"Biology Is A Bigot:" Katy Faust's Fearless Rebuke of Gay Parenting, Surrogacy, and IVF

We all see it, right? Two men being handed a baby in a hospital, rows of petri dishes with human embryos just sitting in a freezer. Something broke, and it seems like everyone has quietly accepted the new reality, that supposedly anyone has the right to children. Not only would saying something be impolite, it carries serious social and professional consequences. Katie Faust knows all of this personally. After writing about these issues anonymously, she was exposed and doxed by a disgruntled reader, an easygoing, affable mom.

Suddenly foisted into a heated debate. It would have been easy to quit. Instead, she decided to become a force for children's rights everywhere. That force has now become a movement growing bigger by the day. Your story begins a little, not predictably, I would say, in sort of a progressive home, right? Your parents divorced when you were pretty young, 10 years old, I believe, and your father dated, remarried. Your mother actually repartnered or married another woman. And so, you sort of saw all of the modern family in your own childhood, but today, you're one of the leading voices, you and your organization, Them Before Us, in defending a child's right to a mother and a father, and you take the lead on all of these more traditional family values.

So, could you share with us sort of how you got from child to Katie Faust today? Well, I always say it was a divine setup because I was not expecting to jump into the most hostile culture war issues at all on that sort of Christian spectrum of truth teller and grace giver. I am naturally much more of a grace giver. Like, I would rather not make waves. I would rather not confront. I'd rather not have hard conversations. I want to keep my friends.

I love to be loved. I hate to be hated. So, like, what I'm doing now is not something that I think I would have chosen at all. But when you look at the kind of issues that we confront and speak into, which is the true definition of marriage, divorce, and the absolute crime against children that no-fault divorce was, how normalizing Same-sex parenting requires child loss, reproductive technologies, and how they are the exact opposite of what adoption was meant to be, and then the loss that children experience and the redemption in adoption.

I mean, I'm like, okay, I can look back on my life and be like, I've got different elements of that sort of swirling around. Obviously, the divorce that you mentioned when I was 10. Thank God I stayed connected to both my mom and my dad, but there is No divorce where instability is not the result for the child. So, transitions as parents move, or repartner, or unpartner, or remarry, or divorce, or whatever after that.

Understanding sort of the dynamics of having a stepfamily or a new partner in my dad's world, being involved in the lesbian community in my mom's world. And from that, I did not get a, oh, I'm starved of the fatherly love because I had it. What I totally got from that is I'm really comfortable with gays and lesbians. Very, very comfortable. Just kind of grew up in that world. I wasn't a Christian, so that just kind of was like swimming in water to me.

So, now I'll get. You know, some blue-haired activist yelling at me about... Adult equality, and I just want to grab her and be like, I was living with lesbians since before you were born. Get on over here, tell me your pronouns, and let's just have coffee.

So then, I got married, well, became a Christian, got married. My husband ended up going to seminary, so he has been a pastor, so we've got a lot of theology chops and a lot of Bible love in our life, for sure. While he was in seminary, I was the assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world. So, very familiar with adoption, understanding it as an institution centered around the best interest of the child, and responsible in some ways for approving adult applications for that, and understanding that not every adult who wants a kid should get one.

And then... And then... Moving on to be responsible for compliance for our agency, for international, federal, and state-level standards for parameters around child placement, so pretty familiar with what adoption done right should look like, and then I became a mom myself and had three kids and understand that beauty and nurture and connection of gestating a child on your own and raising them and being committed to their father through thick or thin so they don't have to like We experience the instability and transitions that both my husband and I lived through as kids, and then God called us to adopt our youngest child, so now I understand that from an adoptive mom perspective, both the loss that he experienced by being starved of His Chinese mother and me, for almost the first two years of his life, and the very long recovery that that kind of deprivation leads to, an understanding of how adoption can redeem a broken situation, but you can't paper over that brokenness.

There's some really serious loss there that some adopted kids Won't get over on this side of heaven, and that doesn't mean the adoption is wrong. That means we better be pretty serious about the onus being on adults to ensure that children, their life, and their right to their mother and father are protected by doing hard things on their behalf so that they don't have to lose either. So, and then, of course, just the...

20 years in ministry together, where we did youth ministry, college ministry, junior high ministry, pre-marriage counseling, marriage crisis counseling, working with people who are struggling with infertility, lots of counseling of people with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria, and understanding on a heart level kind of the struggles that adults go through, but then recognizing that no amount of adult longing or loss or struggle justifies violating and victimizing the kids that were in the ministry who are walking through. The devastation of their father abandoning them, or their parents divorcing, or the new boyfriend moving into their house, or whatever it is.

Other than, like, I've never personally experienced infertility myself, there's kind of a touch point with everything that we're dealing with, where I can say, I know what you're saying. Yeah, I've been there. Oh, I understand. Yeah, I really get it. I've literally seen it. Yeah, and you, so you've mentioned how you have, so all these personal touch points that have sort of prepared you for this, for this activism.

But you've also mentioned in other interviews that for many years, you blogged anonymously about many of these issues. Was there one event or were there a series of experiences that led you to make the transition from pastor's wife in ministry and anonymous blogger to Katie Faust is now out there on every podcast talking to Jordan Peterson, hostile, friendly?

What sort of initiated that transition for you? I was outed by an aggressive gay blogger who back-searched a picture that I shared, traced it back to my husband's computer at... Our, at his church, doxed the members of my church to get me to take down my blog and shut up, and the only reason why I decided to keep going, because he totally, he had the right pressure point. I just felt horrible that people that didn't know that I had this midnight calling were made to pay for A blog that at the time, yeah, a couple hundred people would read each post, but I really felt absolutely driven by God to do it.

And he said, yeah, you know, take down your blog, and I'll take down the names. And I was going to do it, because I think it's hard enough for me to deal with criticism, but it's worse to make people that I love pay for something that they're not responsible for. So, I went to the elders of my church.

And I just said, I'm so sorry that we're now being flooded with negative Yelp reviews from people that have never been here, trashing our church. I'm sorry that this guy who is like a search engine optimization specialist has vowed that anybody that ever Googles the name of our church will never even get to the website until they've seen three or four posts that he's written about us instead. I'm sorry, and I'll stop. And they thought about it for a while, and they said, yeah, you could stop, or you could just...

Go really big. And so, it was the men of our church that really gave me the freedom to say, okay, if there's a cost, then I can just keep going. And then once my name was out there, I mean, people had followed the kind of niche people had followed my blog, but once my name was out there, people were like, hey, do you want to write an amicus brief for the Supreme Court? Hey, do you want to do a workshop at the United Nations?

Would you come to Australia and talk to our members of parliament? So, I actually never had like a 10-year plan or a five-year plan. The plan was wake up and obey. Like, whatever was in my inbox that I had capacity for, that's what I would do. Whatever I felt pressed to write about, that's what I would say.

You know, for years and years, any invitation I got, I would just say, this must be the will of God for me today. And then we formalized that in 2018. I mean, there are lots of organizations that believe in the importance of the family and believe in the natural family and understand that children need a mom and dad. And there are hundreds of organizations that are defending children's right to life against the. The viciousness of abortion. We are the only organization that is solely devoted.

I say solely devoted because, again, a lot of people agree with us, but we are the only ones that are saying our main mission is to defend children's right to their mother and father, which means we will be up in your business about divorce and cohabitation and the throuple that wants to adopt the child and surrogacy and reproductive technologies and IVF and a proper understanding of adoption and your open, non-monogamous, you know, Op-ed in the New York Times where you're talking about how this is so good for you and your kids.

No, it's not, and you're going to have to mess with us as a result. So, that's it. We just felt like children needed formal representation, both in the courts and in the culture. So, that's what we tried to do at Them Before Us. Mm-hmm. Perfect. Can you give us a sense of the scale of the demand in terms of raw numbers? So, you go public in 2017, 2018, and now it's 2025. So, what, how... Did you see sort of an immediate interest?

Has it ramped up in recent years? And what do those numbers look like at this point? Well, the culture has really fluctuated in terms of what they care about and where their attention is going. So, I was outed in 2014. Gay marriage was legalized in 2015, and it felt like a dead issue for years. So, I think that when I first started doing this in 2018, I would go, well, when I was formally at a nonprofit, that was right when surrogacy laws were really starting to be passed.

That was where the redefinition of parenthood was taking hold after Obergefell, because, spoiler, redefining marriage has redefined parenthood, and now mothers and fathers are becoming optional in parenthood law because we made husbands and wives optional in marriage law. So, that is a big focus of our work. Legally safeguarding children against the adult equality that would seek to render them functional accessories to any adult that has the money and means to acquire them. So, like, when I first started as a non-profit, I would talk about things like IVF.

I think, like, literally everybody just assumed I was Catholic because there was no... Protestants, there weren't any major, even the pro-life organizations that had Catholic leaders were not talking about IVF. They were only talking about abortion. Everyone, you know, we were talking about IVF pretty early on. Now, thank God, all of the major pro-life leaders respect it or address it or are going to critique it at some level. I think that IVF is going to be spotlighted in the March for Life in January.

So, like, we really have made a lot. I'm not saying I'm solely responsible for that, but I am saying that when I first started doing this, I would use- No one was asking, right. Yeah, and, like, I would go on pro-life podcasts, and they would lose donors because- They had me on, you know, but now they don't. Now I say, hey, remember this guy? So many people stopped donating, but he's been right, and you need to give him money. So, like, that has become a big focus.

I think in 2014, so I would say the numbers kind of depend on what's happening in the culture. So, last year, I swear, all we talked about was IVF after the Alabama decision. Before that, it had been a lot of surrogacy because we had just started to see a lot of those cases of Gay men acquiring children through surrogacy, and we had moved away from that picture where you'd see two men in a hospital bed with a shivering newborn, and people would go, all I see is two loving parents.

We sort of tripped a wire where now people are going. Why is he in a hospital bed, and where's the mother? Yeah, where's the baby's mom? Right. We have really, we were for a long time, well, there have been voices critical of surrogacy the whole time. They tend to be feminist voices that are critiquing the exploitation of women angle, which obviously is a factor, but nowhere near as important as the victimization of children in the question of surrogacy and the myriad ways that it impacts their life.

Their well-being. Their ability to stay connected to both their mother and father, their ability to have a state and have an identity and things like that. So, this year, not all we're talking about, but a vast majority of what we're talking about is marriage.

We are, at then before us, spearheading a national coalition of all the major conservative organizations and media platforms to retake marriage. They don't get to have marriage. Children get marriage. Gay people don't get to co-opt marriage so that they can, whatever, justice can, prove that they have dignity. They've got dignity, but so do kids. And kids' dignity, thriving, development, identity, and their very life depends on getting the definition of marriage right. So, we kind of flow through responding to whatever is kind of happening in the culture and making sure that when you're thinking about it, when it hits the headlines, We're, as much as possible, going to train you to think about that from the child's perspective, not the adult's.

Right, and you said, I love this line on a podcast that you did recently, you said that your job is to trigger people, that you pretty much, what you talk about triggers people, and I was contemplating this in terms of, it's become fashionable.

I think on the right to sort of abandon this more free market libertarian thing and be like, well, we have to have family policy. And so, you think of child-friendly policies, and most people go to, we need to reform car seat laws or car design for children, or we need to reform education, education funding. You've chosen to go straight for the bedroom issues. And I think you put your finger on it there. With talking about adult equality and this idea that somehow there's this adult equality that we have to open marriage, that adults can do whatever they want, ignoring what children want.

And I wonder about that framing, because I think that A big part of the reason it's so triggering is that people see, hear children's rights, and they think of children's rights as always in tension with or even over and against adult rights. How do you bridge that? How do you talk about the rights of children and sort of present it as, look, this is a human flourishing issue? Or do you? Do you see In our fallen world, maybe adult and children rights are at loggerheads.

How do you grapple with that? Yeah, good question. Ultimately, it all comes down to what do you mean by right? So, conveniently, anything an adult really, really wants today is framed as a right, a right to parenthood, a right to marriage, a right to choose, a right to government-funded birth control. And just because you want something doesn't make it a right. So, we actually spend quite a bit of time in the first chapter of our first book, Them Before Us, Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement, talking about what makes something a natural right.

And my co-author, Stacey, and I, we are not natural lawyers. We are moms. Who read and study, but don't talk or think the way that Robert George does, who wrote the foreword for that book for us. You know, one of the best, I think, most well-known natural law thinkers alive today.

And so, we talk about how there's three rules that make it a right test. Like, just for the normal person, do you want to know if something really is a natural right? And so, we have, like, three rules. Do you want to test a claim and know whether or not you have a right housing? Yeah, I'll tell you what it is. So, the first one is it needs to exist. Pre-government, right? The government doesn't give it to you. The government's there to protect it.

Number two is nobody has to provide it for you. So, if it has to be like... Foundation, sheetrock, plumbed, electric, roof, it's not a right. And number three, everybody has it in equal measure. If it can vary based on degree or allotment, it's not a natural right. So, a dorm room versus Mar-a-Lago, a GED versus a PhD, it's not a natural right. So, you have a natural right, things like your life or your ability to speak, right? Those are natural rights because it exists.

Pre-government, nobody provides it for you, and you all have it in the same measure. Same thing with your right to your parents. It exists pre-government, whether you're an evolutionist or an Adventist. Nobody has to provide it for you. If you exist, your parents also exist, and everybody always gets exactly two, one mom and one dad. So, it's a natural right.

You can look. Adults also have natural rights, one of them being the right to the children that are born to them, and we've had a bit of a resurgence, thank God, for this understanding of parental rights to direct the education, medical decisions, and upbringing of their own children. That is a fundamental natural right, and amazingly, when you define that right properly, and you define children's rights properly, what you see is there are two sides of the natural law point. They both perfectly reinforce one another.

So, when you properly define rights, there's no conflict between adult rights and child rights. What you see is this seamless garment of unity within the family unit, especially, and then you really see that the government shouldn't tread on it. Very much. No, that's a great answer. I think, too, in Catholic circles, there's always this tension. There was a Catholic thinker named Marian Glendon who warned against Catholics relying too much, and Christians too, relying too much on rights talk. You know, rights talk, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, the rights talk issue that because rights have become understood as something the government grants us, which is, you know, it explains some of the passion with which gay rights activists fought for Obergefell, because they're like, well, we don't have this until you give it to us, and somehow we don't have that dignity until you give it to us, which, again, dignity is. Pre-government, as I think we'd agree. And another thread that came up... In that conversation was the idea that with every right comes responsibility, and the idea of duties, which we don't like to talk about duty, because it sounds so Puritan and like Victorian old school or something, and incumbent and burdensome.

But I think that I love how Them Before Us articulates the responsibilities of adults that are sort of the A complementary factor when you're talking about rights of children, and that the idea of having a responsibility to a child isn't burdensome, and it isn't like a shackle on you, but it's actually a way that you flourish as a human person, as a woman, as a mother, as a man, as a father.

And I do appreciate the way that your organization articulates that responsibility aspect of it. I will say, it does burden you. I mean, everything that's going to give you... It is hard. ...in some way, and so the problem is not to throw off the burdens. It is to make sure that the person, the right people in the relationship are properly burdened, because it's not like there's no burden. The question is, who's going to bear the burden? Is it going to be the kid that bears the burden, or is it going to be the adult that bears the burden?

Who's going to do the hard thing for who? I mean, somebody will do the hard thing, and a lot of the ways that we have so overhauled the social fabric in this country and in countries across the West is by... Pretending like there's no hard. Like, oh, you've got a marriage that's struggling because you've got financial debt, or he plays video games too much, or you really have genuine communication breakdown, or she's dealing with childhood baggage.

Yeah, that's a real burden, and so we pretend like, well, why don't you guys just have a clean break, or go be with the person that really understands you, and the kids will be fine because they're resilient. You pretend like there's no burden, but the reality is there is a burden. Either the adults will bear the burden, and they are going to get therapy and accountability, and they're going to grow up, or the children will bear the burden by living in the instability, the split homes, the new partners.

The maybe new siblings who then probably are going to be lost sooner than their first siblings were, or their first parent was, and in 50% of the cases, have a split personality because life at mom's house and dad's house are so radically different.

I think that we have pretended like, well, love makes a family, so two moms can raise a child. No, no, you are just forcing the child to do the hard thing of losing their father so that you can have a child, a home with two mothers. So, let us just stop pretending that there is no burden here. There is always a burden. Who is going to carry it? And if your answer is the child, you have a world that is characterized by injustice.

Yeah, and it's a particularly, it's a uniquely Christian notion, though, right? In history and in theology, it's uniquely Christian to say that the burden should be borne by the stronger person, right? That was a radical shift in humanity when Jesus Christ came and died on the cross and rose again and said, the last shall be first, the first shall be last, except to receive the little children.

And so you receive me. So, I can see how appealing to a Christian sensibility, the Christian faith, this is very, very persuasive. But you have been articulating these ideas for a very secular audience. I mean, you've talked to Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people at this point who don't necessarily share that Christian faith. So, I guess my question would be for you, what arguments or evidences or rhetoric have you found the most compelling to move the needle of a secular public opinion on these issues?

Yeah, it's a good question, and I have, like, crazy evangelical bona fides. Like, I've got, like... She's got the books out. We have the Bibles with the tabs. What Bible do you want? Like, oh, man. Like, Bible options. I carry one in my purse. I've got, like, three different apps on my phone. My husband has a doctorate in ministry. You know, he was the senior pastor of our church forever, like, at a high school conversion. I've smuggled Bibles in other countries.

Like, I try to read the Bible with everyone that I'm with. I am... A junkie. But... In our first book, where we make the case for children's rights, there's no Bible verses, and that is a tactical decision. It's not because I don't revere Scripture and recognize it as my ultimate authority, because I do. It's because I recognize that the general public does not respond to my special authority, my special revelation of Scripture, the way that they are going to respond to the general revelation of the world that God has made.

And so, it is easier for a Christian to say, well, God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Rather than refuting the bad studies that show that children raised by two men fare no different than kids raised by their mother and father, but I actually think the work of child defense requires that we be very good at this, and being very good at it means grounding our arguments in something other than solely scripture, or for Catholics, solely the teachings of the church.

I think that you should be bilingual in the ways that you're able to talk about this. Convince and fortify your friends who attend church with you, attend mass with you, to give them confidence in what they believe. But I think the main way you do that is not just explaining what the church teaches or what the Bible says, but why it's so good. And that's actually what we do at Them Before Us, because like our chapter on divorce in our first book.

It's only like 20 pages long, but there's probably 120 footnotes in it. We've squeezed in all of the research that we can, the best studies that we've got on divorce, into a very, very small window to give you confidence that when God talks about what God has joined together, let no man separate, that's not some arbitrary thing. That's actually a critical characteristic of marriage that leads to child thriving. And it's better to be able to say, I've got the data behind that.

I mean, I understand that when we transgress God's design for the permanence in marriage, it means that girls are 65% more likely to be a teen mom. You're around 40% more likely to go to prison if you're a boy, and you're 35% to 55% more likely to die an early death.

If parents divorce. I mean, doesn't that add an awful lot of credibility to the word of God when he says this should be a permanent union? Rather than just telling your kids, well, the Bible says it, I believe it. That settles it. Shut up, don't ask questions. So, I have found that we've chosen to argue from the world of God, natural law, social science, the testimonies of children themselves who have experienced mother or father loss, and it always reinforces and complements the Word of God, because they've got the same author, right?

It's really two different books, the books of scripture and the book of the world. Yeah, very much so. And I love that. It maps on so perfectly with the Catholic intellectual tradition that faith and reason are the two lungs through which the Christian breathes, and that they're both, like you said, God wrote both of these words for us.

It is compelling to look at these studies. I do have a question. So, it's hard with young people, speaking with young people on campuses, in a high school setting, there seems to be a growing lack of skepticism about science, about scientific studies and reliability and statistics. And you think of the great Israeli quote that's like, there's lies, damn lies in statistics.

Do you ever sense that people just kind of throw studies around? And I found this when I was preparing the video on gay parenting, that you have, here's the Obergefell amicus briefs for, in favor of gay marriage, that were like, here's all of our studies, and then it's all, here's all of our studies. So, how would you, how would you explain, basically, how do you discern between a good Good set of scientific studies or sociological studies and propaganda. What are markers that you look for that you could share with our audience who might be like, it's just yours against mine, you know?

It does feel like yours against mine, and let me go back just a step and talk about the bewilderment that Gen Z and even some kind of young, and Gen Alpha are really grappling with, because we are now in an information age where they have endless amounts of information. Everything, yeah.

And so, the problem is not access to information. The problem is recognition of authority. What sources are they going to consider authoritative? That is really the question. So, that is a problem, and it's an opportunity. So, the problem is, you choose the wrong authority, and you'll wreck your life. You'll wreck your mind. You'll wreck your body. You'll wreck your relationships. The opportunity is, you choose the right authority, who is giving you the right take on the right information, and you can create it.

A teen or a student who is able to influence their world in the direction of the good, true, and beautiful in ways that previous generations did not have access to. So, I'm not saying or recommending that everybody listening to this should start a podcast or a website or a non-profit. No more podcasts. But I am saying, if you can... If you can establish yourself as an authority with your children early on, you are going to be able to not just save them from a lot of misery, but set them up to really be influencers of culture rather than influenced by culture.

Do the hard work early on to make sure that you are a source of trustworthy information for your kids, because they will have to sort things out. They are going to come to you and say, Just, I mean, not to trigger anybody outside of the scope of the current triggering, but they are going to come to you and say, are Jews running the world? They are going to come to you and say, what is the problem with pot? They are going to come to you and say, I actually think that it's probably okay to just fudge a little bit on this test, because my teacher hates my belief, and I just need to get a good grade.

And so, like, all of those different questions, they're going to turn to somebody for counsel for that. They're going to turn to the people that they consider to be authoritative, and it's just a lesson for parents to Establish themselves as authorities very, very early on. So, we, not to transition, but we've been really careful about that with our kids, and I co-authored another book called Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City. It's excellent. How do you do that at different ages, like elementary school, middle school, and high school?

What are the emotional components that need to be in place? What topics do you need to address, and when, and how? Which sources should you yourself look to as it relates to that? So, I just will say, yes, the perils out there of kids doubting.

Institutions that I wish they were able to trust, like the church or the CDC or the Supreme Court or certain media personalities that used to be pretty trustworthy who now have sort of slipped down into a conspiratorial rabbit hole, I wish that they could trust those authorities.

They may not be able to, but they should be able to trust you, and then you should be able to direct them to trustworthy authorities that, once it gets sort of outside your area of expertise or your ability to know. Okay, that was a teeny, teeny, teeny segue. So, on the topic of same-sex parenting studies, we actually do, and you probably, you created such a good video on this, and so you probably have the framework nailed down even better than I do, but social science.

Is a little bit subjective, but not totally subjective. We really do have sort of gold standard criteria to determine whether or not you can take the results of a survey or a study and expand that to apply to an entire population, and it has to do with the methodologies that you use. You know, if I just drop into my local Baptist church, and I say, What do you think about Baptists? Are they really good parents? Oh, they are? Great. And what if you knew that your church was going to get a great Yelp review, depending on how you answer this question?

And your kids are not going to be allowed to answer. We're not even going to look at them. We're not going to look at their school records, and we're not going to look at whether or not they're being medicated at early ages. We just want to know from you whether or not your kids love being raised by Baptist parents. Right? I'm like, you're going to get a really different response. Then if you survey children who were raised by Baptists when they're 25 on their own, and there's no incentive to, like, get that Yelp review, like, you're going to be able to say, you know, they were a little too restrictive on Halloween, I've got to say.

I kind of feel like they, you know. Three season, I love it, yeah. Yeah, and the whole, like, no alcohol thing, not that we're a no alcohol church, but, like, that I couldn't play cards, it felt like a little too restrictive, and it made me kind of question. What other rules are they passing down that probably are more culturally informed than biblically informed, or something like that? So, there are actual ways to conduct studies to know whether or not the results are going to be able to be extrapolated onto the wider population, and the truth is that there are no different studies, as you all know.

Generally don't follow that gold standard for social science. They tend to use small sample sizes. They tend to employ recruited or volunteer participants, not people that were chosen at random. They tend to survey the opinions of the parents, not the actual outcomes of the children. They tend to not have adequate control groups. Very few of them are longitudinal, where they're studying the same group over a long period of time. Like, it cracked me up. There was this study that came out.

Two or three years ago, that showed that gay fathers were superior to lesbian fathers and heterosexual couples. And how do they know? Because gay fathers report that their kids do great at school. Gay fathers report that their children are emotionally resilient. Gay fathers report that their children have lower levels of distress than other kids. Well, gay fathers are just less honest than heterosexual parents. That's really the conclusion for that. So, this is another area where I think that you should know enough to be able to refute those bad ideas.

Does it take a little effort? Yeah, it does. It's not easy to be like, oh, thanks for Googling same-sex parenting studies and delivering me the Cornell summary of the 75 that say there's no difference. Oh, wow. Like, you do need to have a little bit of wherewithal for that kind of thing, but this is the battle of our time. Marriage and family Parenthood? Divorce? Whether or not kids need moms and dads, this is the battle of our time. This is the way the culture is seeking to victimize children, and you, the church, are God's plan A for child protection here.

So, this is where I think that we need to get some due diligence under our belt and be able to have some great answers. A hundred percent. Great argument for women's education, too, because we need to be able to talk about this thing. I wanted to turn, and there's definitely a connection here. You mentioned it right at the top. How Obergefell changed legally sort of the status of all parents, and no one was really thinking along those lines. And at the time of Obergefell, I mean, the stats for both of our churches are not great in terms of, you know, Catholics overwhelmingly, not overwhelmingly at first, but by now, the majority of Catholics are like, well, if they just want to get married, whatever.

It doesn't affect us, and like, it doesn't affect the abortion thing. It's not a pro-life. And I think that, like you said, you've picked up on this and going after Obergefell. Talk about triggering. Oh, my goodness. I cannot wait for this to hit the mainstream. We really are trying to overturn Obergefell, people. Yes. We are. Not only are we trying, but I'm totally going to. My coalition is going to do it. I cannot wait. I'm here for it. I'm here for it, and I will help fund the party to celebrate.

Well, actually, let's just work together on this. This is really important. I love it. So, could you spell that out a little bit more for people who might be like, wait, what? Obergefell Parenting? I thought it was just like, leave us alone. We just want to get married. Love is love. So, what exactly is going on there legally?

I'm going to give you... As close as I can, as tight as possible, the connection between gay marriage and child victimization, but if you go to the Them Before Us sub stack, you should see pinned right at the top why gay marriage needs to go, and you will get this laid out in detail with links and receipts. So, if you need more of an explanation, you can find it there, but here is the gist of it.

Marriage has sort of functioned as the sun at the center of the marriage and family and parenthood solar system. And so, when you swap out a sun that, at its heart, has a procreative function, and you swap in a sun that is ordered around adult desire, validation, and identity, all of the different planets in the constellation are going to have to realign. And so, what we have seen since Obergefell came down is we have seen all the different planets absolutely start spinning in another direction or drop out of the solar system altogether.

So, here's a few examples, and let me tell you why. Let me tell you why this is. Okay. So, what Obergefell said is that it is discriminatory to treat two men different from a man and a woman in matters of marriage. It is discrimination. Those two men need to be afforded the full constellation of benefits that marriage provides to heterosexual couples.

Now, one of the benefits of marriage has been the fact that Those children come from that union and deserve to be raised by that mother and father, but if gay couples need to have equal access to that benefit, that means gay couples need to have equal access to children. Now, that is a problem because biology is a bigot. And biology discriminates against two men that want to become parents. Biology actually prohibits those two men from being parents of a child. But the law has said you can't discriminate.

So now the law must accomplish what biology forbids. The law must now make two adults of the same sex parents of a child. So, they have to find a way to give these adults children that is not a biological system.

Further, gay couples over the past 10 years, and even before, had talked about how adoption was invasive. And undignifying. Why should I have to adopt the child of my wife, or the child of my husband? Heterosexual couples don't have to adopt their spouse's children, because it's also their child. And so, what they've done is they've created this new pathway for parenthood, because biology and adoption was deemed as discriminatory for same-sex couples. They've created a new pathway for parenthood, and it's called intent-based parenthood.

I just did a sub stack on this on Tuesday, if you want more information about it. But intent-based parenthood says, if you can assemble a child by gathering sperm, egg, and womb, and you've got the proper contracts, then you walk out of the hospital with that baby, even if there's no genetic connection, there's no biology, and even though you have not undergone adoption screening and vetting, there's no adoption. It's simply, I intend to parent this child, I get the baby.

So, that is a problem, because when the state can assign parenthood to somebody who is not the biological parent and who has not undergone adoption, vetting, and screening, that means the state has the power to determine who is and is not a parent. So, that is a problem for two reasons. Number one, it's a problem for the child that goes home with the person who is unable to fulfill their understanding of a biological identity.

They've lost their mother or father in the process. They have lost one or both of the parents who are statistically the most connected to, invested in, and protective of them. And number three, they're going home with an adult who statistically has the greatest chance of abusing them. So, it endangers the child who is going home with that person who is the intended parent. But it also imperils your relationship to your children and my relationship to my children. And I... I did an article at First Things a couple months ago called The End of Natural Parenthood, where I talked about how once the state can assign parenthood to unrelated adults, it is very easy to unassign it from you.

If the state has the power to determine who is and is not a parent, then they can make sure that you are not the parent of your biological children. And I went through about nine different laws that used to recognize the preeminence of the natural parent-child relationship, and I looked at how, since Obergefell, those have all been Weakened or completely overthrown in the name of adult equality. So, you have to pick. In the world of marriage and family, you can either privilege the natural parent-child relationship that benefits not only the children, but also the parents, or you can privilege a state-constructed family where the state determines who is or is not the parent of the child, but you can't have both, and gay marriage will.

So, if you believe that children deserve not just a mother and father, but their mother and father, if you believe that you have a right not just to any child in the nursery, but the one you gave birth to, you are against gay marriage. You don't get to have both. You have to choose. I would strongly recommend, if you consider yourself a Christian, you side with the kids, because like you said, this is part and parcel of the Christian life. This flows from the Christian understanding that we do not cause little ones to stumble.

Woe to us if we do. So, we've written about this quite a bit on our Substack and at a variety of different places. I understand that was a bit of a race. Through a pretty complex topic, but it's actually very serious. Yeah, and I would encourage everyone, we're going to leave in the show notes a link to the Substack and then the First Things article, as well as both your books. So, I highly, highly recommend Christians and Catholics. We need to be up to date on this and understanding exactly what is at stake here.

This isn't just about feelings and you want to be nice to everyone and your neighbors who are gay and nice and happy. This is about a much deeper issue of justice. I know we only have a few minutes left.

But I did want to touch on the IVF a little bit, and you mentioned that this has been, since the Alabama decision last year, that this has been front and center. It's been a huge sort of touch point for the Catholic world, and a great source of disappointment to have sort of what people have interpreted as a tepid response from J.D. Vance, and then to see RFK, Maha, Mann, get up there with Trump. recently in the Oval Office and say, you know, we're so excited about this new pro-life.

We're going to encourage IVF. So for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about this and feeling that sense of betrayal by Maha. How do you frame IVF to people who are like, but this is just making more babies, and isn't that what pro-lifers want? How do you frame that issue for them? My shortest answer is, we are so grateful for the 2-3% of lab-created children that are born alive. I just wish I could have met their siblings.

I just think it's a tragedy that... By our best estimate, big fertility in the form of IVF destroys maybe four times the number of little lives as abortion does. So, the truth is, this is not a child-friendly technology, even though some children are born because of IVF. Side note, anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of the ones that are actually born alive lose their mother or father or both in the process. So, it is like there are so many different child rights, right to life, right to their mother and father, right to be born free, not bought and sold, right to not be used as a eugenics project or a designer baby that IVF contributes to.

What is the tactic we should take? Honestly, it's the same tactic that we use for every other conversation. I think half of my job is taking the spotlight off of adults and what they want in their backstory or their sadness or their longing or their feelings or their identity and shining it on the child and saying, you're actually not the victim here. You, the same-sex attracted person, you're not the victim. You with the unplanned pregnancy, you're not the victim. You struggling with infertility, you are not the victim.

The child who loses their life, the child who loses their mother or father so that you can have what you want, they are the victim. So, to me, that is the tactic moving forward. The victim determines the policy.

So, you have got to very properly identify the victim. It's not sad adults, even though we can empathize with them. We should empathize with them. They have a burden that we should help bear, but the bright line is, don't you transfer that burden to a child? Don't you make them do the hard thing because you refuse to? I will not allow you to inflict that injustice on them, at least without speaking up. I'll speak up, and if possible, I'll throw up a hell of a lot of legal roadblocks as well.

So, I think that that's it. We do have quite a learning curve with IVF. Obviously, I think the Catholics have been much more consistent on this, and the Protestant world has. Come a long way, but has so much farther to go when it comes to this topic.

So, I think that that's the way to go, is whenever possible, we shine the light on the real victims. Obviously, the dead ones don't speak, which is kind of a problem, but then the ones that do come through the process, who lost their mother or father because of it, or maybe are a little burdened by the fact that they have eight frozen siblings that they've never met, or they're growing up with an older sister who is eight years older than them, but genetically, they're like, I mean, chronologically, they're the same age and the kind of like mind tripping that that results from them.

We need to spotlight the stories of really earnest pro-life people who were misled and now lay awake at night because they're 57 and they still have five frozen children in storage that they can't thaw and discard, donate to research, and they don't have the stomach to have another family raise them. I mean, like.

We need to be a little more vocal about the cost to the most vulnerable in these processes, and we cannot allow, like any other conversation about marriage or divorce or modern families or anything, it cannot get hijacked by sad adults. We have to shine the spotlight on the real victims, which are kids. Right, and that is the beauty of Them Before Us. I'm so impressed with everything that you've put out. I am going to have, at the end of this interview, we're going to play a video that Them Before Us put out.

It's a powerful sort of dramatization. ...of a small child confronting IVF. It will move your heart, and I think that medium of telling the story through the eyes of the child is so convincing and so important. And after all, as Christians, we worship Christ the victim. We worship Christ the victim and the priest, but He's the Lamb of God who was slain. And so, of course, in our work politically, in our neighborhoods, in our families, we have to... to keep the victim front and center.

That's our faith, and thank you so much for responding to God's call to bring this to the public discourse, really, in a way that has not been done before. So, thank you, Katie. Thanks for being a voice out there that is It's ringing the gong for child protection because there's not enough doing it. I think if the church became the child-centric fighting force that God designed for it to be, we would be in a really different place. It is going to take courage.

There will be a social cost, but kids are worth it. Yeah, and this is what Christians have been doing since the beginning. I mean, we were the ones pulling the babies off the trash heap in Rome. Come on, people. We can keep doing this. Yeah, very well. Well, thank you so much for your time again, and yeah, look forward to speaking with you again soon.