of wheat. It was things essential to the human function like speech, religion, religious expression, and all these things.
We use the rights language knowing that it’s been perverted, but we have no choice but to use it because the loss of it is a disaster. I want to tell you, thank you for intentionally and I think very intelligently using the rights language. I think I agree with your three tests. The second one is the one where we have to come back and say that, for instance, unconscious human beings still have a right to life. Those with profound mental disabilities may not be able to function in every way. That’s where you get to something else you just implied. Even when you say a child has a right to a mother and a father, and I affirm that, but there are times in which that is not the case, not because of human misbehavior, but because of death or something else.
In that case, the right isn’t nullified, but rather the rightness of the right is amplified. We live in a society that wants to say no, because there are exceptions to this picture, then the exceptions are the norm. I think it’s very smart tactically, but it’s complicated. I just don’t want Christians to fall into the rights talk trap, which you’re thoughtful and you’re avoiding here, of just saying everything we like and want is a right.
Katy Faust:
I agree with you that the use of exceptions is the way that they have made pretty much every legal change when it comes to marriage and family. It is appealing to exceptions. We deal with a lot of those in the book, a lot of the objections, because the rule is so obvious and self-evident that they have to rely on these edge cases. “You would rather have a baby grow up in an orphanage than with two gay parents?” or, “You talk about biological parents being statistically the safest adults in a child’s life. So are you saying that you would rather have a child be with their two abusive biological parents versus a single loving adoptive mother?” They make all of their cases, very similar to the pro-life world, all of their arguments are based on edge cases. We need to reclaim the fundamentals. We need to understand, what is the rule here? First, saturate yourself in the truth of these natural law, natural rights arguments, and then you’ll be able to navigate the exceptions. Because we aren’t adept at wielding these statistics, we do get caught up in a lot of those exceptions.
Albert Mohler:
Now the documentation’s something you do particularly well. But before we get to that, I want to ask you to just kind of tick off, list what you think are the enumerated, rightly understood rights of a child that are currently under subversion and subject to denial?
Katy Faust:
There are hundreds of incredible organizations fighting for children’s right to life, thank God. We deserve every one of those. I don’t know where to begin because almost every policy being pushed today, from lockdown COVID policy to transgenderism, it all disproportionately harms children. And almost everything, every policy decision that we are making today seems to prioritize what adults want above the rights and well-being of children. You really could look at almost any issue today and say children are being victimized because adults are pushing something that they want and kids just are the acceptable sacrifice on the altar of that adult ideology or whatever it is.
But I would say children have a right to innocence, they’re not just miniature adults. That is why you see parent groups rising up against radical and perverse sex-ed curriculums. Children have a right to an unmedicalized, intact body. That is why we now see de-transitioners and other organizations shining the light on the horrifying medical treatments that result in chemical and surgical castration in children. Children have a right to their mother and father, and that’s going to implicate every marriage and family issue. That’s what we try to do in the book. I do see organization’s voices that are standing up to pinpoint and recognize where children’s rights are being violated and push back. And in fact, I feel like that’s probably one of the few unifying aspects.
If I could just speak to conservatives, I would say you need to be the party of children. That is how you’re getting Glen Youngkin elected, is because the parents are saying, “You are harming our children.” It is creating these new voting blocks. You now have a voting block called parents, and it’s literally around the violation of children’s right to innocence. We could go on this a long ways, and of course there’s a lot of debate over whether or not children have a right to innocence, but we can talk about children’s rights to their mother and father and the implications that that has for marriage, divorce, same sex parenting, transgender parents, cohabitation, polygamy, sperm donation, egg donation, surrogacy and adoption.
That’s what the whole book is about, any place where these controversial topics intersect with marriage and family, it must be children’s right to their mother and father that governs these discussions.
Albert Mohler:
I think one of the most effective rhetorical devices you use in the book is to contrast “them before us”, with “us before them”. I think that brilliantly encapsulates the scale of moral loss in our society. I don’t know exactly where you can pinpoint that, but my honest guess is that it’s somewhere in the 60s and 70s, by my own life experience, that the “us before them” really became the determining factor. Of course that’s present in the birth control arguments you see in the 1960s before the Supreme Court, certainly by the time you get to Roe v. Wade. There’s frankly no two greater symbols of “us before them” than Roe v. Wade and Obergefell.
Katy Faust:
Yep. Absolutely. If you want to frame it in more of a Christian context, during the sexual revolution, sex became god, adult sexual desire, adult sexual choices, adult sexual freedom. If sex is god, children are the obvious and necessary sacrifice. That’s it, right? It’s us, our own sexual desire, sexual freedom, sexual wellbeing, sexual identity, sexual experiences, f that is god, and if sex makes babies, then obviously children are going to have to sacrifice for adults. I think you’re right.
Albert Mohler:
You collect an awful lot of data and I’m carefully avoiding the word science, but it comes from what is called social science. I’m simply going to invoke the great transcendent moral authority, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and his continual suggestion that we must trust the science. Why is it that when it comes to the demonstrated results of every single thing they call social science, they look at the conclusions and say nevermind?
Katy Faust:
It’s true that there has been a horrifying amount of institutional capture when it comes to our institutions of research. You are correct that we need to look very skeptically at what is coming out of the academy in a lot of these different areas. But there are still good scientists doing good “sciencing”.
Albert Mohler:
It is the Anthony Fauci’s of the world, it’s the left. I’m speaking of even how he changed his position on AIDS and so-called “safe sex” during that crisis. My point is that the left keeps saying, “we are the science people”, and yet when you look at all the evidence of the numbers of the difference between a boy growing up with a father in the home and not, and frankly it’s not just boys, although the pathology show up far more with boys, and then especially the interior struggles of girls growing up without a father in the home or children without two parents in the home, those two parents being a mother and a father. That is the evidence you cite, and I want people to read your book, I want them to have these arguments at hand, because you’ve marshaled it very well.
Katy Faust:
Just buy the book for the footnotes. We took mountains of data, for example, on divorce, and we tried to select the highest scholarship, the most far reaching, that you could extrapolate on a population wide basis. There are mountains of research on all these different topics, and we tried to pull only the highest, trusted, genuine social science for you, because it is hard to know where to trust and what to look to when it comes to all of these topics because they’ve been so highly politicized. But unfortunately, following the science in social science often follows the money in social science.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. All the capture, all the ideological corruption you’re talking about, it’s all there. But still, the Christian in me wants to come back and say, “Your own research, as much as you want to deny it and ignore it, affirms the need of children for a father and a mother. The very crime reports, the education reports, the psychological and psychiatric reports that you file are reports that can be directly traced to these pre political family, marriage, sexuality, gender issues.”
Katy Faust:
That’s exactly right. And especially before the same sex marriage debate, you had five fairly widely agreed upon conclusions: that biology mattered in the parent child relationship, that men don’t mother and women don’t father and kids need both, you had pretty unanimous agreement that children suffered diminished outcomes when they lost a parent to death, divorce, abandonment. And now the best social science and surveys that we have on third party reproduction, it shows that whoever’s raising these kids, heterosexual, homosexual pairings, groups raising these kids, that if a kid loses a parent to one of those, they suffer diminished outcomes.
This is especially relevant when you are taking down the highly politicized studies around same-sex parenting, which was a huge part of advancing Obergefell and the arguments for gay marriage, arguing that the kids fared no difference. We spent quite a bit of time on chapter six, the first half, debunking that myth that children with two moms or two dads fare no different because it is such a damaging lie.
Albert Mohler:
You did a very, very good job with that. Can I point out something? I’ve written several books. The problem when you write a book is it’s written and the world keeps moving on. Argument books, and that’s most of what I write too, just as you did, they can be confronted with subsequent data that you’ve got to go back and factor in. Everything I know that has come out since the release of your book would basically verify and buttress the argument you’re making. You point to something very, very important. I think a lot of people look at all these studies supposedly showing that children raised in same-sex families have similar outcomes to those who are raised in two parent, male female homes. Number one, in a lot of those cases, the research is not equalized for marriage. In other words, that’s not fair. The other thing is that as conservatives, we don’t deny socioeconomic factors as having an influence. We deny that they’re determinative, but we don’t deny that it’s an influence. It just so happens that the studies that were produced for the Obergefell arguments and all the rest from the pro same-sex marriage side, the people who were same-sex parenting at that time happened to be, and by the way still overwhelmingly are, especially among two men who claimed to be parenting the child, are overwhelmingly from the top economic strata of society. And so that’s not a fair comparison either, but it shows you the desperation of those making these arguments, and frankly their cleverness.
Katy Faust:
Right. I would say that’s not the greatest problem when it comes to the methodologies used in those studies. They tended to use recruited versus randomly derived participants. Very often you were not surveying the actual results of the impact on the life of the child. You were surveying how the parents believed their kid was doing. They’d go to the lesbian parents and say, “Does your kid love not having a dad? I guess there’s no difference.” When you think of the gold standard of the scientific method, that is not these studies.
Albert Mohler:
Nor has there been enough time. There hasn’t been enough time and experience. We have millennia of evidence on the natural family. We’ve got, in human scale, seconds of time with legalized same-sex marriage.
Katy Faust:
Absolutely, and the fact that it goes against the consensus of social science. Social science consensus does not change in the matter of five years. Yet it strangely did when it came to the topic of same-sex parenting.
Albert Mohler:
Oddly even.
Katy Faust:
Which science are you going to trust? I guess is the question.
Albert Mohler:
I can still remember Samuel Alito saying, “Whatever same sex marriage is, its more recent than the smartphone.” Just a very insightful statement. That’s how recent this is.
You are brave to take on some issues that frankly I’ve written about, talked about, and I’ve been in hot water about as well. Your aim is at logical consistency and moral consistency, logical in the sense that you recognize that an argument against surrogate parenting is actually an argument against an awful lot of IVF technology, and also I think in consistency in your advocacy for the child. We now have enough data. Again, our first argument is not data, our first argument is the creation order and natural right, and natural law, but we now have sufficient data to understand that the subversion of children’s rights includes the commodification of the entire reproductive process. You’re brave to take that on. I appreciate that.
Katy Faust:
I’ve lost friends over it and it’s tough because I like keeping my friends. When it comes to children being harmed, there are things worth losing your friends over. The reality is that, especially conservatives and especially Protestants, we haven’t thought well through these issues. The premise of the book is that children have rights. Children have a right to life, children have a right to their mother and father. The benefit of that message is it doesn’t discriminate. It insists that all adults make sacrifices on behalf of children. The drawback is that that makes demands on all adults for the sake of children. One reason why I think traditional pro-family arguments got into some hot water and were not as effective as they should have been is because they were selective about to whom that message pertained.
They were out in arms in many cases around gay marriage because they said kids need moms and dads, but they were silent on the topic of rampant divorce or cohabitation, which numerically denies more children a right with their mother or father than same-sex parents do. I think the same can be said when it comes to reproductive technologies.
I was just at a conference last week on life after Roe, talking about how horrible the baby taking industry is, back in the most recent numbers that we have from 2019 is about 700,000 children lost their lives to the baby taking abortion industry. About 900,000 died that same year in the process of IVF, that this process of making babies in laboratories is not a child-friendly process. Overwhelmingly these babies will not survive if they’re made in a laboratory.
First of all, as people that are charged with protecting the least of these, we need to understand that IVF very often is not about babies. It’s about on-demand, designer, discardable babies. That’s really what IVF is. As many pro-lifers, Christians who have gone through those processes to make their babies have told me personally, “I still have my kids in a freezer and I don’t know what to do.” Or, “I tried to go into this with pro-life convictions and honestly we couldn’t afford it. We just had to discard some embryos or we had to create more than we were willing to use”, or whatever it was. These are not child honoring technologies.
Then if you add to that, not just the anti-life aspects of IVF, babies in glass, making babies in vitro, but then you introduce this thought of a third party, somebody else’s egg, somebody else’s sperm, somebody else’s womb. Now not only are you putting children’s right to life in jeopardy, but you are guaranteeing that they lose a right to one of the two people to whom they have a natural right, their mother or father. This is sensitive because all of us know couples that struggle with infertility, that would be incredible mothers and fathers. We desperately want them to have a baby. It can never be at the expense of children’s fundamental rights and well-being. It just can’t.
Albert Mohler:
Or the discounting of humanity. I too have lost friends over this. I participated in two book projects about 20 years ago on IVF and similar kinds of modern reproductive technology, but IVF was at the center of it. The problem for me was that I find myself completely unable to make the argument that human dignity and respect for life is to begin at the moment of fertilization and then shift gears when it shifts from talking about how not to have a baby, to how to have a baby in terms of through IVF. One of the things you demonstrate in your book is just the argument we have to make over and over again, which is if we really believe that every life begins at fertilization, in other words that that is a baby, that is a human person. If we really believe that, it’s going to come with consequences.
By the way, in at least one state, Mississippi, when the Human Life Amendment came up, the left used it to say, “This is going to forbid IVF”. Among other reasons it failed. There’s another Christian principle that we need to articulate very clearly, and that is that there are no human beings who are illegitimate. There are means of technology in their moral context that bring them into being that are illegitimate. If we’re talking to someone and they say, “Well, I was conceived by IVF.” We are not at all discounting their humanity. We affirm it in full. But the scriptural worldview and the natural worldview understands that there are still moral consequences and importance. There’s a difference between whether the parents are even known or unknown.
Not to mention the fact that when you’re talking about the willful creation, you are also talking about the fact that, as you say, economics comes in. Then people say, “Well, you need to have multiple embryos. We’re never going to transfer all those.” So then eugenics comes in, because then you’re going to select which of these embryos has the greatest potential. We are at that point doing exactly what we deny is in any sense, morally acceptable.
Katy Faust:
That’s right. We spend quite a bit of time in chapter nine, contrasting adoption and big fertility. A lot of people think this is the same thing. In both senses the kid lost their parents, one or two, and they’re being raised by non-related adults. From a moral perspective and a children’s rights perspective, these are exactly the opposite. These are exactly the opposite kinds of technology. Adoption is an institution centered around the well-being of children. It is seeking to restore something that is lost. Big fertility is a marketplace centered around the desires of adults. It seeks to deliver a child, a product, to adults no matter the cost to that child, or to any other child.
I love what you said about how there’s no illegitimate people, but there’s illegitimate means. I will just say, I’m not donor conceived obviously, but I gather the stories and hear from a lot of kids who are, and what they often say is, “When I talk about how I feel commodified through these processes, where I feel like I am a designer product because I was picked out of a catalog, when I talk about how desperately I long to know the identity of my biological mother, even though I was raised by a woman that I love, people will say, ‘Well, would you rather be dead? You exist because of these technologies, right? So wouldn’t you rather be dead?’”
And the answer is, I can be critical of the means of my conception and still be grateful for my life. They will often say, just like a rape victim, a product of rape would say, “I’m critical of the circumstances of my conception and I’m grateful to have my life.” That’s exactly what you’re saying in another way. The life is sacred, the life is precious, the means of creating that life is not necessarily something that you want to endorse, incentivize, and promote.
Albert Mohler:
Can I offer you another moral argument that I think you might find helpful?
Katy Faust:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
That would be the principle of proximity. People will often say, “When you make arguments such as you make, well then you’ve got to then basically go into IVF centers and defend those human embryos the same way you would defend a child on the street.” That is not true. That’s a false setup. We affirm the common humanity, and yes, the common dignity and yes, the right to life of all. But one moral principle is, and this is also made clear in scripture, “the sojourners who are in your midst”, for example, in the Old Testament, “the widow and the orphan in your midst”. In other words, a needy child in front of us. That really helps make the adoption issue clear too, I think. In adoption, you’re not arranging for the child to be born. You are not ordering a child, there is a child who has proximate existence. I know someone, right now in space and time and history, needs to care for that child right now. That child standing before us right now needs to be fed and clothed and cared for and loved, sheltered. I hope that makes sense. That’s another Christian argument based in scripture and in natural law that I think really helps us.
Katy Faust:
I love that. I’ll let you make the theological argument and I’ll just make the children’s rights argument, and that is, don’t make kids sacrifice for you. That’s the big idea that we have in our entire book. In any of these issues, whether you’re in a struggling marriage or you have infertility or you have same-sex attraction or you’re single and you wish that you were married or whatever it is, the solution to your struggle cannot be, “A kid is going to sacrifice for me.”
That is the big difference between the only study that we have that compares outcomes of children who have been adopted and children created through sperm donation where the sperm donor kid is being raised by their biological mother and usually another adult, either another woman or another man, but it’s a two-parent household and they’ve got one biological parent. What we see is that adopted kids fare better when it comes to psychological outcomes, feeling like they can trust their parents, reduced levels of substance abuse and things like that. Why is that? It’s because the adult that is raising them is seeking to mend their wound. They didn’t inflict it. There’s the child in your midst, right? The sojourner among you, and you say, “I see that you have a need. I’m going to step in and I’m going to care for that need”, versus the kid created through third-party reproduction where the adult raising them inflicted the need. They insisted that the child would end up having the need to begin with, and that has a very different psychological impact on a child. This child who’s been adopted can be open and honest. They can grieve, they can mourn, they can ask questions because they’re not talking to the adult that decided that they would need to be adopted. This child has a much harder time talking about their longing to know their biological parent or their questions about commodification or whatever it is, because they are talking with the adults that chose to commodify them. I think that the person in your midst, the one right here that you can care for versus manufacturing a child that is going to be in need of care, is an important distinction.
Albert Mohler:
Part of this is also rooted in pastoral ministry and in life. Part of it’s in my role as being president of an institution that has both undergraduate and graduate students and an overwhelming number of young men. It does not take long to detect patterns in terms of, let’s just say, I want to say it positively, the positive presence of an engaged father’s life. It makes a huge difference. That’s something we just say to honor God in understanding that God had a perfect plan.
You deal in the book with rights and biology and marriage and divorce and same-sex parents and donor conception and surrogacy and adoption. I appreciate the specificity. I had a thought, and that is that I would commend this book not only to people who want to know how to better understand these issues, I think it will help people in their own families.
I think it will be helpful to a lot of parents because your principle of “Them Before Us”, I hear among evangelical Christians some moral silliness about the rights that parents supposedly have for all kinds of things from time apart from their kids, to just time with each other, to us time and all this. I’m not saying that’s always wrong, I’m just saying whatever it is, so long as you have children, they are the demand, they are the imperative, they are the priority. I hope there’ll be a lot of parents who will read your book, even though they hold to none of the pathologies you indicate, their patterns.
Katy Faust:
This isn’t about making children your god. This isn’t about saying that this is the only thing that matters in life. This is saying they have fundamental rights and needs and you the adult are to do the hard work so that those needs are met. I’m a mom, I got four kids, and sometimes I need a break. But it cannot be at the expense of our children’s fundamental rights and needs. Thank God for a strong, engaged husband who helps me shoulder that load. God bless the women that for whatever reason don’t have that, because this is a two-person job. This is not a two-person job. This is a mother, father job and kids need both.
Albert Mohler:
There is a brokenness in the world. We recognize that. By the way there’s a brokenness in every one of us. There are no perfect marriages. That’s a good biblical principle. But marriage is still an undiluted good. There are no perfect parents. But that just points to how essential parents are. And so the Christian Church, based upon our understanding of every doctrine from creation to eschatology, understands that God’s plan and purpose for us was not to find or make utopia on earth, but nonetheless in a fallen world, to show his glory according to the structures of creation and the laws that he’s embedded in his scripture and also in nature.
And to find the joy of, yes, loving each other, loving our children, raising them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, seeing them launched, and ultimately taking satisfaction in our children becoming parents. Sociologists and historians would quickly say that a society that doesn’t do that. I think of some of the foundational works of sociology in the early 20th century in which they said it’s very easy: civilizations that accomplish these things survive and those that don’t fail on how that happens.
Katy Faust:
Now peaking as a pastor’s wife in Seattle, when I need to know what to do, I read Jeremiah. Jeremiah has all the words that I need to know to direct my steps. We really are a remnant, because everybody that lived in Seattle, everybody that was just here to have a nice life and make money has moved to Idaho. All that’s left is the remnant.
I read Jeremiah, and what we can do is we can get married, build houses, plant gardens, raise children, help them get married, build houses, have children. Actually, those simple things here in Seattle, that is the most countercultural thing that you can do right now. Do these small things to create your own mini society that is going to honor the Lord and then replicate itself. Remnants that do that, not even all societies, but remnants that do that will survive.
Albert Mohler:
Very well said. And other things survive. And this is just a testimony to the goodness of God. So even in Seattle, even in radically leftist, progressivist, west coast, Seattle, even in just about any part of the world you go to, but I’m thinking even of the liberal enclaves, I will see a parent walking along with a child. I will see them get to where they have to cross traffic. I see that little child’s hand go up and the parent’s hand come down, and I think God did that. There are still vestiges of the glory of God in creation, in Seattle, in Louisville and everywhere where we have the chance to see it. There are still arguments to be made and children to be protected and defended, and that ought to keep us busy.
Katy Faust:
Yeah, it certainly will.
Albert Mohler:
I just want to thank you for writing this book. I want to thank you for sharing your own story and for the passion and the obvious care for children that you bring to these arguments. I have one final question for you. Roughly two years after you must have finished this manuscript, because books take a while to come out, what has happened that you would put in a new edition of this book?
Katy Faust:
All of the reproductive technologies are still going and getting worse. We now have things like artificial wombs and robot nannies that are being developed in China. We’ve got to get that figured out. But probably in the legal realm, polygamy, right? The family redefinition train didn’t stop and pull into the station with same-sex marriage. It is rolling on. Now we are going to look at the expansion of the definition of marriage to group marriages. There really is no legal argument to be made against it. If we have the premise that marriage is just about with whom you share love and connection, because two men can have love and connection, and three men, or four men, and some women can have love and connection. That’s next in terms of the new front on the family redefinition train.
Other than that, everything else that is in the book, it’s not going to go away: the definition of marriage, the impact of divorce, the rise in promotion of same sex parenting, reproductive technologies, these are not going away. I think in the next few years and decades, what we are going to see is a chorus of children who have been harmed by these legal and technological developments rise up and say, “You starved me. You denied the right that I had to be known and loved by the two people responsible for my existence.” I do think that this isn’t over. Natural law is going to make itself known, and I think it’s going to make itself known through the testimonies of kids.
Albert Mohler:
Very well said. I predict the same by the way, that polyamory, as it’s known in the larger sense, without even reference to marriage in some cases, it is definitely the coming thing. It struck me the other day as I was speaking about this, that a part of the way the left works or a moral rebellion works, is that you have to continually broaden the constituency. So, it’s not just L, it’s LGBTQ, and then plus sign, whatever is coming. It just struck me, the thing about polyamory, you immediately multiply your constituency, because that’s not LGBT or whatever, conceivably that could be anyone, any place at any time for any duration. In some ways, that’s the ultimate annihilation of marriage and the family.
Katy Faust:
You do have activists who say, “We’re here to abolish marriage. We don’t want to redefine it. We want to abolish marriage.”
Albert Mohler:
And that’s effectively what it is.
Katy Faust:
Yeah. That’s what it is.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I want to thank you for writing this book. I want to thank you for joining us with this conversation. Again, the book is entitled Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement. Katy, it’s been a delight to have you on the program. I want to thank you for your work and God bless your work and God bless the children.
Katy Faust:
Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for standing firm. Thanks for shining a light on this issue.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest Katy Faust for joining with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com, under the tab, Thinking In Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.