Children's Rights Advocate EXPOSES the Dark Side of Gay Marriage & IVF (ft. Katy Faust) | Live Free
 with Josh Howerton

No, you don't have a right to marriage and you don't have a right to parenthood and you don't have a right to choose. Children have a right to life and they have a right to their mother and father. When you use something not according to its design, things go wrong. What you believe has real life consequences, not just for yourself. It's not all about you. It's actually about the people around you. It's about your legacy, about your children. Well, hey, Live Free Nation. Before we jump into the episode, this podcast is recorded right here at Lake Point Church in Dallas, Texas. But the Live Free Nation is spread all over the country and all around the world. So if you've been watching and thinking, man, I wish I could be part of something like this, we want to invite you to take a simple next step, and that is join us for Church Online. Every weekend we stream our services live on YouTube, Facebook, and our Church Online platform. And it's more than just watching a service. There are live hosts in the chat, prayer teams ready to stand with you, and people all around the world worshiping together in real time. And so whether you're exploring the faith, coming back to church, or just looking for a place to start, Church Online is a great way to jump in and experience what God is doing here at Lake Point. We would love to see you in the chat this weekend. And now enjoy the podcast. Well, hey, welcome back to another episode of the Live Free Podcast. My name is Carlos Erazo, and I am here today with Pastor Paul Cunningham. Come on, man. What's going on, bro? It is good to be back.

Yeah. Where's Pastor Josh? Man, you know, who knows where he's at this week? He's been a world traveler. No, I'm just messing. He is busy prepping for next year's sermon. So he usually takes the summer to do some praying and some prepping for next year. So he's right now praying over 2027 and what God's leading him to preach on, man. We're going to do a little prank on Pastor Josh, and we decided we were going to save it. Yes, we are. We are going to save that prank. I, you know, I'm just saying I'm gone a week, I'm gone a week, and I go to Israel. Um, no, I did not. Um, everybody was commenting on that on social media. Well, you should have let it linger a little bit, and then you would have been like, actually, just kidding. I know. Well, but you guys, you advertised that last week. So it's really no surprise. Whenever you get a chance to go to Israel, which I hope happens soon. And I hope I get to be a part of that experience because I want to share in the joy. That's going to be, we're going to celebrate. We're going to celebrate. It's going to be a party. We'll maybe live, like live broadcast from Israel that I'm there for proof and stuff like that. I'm going to need a Israel tattoo on you for that trip. I think it can happen. Not on me, but definitely on you. Listen, I may talk you into it while we're there.

You can try. I'm gone for a week. And while I'm gone, apparently a new t-shirt is made in my honor. That's right. And you know, about joking about me going to Israel and how I've not been yet. It's a serious t-shirt. But, but seriously though, when Amy and I were posting t-shirts. Available where all t-shirts are sold on our merch shop. That's a joke. It's not there. It's not there. It's not. I'll be ready to hand make a lot of those. Let us know in the comment section, if you want that shirt as a part of our merch. Someday, actually we should remix it. Someday, Paul will go to Israel. That's right. That's right. But anyways, before I even saw that video, by the way, when the, when the podcast posted, like when we were posting pictures, we were in Quebec, Canada. People were literally just like on social media was sending me a message. No Israel. And I was like, bro, like, come on. So they beat you to it on that. But anyways, I'm gone for a week and all that happens. And then by the way, I'm gone for a week and you go to the capital. You go to DC and actually go to the capital. That was not on my bingo card this year. Oh man. Tell us about it, man.

How did you get there? What was it? What was it? What was that about? Literally a couple of days ago. So our friend Frank Turek extended the invitation and had the opportunity to go to Washington, DC to the Capitol. And we spend an evening with speaker, Mike Johnson, which was phenomenal way. And we had a little bit of a spiritual heritage tour in the Capitol. Man, honestly, it was really cool to see how faith is woven into the art of the Capitol and also the architecture and the history there's a lot that I could share with you, Paul, you you've been there, right? I have been. I've been to Israel. I've actually been to the Capitol multiple times. Okay. More than me, probably. No, I'm just saying I've been to the Capitol. I'm tracking with you on this one. So honestly, like probably one of the coolest experiences ever. I wish I had more time to just spend there. Cause it was literally like, we just went there. Um, but if you go in there, I mean, there's like a Capitol prayer room for members of Congress. There's like a stained glass window with a Psalm 16, one that says, preserve me, Oh God, for in thee. Do I put my trust? There's like literally artwork depicting, um, faith and religious elements, like literally everywhere. There's like a painting of like the baptism of Pocahontas.

Um, and so honestly, like so much history, um, the, it really shows just how Christianity profoundly impacted the, uh, the founders of our nation. And I want to show you my favorite actually. So Trinity, if you can pull up that photo, this right here is a photo of the house chamber. And if you, if you are familiar with this place, uh, like I was before, you probably seen the, the presidential address state of the union. This is where it happened. The photo makes it seem like this is a very big room, but it's actually quite small. Yeah, really. Lots of history. This is where the representatives meet to pass on, uh, to debate laws, to vote on legislation. Basically, these decisions are made in that room. Again, lots of history there. What I found fascinating is, if you go to the next photo, above the speaker's chair, not that one, actually, the one with the American flag, above the speaker's chair, if you pay attention, right above the American flag, for whatever reason, this doesn't make the TV whenever this is aired, but I don't know why, we probably need to change that, find a way. It says, in God we trust. Big letters right above the American flag. Again, this just means, above the American flag, then we are one nation, under God. Every law passed by the house begins its journey in a room where the words, in God we trust,

are just big, right there, bold in your face. Which means, again, government leaders are accountable to a higher moral authority. Now, in that room, as well, one more thing, around the room, there are portraits of different lawgivers in history. So, let me show you one, this is what it looks, these are little circles around the room. What a beard. I do not know, I try to recognize some of the names, honestly, I wasn't aware of some of these, this is like Justinian, Hammurabi, et cetera, and every single one of these faces and portraits are looking towards the side, except for one. In the middle, right in front of where the speaker is, if right across, there is one photo, and the lawgiver in that photo is this one, you can see it, is Moses. He's the only one that's not looking to the side, he's looking to the front, and here's the point, he's the one that gave us the law of God. God's law is above every other human law, and that's the point. Dude, that's so cool, I'm so glad you had that experience, man, that's killer. It was amazing, honestly, again, I wish I had more time, like, there's so much there, but very grateful for it. So good, man, well, good to be back with you, man, glad to be here with you. Hey, bro, week two of At The Movies.

Come on, dude, he's doing best series. You like the movie? Oh, man, it's so good, it's so good. I love At The Movies, we're getting to hear stories of people, like, we actually heard one at AllSath this week talking about how, literally, sometimes this'll be the series that they would not come to church for any other reason, people who were far from God, but then they come, and they hear the gospel explained in a simple way they can understand, and they find new life in Christ, man. It's one of my favorites. Bro, we had 170-plus students get baptized. Oh, this is so good, man. So, big celebration, here's a quick story, not from this weekend, but of a family I met literally, like, a couple weeks before. Trinity, if you got that photo, this right here is Anthony and Eunice, and they're a beautiful family. So, they were telling me that they lived in Illinois. At some point, they stumbled upon Lake Point Church Online and Live Free, they started to tune in regularly, and at some point, they were like, man, whatever this church has, we want it. We need it in our family, and so they decided to come visit on an Easter, and then they just felt the conviction, we believe God is calling us to move our family, to sell our home, to come over here, they literally drove to Dallas. This is literally a photo after they got baptized.

They're now plugged in, they're gonna look for a rooted group, and Lake Point is now their home. That's amazing. Welcome home. Welcome home. Bro, that's amazing. That is so amazing. Hey, if you are ever in the DFW area, and you're a part of the Live Free Nation, coming out, we'd love to say hi. Yeah, man. We get to, honestly. Who knows, God may call you to move here one day, man. Be careful. God may call you. Just be careful. Watch out. That's right. If you come visit, God might say, actually, I want you to move here, and if you do, we'd love to see you on a regular. Also, if you're here visiting for the first time, we got a free gift for you, so come say hi. Find our first-time guest tent. We do a giveaway every single week, so if you're on YouTube or Spotify, comment hat. We would love to hook you up. We got these two hats as well if you want some more merch. By the way, we're working on new merch. No way.

Yes, absolutely. Including the Israel shirt? Perhaps. Is that gonna be a part of it? Limited edition. If the people want it. And I want you to sign it for people. Hand sign all of them? If you want to find our merch, go to livefree.shop or text the word hat to 20411. Thank you for subscribing and liking all the things on YouTube, Spotify. It's fun to see that, man. Also, to download the Lake Point Church app, you can text the word app to 20411. That's where you'll find a daily Bible reading plan, amongst other things. Bro, we have a really unique episode today. Yes, we do. Honestly, I'm so excited. We have Katie Faust coming in as a guest. I think this is probably gonna be one of the most interesting conversations, literally, we've ever had on this podcast. 100%. We're covering some things that we've covered before. So I think we are hitting gay marriage. We'll address IVF, which we addressed, I think, around a year ago, and some other things around that. But what Katie does so amazingly

is she comes at it from angles that most people don't. So if you're only hearing the topics and you're thinking, oh, I've heard you guys address this before. Nope. I'm guessing you've never heard it addressed the way Katie does. That's right. I encourage you to tune into that conversation. Extremely valuable. Honestly, again, I think one of my personal favorites, so I'm so excited for it. conversation. So, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do this one real quick, and then we're going to jump into the conversation with Katie here in just a minute. But this weekend, obviously, week two of At The Movies, great week, man, facing fears, running towards the storm by the grace of God. You know, if you're a Christian, we are called to live not by fear, but by faith, running towards whatever it is God has called us to run towards. So, here's what we're going to do, Paul, we're going to try to make this super practical, if somebody is coming out of this weekend's message and, you know, maybe it's still wrestling with some sort of fear, we're going to try to be helpful. What's one nugget that you're like, hey, this is what I want you to keep in mind as you wrestle with your fear that will help you in your walk with Jesus. You're going to share one nugget, I got a little something, and then we're going to jump into the conversation with Katie Faust on. I love it. Before I share that nugget, though, I'm going to put you on the spot. Okay.

Oh my goodness. What's the fear you have? And I don't mean like a deep-seated, like philosophical fear. I mean, like, just like what's a superficial or random fear that you have? Like a, okay. So not being superficial? No, it can just be whatever. Like, you know, are you afraid of clowns or anything like that? I'm not afraid of clowns. Okay. Huh. Putting me on the spot here. I know I am putting you on the spot. You're afraid of facing messy, if your team ever had to face messy. I would not be afraid. I would be excited to face messy. Uh, and, uh, and yeah. I can share some of mine if you're, cause apparently you're not afraid of anything. No, I didn't say that. Oh, I don't know if this is a fear. Go ahead. You share yours. And then. Oh, I mean, for me, mine are, mine are pretty classic. It's like snakes, spiders, sharks, you know? I mean, this to me, the three S's for sure. Um, also like for me, like. Have you seen a shark in real life? Yes, I have. Okay.

Uh, and the, for me though, like a random, and actually when we were in Canada, I had to, I had to deal with this fear. Oh, I should have thought about this and brought the video for you guys to watch. Could you see me holding on for dear life? Oh, that's a fail on my part. Anyways. So when it comes to heights, I'm not afraid of heights if I'm on like just natural land or something like that, like that. So I'm a backpacker, I'm a hiker. I can stand on the edge of a thousand foot cliff and not feel nervous at all. But if it's anything manmade, I do not like it. It's like a fear of my life. I hate glass windowed elevators. So like where I can see out of the elevator when it's moving, like I'm right now, like cringing, thinking about it. I can feel it welling up. Or, uh, when we went to Quebec, we tried some different things. My wife and I did, it was just she and I. So she had to try a multi-course meal where she didn't know what food was coming out and that makes her nervous. Uh, she made me go ziplining over a waterfall that's taller than Niagara Falls. And so I had to walk up these stairs up the side of the cliff, like 487 stairs to it, which I was freaking out the whole time. And then I had to zipline and we were up high and, oh, are you kidding me? Oh yeah. It's like, if you actually, there's, we have video of it. I am like clinging on. She's like screaming, I love you, baby.

I'm not even like looking at her. I'm like just looking straight ahead. Yeah, no, it's a huge fear of mine. But you enjoyed it. I enjoyed, I enjoyed surviving. You enjoyed it when it ended. Yeah. Huge smile on my face when it was over. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, I don't know if this is a fear, but this is definitely something that I'm like, it gives me something like I feel ebgbs or, you know, just something, uh, it's rats. I hate rats. Okay. Uh, whenever I hate it, I absolutely hate it. Whenever, you know, we've had not, not in my current home, but in my previous home, um, it was an older home and we had a rat once in a while, like somehow get inside and bro, I absolutely hated it. Cause I'm like, dang it. Now it's my job to figure out a way to like squish this thing, somehow kill it. Uh, and then, uh, but, and I, I don't like it. By the way, uh, for context for people that didn't, you know, you know, we're not able to join us for at the movies. Uh, the movie was twisters. Yes. So we're talking about fear and facing that afraid of tornadoes or storms. Uh, I'm afraid of what they do to houses and people. Yeah. That's probably actually a decent thing to be afraid of. I wouldn't want you to see a tornado.

I'm like, Oh, I'm going to move towards that. No, yeah, yeah. So that's the context. What do you got for, well, partly I was just interested as we were sharing. It just dawned on me. I'd never asked you these things. Good, good little ammo to know that you're afraid of rats in case you ever pick on me too much about Israel. Uh, no, that would, I would never do such as anyways. Uh, no, but also there's something like we all have fears, like, and some of them are like superficial or small, but then also some of them are very serious. And partly I would just tell people, Hey, fear is simply an emotion. It's an emotion that we feel. In fact, I would even say in some ways it can be a God wired emotion. Cause if we never felt any fear, we would probably do some really stupid things. The issue becomes when the fear begins to control us and keep us from stepping into what God would have us to step into or to overcome. So in terms of a practical nugget to help people overcome it, I don't want to feel like I'm going against something that Pastor Josh said in sermon, but in his sermon, he'd said, face your fears. I'm going to amend it a little bit. I've said for a while, although not a minute, I think it's the same basic point, you're like, oh yeah, you waited till he was gone so you could disagree with him. That's right. I knew that's what you were thinking. No, actually not at all. But no, no, no. So here's what I would say is this, man, if you're in a situation where you're seriously afraid to face your fear, I actually amend that a little bit to say, hey, don't try to face your fears then, make your fears face your God. So let me say that again.

Say that one more time, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're really scared of something, you just can't overcome it, then stop trying to face your fears and instead make your fears face your God. Here's what I mean by that. If you look in scripture, so many of the places where it says, do not be afraid, Isaiah 41.10 or Psalm 23, what you'll see is a common theme is do not be afraid for I am with you, for I am with you. So the idea that God is saying, hey, don't be afraid of this thing is usually, by the way, something that they had a reason to be afraid of. That's right. It's like, even when you think about it, anytime you tell someone don't be afraid, it's because there is something they should be afraid of. That's right. And so he's telling them, hey, in a sense, you're in a situation where it would be natural to feel fear, but don't feel fear because I am with you. And so the way you can overcome it is not to try to face your fears, but to make your fears face your God, because whatever fear you're facing actually might be bigger than you. It actually might be something that you cannot overcome on your own, but God is bigger than anything that you'd be possibly facing. And so to even kind of put this on as an illustration or an analogy for how I like to think of this sometimes is, you know, when we were growing up, I don't know if you did this, but, you know, if anytime you were kind of feuding or going back and forth with a kid or something, and they'd like, oh, I'll beat you up. What you would then begin doing, at least where I grew up, is you would begin appealing like, well, my brother can beat you up, or my brother can beat your brother up. Because if I said, I'll beat you up, you'd be like, well, my brother will beat you up. And I'm like, well, my brother will beat your brother up. You said that? Yeah. Yeah. Just go back and forth. Find your own faith, bro. Yeah. Well, what was fun is my dad was a pastor. So it was like, well, my dad will beat your dad up. And I'll be like, well, my dad will send your dad to hell. Oh, wow. That's not true theologically, by the way. It's just when you're a pastor's kid,

that was the truck car that would then send the kid home crying and get me in punishments. Anyways, but the point is, what would I do? I feel so bad now saying that out loud. That's very interesting. I've never heard that before. That I did that as a kid. It's, again, a pastor's kid thing. Point is, in that moment, even if I felt like I couldn't overcome the person in front of me, I appealed to someone who was stronger than them. So the whole idea here is that anything you're afraid of, any situation which you're facing, some fears or hesitations, remember that whatever you're facing is no match for your God. So instead of focusing on your fear, put your focus on your God and then make your fear face your God. That'd be the one nugget I'd say. That's really good. Let me add to that because this is kind of what I had of how to do that because here's what I've done. And this is extremely practical anytime that I'm wrestling with a fear because you said, Paul, everybody has fears. Another thing is for you to honestly either be paralyzed by a fear or there's a point where it becomes an anxiety that's just a never ending, you're constantly thinking about something and then you're like, it's kind of like it possesses you in some ways. And so here's what I have done and this is what has been helpful to me. Three things real quick. The first thing that has been helpful to me is number one, bombard your mind with truth. That's good. Right. And so I heard somebody say once the three most important words for you and I in light of eternity is, it is finished. This is what Jesus said at the cross. It is finished. That's one of the three most important words, but the three most important words in this lifetime, it is written. So this is what it means. Second Timothy one seven says, for God gave us a spirit, not a fear, but of power and love and self-control. What I've done and what I do honestly on a regular basis is I, whenever I'm going through something and if something is causing me anxiety or there is a fear inside of me, the way you combat a lie is with truth. And so I want to bombard my mind. God did not give me a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-control. I want to bombard my mind. Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. And I'm literally preaching the gospel to my mind because this is what literally happens by default with literally like the world. And so I'm trying to counter those lies with the truth of the word of God. So bombard your mind. And what I do practically, literally I'll write note cards and put it in places where I'm literally constantly seeing those reminders of what is true. I do it every time I wake up. There's literally in my

bathroom, in my room, in my office, like I got things that I'm seeing and I'm reminding myself of what is true. That's number one. Number two, pray. First Peter chapter five or six to nine, cast your anxieties on him because he cares. Brother, something supernatural happened when you just start praying and say, God, I am afraid of this. God help me with this fear. And I can't explain it, but when I do pray and I, every single day, God, I can't sleep. Would you help me be, and there are situations where, you know, man, you need to be strong and courageous. God, would you help me be strong and courageous? There are other situations. Maybe it's outside of your control. God, this is outside of my control. Would you help me surrender this? There's something supernatural happening with you when you do that, that I have, there's been moments where I've felt fear and a burden on my soul, and when I release that in prayer, there's just like a lightheartedness. I love that. I'll let you go to your third thing in a second, but it almost reminds me. It's like, Hey, when, when you and I both have kids, when your kids are scared at night, what's their instinct to go to dad and to go to mom and to ask for help because they're afraid, Hey, we're afraid. And so that's the thing is, man, when you're afraid, you could act like you're not afraid or stuff it down or like, Oh, whatever, not in that moment, just recognize it. And again, that helps you get your eyes on the God who is bigger than whatever you're afraid of. So love that. Keep going. So, and then, so one, bombard your mind with truth. Number two, pray. It's simple. Um, and, and number three, um, do it afraid. And so whatever it is, like if you are wrestling with fear, whatever it is that

God is calling you to do, just do that. Even if you're afraid, if it's a step of faith towards something, if it's a, if it's a decision, if it's a conversation, whatever it is that you believe that God is calling you to do, you and I are called to be obedient. Keep moving forward and do it afraid. It's interesting in the Bible, God doesn't move until we move. You see this in multiple parts in scripture in the old Testament. It wasn't until Moses stretched out his hand that God opened the sea. Again, I'm pretty sure Moses had some fear in his heart, uh, in that situation, but it wasn't until he moved that God, you know, did something. When Israel leaders, uh, that when, when, uh, the leaders of Israel, their feet touched the water of the Jordan river, like that's literally what the Bible says that when they touched the water, then got part of the sea in the new Testament, Jesus tells the lepers to show themselves to their leaders. And the Bible says that as they were going, they were obeying, they were moving in the direction that God told them to move, then they were healed. So again, um, whatever it is that God is calling you, man. Honestly, I can count situations in my life where I know God is calling me to do one thing in particular and I'm afraid and I'm like, God, I am afraid. Help me. Give me the strength. Give me the power. Give me the courage because courage is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to move forward in spite of your fear. And so, uh, do those three things. That's going to be helpful. So good, man. Glad we got that short convo then now I guess we get to get to dive into the convo with Katie Faust, right? Get ready for an amazing conversation with the one and only Katie Faust.

Well, Hey, before we get back to the episode, I want to tell you about something coming up at Lake Point that we're really excited about this summer. We're hosting at the movies, a four week sermon series where we'll use movie clips and stories to illustrate powerful biblical truths is one of the most fun and creative experiences we do all year here at Lake Point and it's designed for the entire family. And so every weekend at our physical locations, we'll feature a unique movie themed experiences, fun characters in the lobby for both kids and adults. Incredible worship and practical teaching from the word of God. And of course, popcorn and drinks for everyone. So whether you are here and maybe you're a long-time churchgoer, someone who's been away from church for a while, or maybe you're looking for an easy way to invite a friend, neighbor or coworker to church, this right here is the perfect series for you at the movies is an in-person only event and begins July 11 and 12 and continues through August one and two. So if you're in the Dallas area, we'd love for you to join us at one of our campuses, you can find service times, locations, and more information by texting the word ATM to 2-0-4-1-1. Now let's get back to the conversation. Katie Faust, welcome to the Live Free Podcast. It's been a long time coming. Come on. Really glad to be here. Hey, I first heard about you, I think it was like three years ago because I connected with our common friend and your work colleague, Josh Wood. And honestly, what I thought was when I started listening to some of the things that you were sharing, I've never really heard anybody address those issues around marriage, family. And we're going to talk about this in just a second, reproductive technologies and the way that you have done it.

And honestly, I thought like, man, this is something, honestly, more people need to hear about. And so, and we started having conversations about you potentially coming to the podcast and also even before we did, Pastor Josh and I, we were already talking about, man, we need to bring Katie Faust at some point. So, so glad you're here. And it just so happens as well that we met in person for the first time, literally like three days ago. In the Capitol being toured. Out of all places. By Mike Johnson. That's right. All these like secret places and like what I feel like is like newly unearthed historical knowledge about our amazing founding. It was fascinating. Yeah, it was so amazing. Have you been there? No, no. Well, I have been to DC. I don't think I've been in the Capitol buildings. I've been to some of the legislative buildings to meet with the different like senators and reps and things like that, but I've never been in the Capitol building. I've gotten great selfies with it behind me. Okay. But that's all. Man. Uh, it was, it was, it was really fun. It was amazing. And I wanna say I'm really glad to be here

because I am a fan of courage and I appreciate Pastor Josh, or PJ, as some people like to call him, apparently. And I want more pastors to be bold. I want them to be clear. And I'll tell you what, with all of the smoke machines and jazz hands that a lot of people are adding to that, I mean, I say this as someone who was a pastor's wife for almost 30 years. All that you need from pastors today is tell us what the word of God says clearly and courageously about what's happening in our world today. And I think Pastor Josh does that really well. I had a chance to listen to the podcast on my way over and I'm like, ah, a lot of you guys speaking clarity with courage. So it's a joy to be with you. Thank you for that. Glad to have you. Hey, for people that might not know you yet, and they will, and let me just give you a quick little overview and I wanna give you a chance to also explain what that is. You are the founder and president of Them Before Us, which is a nonprofit organization that focuses on the right of children to have a mother and a father and how that affects policies around marriage,

family, divorce, surrogacy, IVF, and more. Can you explain what that is and what that means? Yeah. So children don't have a right to a mother and father, they have a right to their mother and father. And just like we understand that children have a right to life, children also have a right to be known and loved by the two people responsible for their existence. And this might sound a little strange to our ears, but when you're looking at natural law, when you're looking at social science, when you're looking at the stories of children themselves, what you see is children do best. They fare best when they're raised by the man and woman that made them and they experience loss, objective, measurable harm, identity struggles, development challenges, and are often placed in riskier homes when they're separated from their mother or father. So what we do with them before us is we defend that fundamental natural right children have to their mom and dad. And when you do that, it serves as a bit of a cheat sheet. You can lay that template over the top of any question of marriage or family and come out with the right policy decision and right personal decision. It always results in the defense of children, it always results in having their needs met,

and it always requires that adults sacrifice. It always is going to cost adults something. And I often will say in interviews, give me enough time and I will piss you off too. Because this world where children have a right to life and a right to their mother and father means no adult gets a pass. Every adult, single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile at some point will have to say, who's going to do the hard thing? Is it going to be us the adults or is it going to be the kid? And in a just society, and certainly in a biblical worldview, it must be the adults sacrificing for the children. It must be the strong sacrificing for the weak. But what's happening in the world of marriage and family today is the exact opposite. It's always forcing the weak to sacrifice for the strong. It's always forcing children to do hard things on behalf of adults. So we're going to talk about this right now in just a second. And honestly, we're going to get really practical because we're going to start with gay marriage and we're going to talk about IVF and surrogacy as well. And what's interesting to me is, especially the reason I'm excited for this conversation, Katie, is because honestly, if there are some issues in Christianity

and honestly in the church in the last 10, 15 years, gay marriage is probably one of those that I don't know that Christians are equipped enough or have been equipped enough to be able to, the Bible says in 1 Peter 3, 15, be ready to make a defense for what you believe. Somebody at some point will ask you, hey, why do you believe what you believe? Why do you stand for this or that? And we have a responsibility to be ready to defend what we believe. And so this is probably one of those topics, gay marriage and homosexuality and what that looks like for us in our culture, in our nation, that I just genuinely don't think most Christian perhaps really know how to, we know what the Bible says, but when it comes to hanging out with family or friends or people that are genuinely curious and they probably disagree with us, we are just not ready for it. And so what I wanna do in this conversation is I wanna tackle every emotionally compelling argument that gets thrown at Christians all the time regarding gay marriage, and then we'll transition to talk about IVF and surrogacy. One quick disclaimer as well, there is no chance we're gonna be able to cover every single thing regarding those conversations.

This is such a huge conversation. At some point, likely, we might even do a deeper dive. So in fact, if somebody's joining right now and they're like, man, what about this thing? And what about this other question? Let us know in the comment section. If you go on YouTube or Spotify, drop it in the comments, and we're actually gonna use that information to figure out, okay, this is what we need to do, a deep dive in for the following episodes, because obviously there's so much in this conversation. And you know, we only have so much time for this time. So let's start with gay marriage. Chad, GPLC, how are you, man? I'm doing good, man. Were you earlier gonna make a joke about if I'd been to the capitol building? Yes, I was. I saw it on your face. I was about to say it. I just see him. They have an ongoing joke with me if I've been to Israel. I have not. You know what I was gonna say? I knew I have not. You know what I was gonna say? I was gonna say, yeah, cause we were in D.C. I was gonna say, Chad, GPLC, have you been to D.C.? I have been to D.C. I used to live in the D.C. area. Thank you.

So I've been to the capitol multiple times. Oh, more than me. Wow, yes. That makes me feel so good that I've been to a place more than him. He's Mr. Worldwide. He's been pretty much everywhere. Him and Pitbull. And that was for you. Thank you. Only I got it. But I'm sorry, I could see it on his face and he just, yeah, I had to bring it back for you. So anyways, go ahead. Let me talk about gay marriage for a second. Please do. Okay, so in 2015, the law was changed so that every state required now, after 2015, to recognize same-sex marriage. So this is what this means. From a legal perspective, the definition of marriage was changed. Since then, Christians really, again, it's been like a thing, we were just talking about this right before this podcast, like we've struggled really to figure out, man, how do I, I know what the Bible says, I don't know how to explain it to people or even not justify it, but help people understand why we believe what we believe.

And so we did a full episode on homosexuality, the whole ideology behind LGBTQ+, love is love with Paul. Me and Paul, I think it was like a month ago, we're gonna drop that in the show notes and in the description of this video. Arthur's gonna help me out with that. Paul, would you just briefly give us like an overview? Hey, if you are new joining the Live Free podcast and you just don't know, here's what the Bible says around this topic. That's good. Well, when we get into this, actually before we jump into definitions of marriage or men and women, I actually just like to start with, hey, we really have to start with God. And that seems obvious, but here's why is that we can ask a lot of questions around homosexuality and gay marriage and all these things, but really it all comes down to two questions. Who has designed me and who has created me? Who's the designer and the creator? Because the one who designs is the one who gets to decide. And whoever owns something is the one who gets to decide what is done with that. And so at the end of the day, if there is no God, we can construct marriage to be whatever we want it to be. Love whoever you want, do whatever you want, be whoever you want. But if there is a God who has actually designed me

and created me, then the first question is, what does he want? Not what do I want? What is his desire? Not is what my desire. So then if we use that as a kind of a foundational idea and then say, okay, his will, his desire is then revealed in the Bible. Then we have this, okay, what does the Bible say about God's design specifically for marriage and the idea of marriage scripture? And we see this in Genesis. So in creation before sin ever enters into the picture, there's a marriage. And then this design is then reaffirmed throughout the rest of scripture without fail. And that is the idea that for a romantic relationship, God has designed for one biological man and one biological woman to be together in a lifelong union we call marriage. And it has a few big purposes when we look at scripture. One is faithful, intimate, and loving companionship. But another, and this will go into a big thing that I love you lean into, is the bearing and raising of children. So if God has designed marriage to be the faithful and loving union, lifelong union of one man, one biological man, one biological woman in marriage for loving and faithful companionship, for raising of children,

and for rightly ordering sexual relationships. There's more that could be said, but that's just kind of a foundational thing that we see all the way starting in Genesis with Adam and Eve. But then Jesus reaffirms this design in the Gospels. And so when people are like, oh, Jesus never said anything about marriage. No, he did. He reaffirmed God's original design in the book of Genesis. Anything you think I left out that isn't important for the conversation? Obviously, as a church, we care about marriage because strong marriages build strong families and strong families build strong disciples. So it's a big deal. Obviously, we're gonna talk about this. Katie Faust, if you have two adults that are of the same sex, they just love each other faithfully and they live together and they're faithful to each other, what is wrong with that? Okay, let me back up. Please do. I could tell you wanted to add some stuff. I just fill in there because it will help us springboard and answer this question. So when Jesus was asked about marriage, he went back to the order of creation. Yes, he did. And his very tight definition of marriage

had three specific characteristics to them, right? He said, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. The two shall become one flesh. What God has joined together, let no man separate. So what do you see? Three non-negotiables, three aspects that sets this relationship apart from all other relationships. The first is complementarity. It's what you said, male and female, right? Man, wife, mother, father. We've got very gender specific terms used there. The second one is one flesh. So that idea is monogamous. There's only one other person in that relationship. with you. It excludes all others. It forsakes all others. And number three, it's what God has joined together, let no man separate. It should be permanent. It should be lifelong. So we think about that, and we think, wow, this is beautiful, it's a picture of Christ in the church. Yes, all of that is true. But God is the maker, He is the creator, He is the owner, and so He gets to decide. So what is it that He cares for? What is it that He loves? And you will see all throughout, at least through the Old Testament and the New Testament, do not touch the children.

God has a fierce, ferocious, protective heart for kids. And I was listening to your podcast that was both about LGBTQ, but also about anger. And you guys talked about when you stand by and you refuse to be angry about things that deserve anger, there's actually something wrong with that. God gets angry when children are harmed. So His primary vehicle for child protection is actually marriage, complementarity, monogamy, and permanence. So what is it that those three things do for children that are so critical? Because we can look at this and we can say, oh, this is beautiful, you know, it's a sort of archetype. No, it actually has very sociological receipts attached to them. So the complementarity means that there's always going to be a male parent and a female parent. Why does that matter to kids? Because men and women are different. And I will often illustrate this when I go speak in large groups. And I'll say, I want you to raise your hand if you've ever seen a baby thrown up in the air. And everybody raises their hand. And then I say, I want you to keep your hand up if the person throwing the baby was a woman. And almost everybody puts their hands down. So that is one of the easiest ways to illustrate the benefits and the distinctions between fathers and mothers. I say, you know, moms don't throw babies. Moms wear babies. And so it's this picture of what mothers and fathers do differently, and both of them are critical to kids. So mothers promote attachment. Mothers promote security, right? By literally keeping the baby close, by responding more quickly to, for example, infant cries.

A woman, a mother, will respond in half the time to a distressed baby as a dad will. But dads promote independence. Dad promotes separation. Dads are the ones that are saying, you can make it. Run higher. Go faster. Go bigger. Swing the hammer. Climb the tree. Can you go faster? Can you go faster? Can you go slower? And you actually need both of those, right? You need the one that is focused on their immediate emotional well-being, and you need the one that says, actually, it's time for you to just get a job, you know? So kids need that complementarity for maximum development. Monogamy. Monogamy is probably one of the most important tools to our human species when it comes to child protection. So if monogamy, if every relationship was monogamous, if there was only one other person and it was the child's other parent in the family, what does that mean? That means that statistically the child is being raised by the two adults who are the safest in their life, the most invested in their life, the most connected to the child. So this is actually so well known and so well understood that a child's own mother and father afford them this level of protection that unrelated adults do not, that evolutionary biologists have a name for the kind of risk that children encounter when there's an unrelated adult in the home. And the name of that risk is called the Cinderella effect. And it is the objective, measurable, diminished input and protection that a stepfather or a mother's boyfriend or a father's boyfriend or a father's girlfriend is going to bring

to the home. That's not to say that all stepparents are abusive or anything like that. We have heroic stepparents that are doing what they can to fill the gap left by a negligent biological parent. But on a population-wide level, unrelated adults in the home will always increase risk of abuse and neglect. And in the case of a cohabiting man, statistically, again, there's heroic stepfathers, but statistically an unrelated man living with a child, left to care for the child alone, is the most dangerous person in a child's life. So if you want to forsake monogamy, you are just swapping out child protection. And then third, permanence. Children need that complementarity. They need that maximized development. They need that safety, the protection, the investment. They don't need it for two months. They don't need it for two years. They don't need it for 12 years. They need it all their life. So we can look at this beautiful picture that God has given for His definition of marriage, and we see that that tells us what God says about marriage. But then natural law and social science tell us why His definition is so good. So those are the non-negotiables of the human child. They come from a man and woman. That man and woman are... going to be the safest, most invested, most connected to them overall, that the male parent and the female parent are going to do things for children that generic love is not going to, and they need them all their life. So those are not going to change. Those things will not change regardless of what five Supreme Court justices say, regardless of whether or not you wear a t-shirt that says love makes a family, regardless of how we tinker with children in a laboratory. These are non-negotiable biological facts of the human family that God

ordained and designed, and they will not pass away until human nature changes, until human nature passes away, and that doesn't seem to be in the cards, right? We're going to be restored, we're going to be redeemed, but we are human. These are human realities. So once you understand those non-negotiables of the human child, it gives you the foundation to respond to all these other questions about marriage and family. Katie, that is fantastic, honestly. So you said three things, I want to make sure people don't miss it. You said one, monogamy was one. Go ahead, repeat those three once again. Monogamy, like married only to one other person, so it keeps the child's biological parents in, it keeps unrelated adults out. That's great. What was the other one? Complementarity. So it's always both halves of the human species, both the male and the female, because children need male love and female love, and they crave maternal love and paternal love. Dads are important, moms are important. Either or, there's not a competition, it's like we need them both. Yeah, that's right. And the third one? Permanence. You need them all their life. Okay, that's great. And what's interesting there is a couple of things. One is, I intentionally start with that, the one who designs is the one who decides. Because even if you think of the idea of when you use something not according to its design, things go wrong. Things go wrong. And so you also then talked about the social sciences. So there's literally data out there now that tells us and confirms all these things. So even if you don't believe in scripture, if you take those three things you just laid out, there are now social sciences and data that tells us when those things aren't in place, things go wrong. And it's because we're not using things according to God's design. When that happens, society is not gonna flourish, and individual couples and people's lives are not gonna flourish. So I just wanna connect those dots for people. That's why we really wanted to start with the idea of it's God's design, and when you don't do it according to God's design, things can go wrong. Okay, so let me help some people here. Yeah, Katie, but you're talking about children. Honestly, I just wanna know, I just see my best friend who's a man is in love with another man, and they just wanna be together because they're happy. They're not bothering children. Maybe they won't even have children. They just wanna be happy together. Who are you? What's wrong with that?

So I started writing about the importance of mothers and fathers in 2012 when my state, Washington State, started to consider gay marriage. This was right after President Obama evolved on the topic of marriage. He went from being a supporter of traditional marriage to supporting gay marriage. He had just secured his second reelection. And what I heard everybody say is kids don't need moms and dads. They just need to be safe and loved, and love makes a family. And I had been working with kids. My husband and I had been in ministry together since we were like 19 in college. And I, at that point, 20 years of youth ministry, junior high ministry, senior, I had been the assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world. Like, I had a lot of close contact with kids. And this idea that kids don't need their mom and dad was just, it incensed me. Because, I mean, like you guys, I'm sure, I had been in these rooms with kids at the junior high lock-in at 3 a.m. when everyone's asleep and that one kid wants to stay up. And they're crying. And what are they talking about? Where's my father? Where's my mother? Why did she leave? Why did she move three states away? It creates what we call a primal wound when a child is rejected by their mom or dad. And thank God, you know, we can work to redeem that through adoption or other people stepping in. But what was happening in the world of gay marriage was normalizing the absence of a child's mother or father in the name of progress. Not a child losing their mother or father to tragedy or death, but actually saying it's good. It's good that they don't have their mother and father. So this actually was one of the main vectors, one of the main arguments for legalizing gay marriage. And sure, there was some of this libertarian, like, you know, just stay out of my bedroom kind of stuff. But the truth is that in 2015, I submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Obergefell decision alongside a woman that had been raised by two mothers. Explain what that is for somebody that doesn't know. It's a friend of the court brief. It's something that anybody can submit. Somebody saying, I have something that the court should probably know about the case that they are considering. And so my mom is in a relationship with her partner. They've been together since I was 10. My parents divorced. So I'm not a fatherless girl with two mothers. I'm just a woman who loves her mother and her mother's partner. But I've been kind of in this LGBT world almost all of my life. So I co-authored a brief with a woman who had exclusively been raised by two mothers, and we just filled it.

with the stories of 30 children that were raised by same-sex couples, talking about how if you redefine marriage, you will redefine parenthood. If you make husbands and wives optional in marriage, mothers and fathers will become optional in parenting, and that is bad for children. Here's 30 children who have been raised by same-sex couples. Look at them. Look at their identity struggles. Look at how disconnected they are from their non-biological parent. Look at how there's so much instability in their life. Look at how they hunger for male attention or female attention. Look at the vulnerable places they've put themselves in to get the missing male attention or female attention that they desperately wanted. And so while there was a lot of narrative that this is just about adult decision, adult behavior, a lot of us were warning about the fact that redefining the institution of marriage will require freeing children, freeing children from a connection to their own mother and father, and that has happened. So we've got eight, we've got 11 years of receipts for this. We have seen over the last 11 years how gay marriage has redefined parenthood,

how children no longer have as much of a claim to their own mother and father, and in some states and countries, no claim at all to them. So even if some same-sex couples choose not to have children, in the name of being constitutional, so what is it that Justice Kennedy said in his majority opinion in that Obergefell decision? He said, same-sex couples, in the name of nondiscrimination, need to be afforded the full constellation of benefits of marriage. One of those benefits is children. So it was always part of the plan to go directly from marriage to now we are going to redefine parenthood. Which means that if you are in a same-sex relationship in a now quote-unquote gay marriage, you are entitled to children is what you're saying? That means that the law is now reorienting itself around your desire to access somebody else's kids if you want them, yes. That's exactly what that means. And even if a lot of same-sex couples choose not to have children, but the very existence of gay marriage means that the law had to reorient around an institution that was no longer procreative, but centered around adult validation. So on that note, if somebody were to say, yeah, but shouldn't they have the same rights

that heterosexual couples have? Like you're saying, it sounds like you're saying they don't, but it sounds, we should have the same rights, right? Gay couples and heterosexual couples, what would you say? So the very first book that I co-authored with Stacey Manning is called Them Before Us, Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement. So it's very, very important to properly understand what a right is. Conveniently, anything that an adult really, really wants, they will frame as a right. I have a right to housing. I have a right to government-funded birth control. I have a right to parenthood. I have a right to choose. I have a right to marriage. But just because you want something doesn't make it a right. So no, you don't have a right to marriage and you don't have a right to parenthood and you don't have a right to choose. Children have a right to life and they have a right to their mother and father. Those are fundamental, natural rights. And if you have a pseudo right that conflicts with the child's fundamental natural right, there's a really good chance that that's actually no right at all. That's probably something else posing as a right because you are trying to manipulate

and coerce government powers to get behind something that you want at the expense of the most vulnerable. So we spend some time in the first chapter of that book kind of outlining criteria for what makes something a natural right. And when it comes to somebody marrying another person of the same sex, the answer is no. So just because you want it doesn't mean you have the right to get it. That's right. And some of these things that we want are important. They may be a very strong drive. Sometimes you might even need it to survive like shelter or food. But that does not make it a natural right. If something is a natural right, that means the government must organize around and protect it at all costs and sometimes deliver it to you. Okay, so that's not a right. And even to maybe connect some dots for people, for a lot of people, this is probably the first time they're hearing this line of argumentation. So even connecting the dots for people, because I think one of your original questions was, well, man, can't just two people love each other? Sounds like you're saying, hey, we actually should choose a totally different angle.

Because I've even thought this for a while. If Christians only ever talk about the idea of love is that that's the main purpose of marriage. We're gonna be in an endless cycle back and forth with people. It sounds like you're advocating for saying, no, let's actually change the venue of this discussion. Because, and I know that not everyone we're talking to would obviously agree. Most people wouldn't on this. But it's interesting that I've just opened up Genesis again and literally right out it says, so God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. Male and female, he created them. What is the first thing he says? Now be fruitful and multiply. So marriage, yes, as we. out earlier, is for sure for faithful and loving companionship. That is part of marriage. But it's not the main or even only part of marriage. In fact, the first thing God does is He says, the purpose of marriage is to bear children. At least that's one of the main things of marriage. So you're basically saying, hey, let's move the venue to this discussion. Am I interpreting you correctly? So that is 100% true. And I will take it even a step further. But first, we will talk about Malachi. Because what was going on in Malachi is, you know, they're like, why don't you hear our prayers, Lord? Why don't you love it? Why won't you listen to us? And he's like, because you offend me. It is because you have wronged me. They're like, we? Us? How have we wronged you? And he's like, you're bringing me the trash offerings. But one of the things he said is, you're divorcing the wife of your youth, in essence, to marry the trophy wife. And he was speaking specifically to the religious leaders. And then he gives an explanation. And this is the famous passage where he says, I hate divorce. This is where God says, I hate divorce. And then he says,

in spirit and flesh, they are one, right? And why has God made them one? What was the one God seeking? Do you know what his answer to his own question is? Godly offspring. Why is it that he is so offended when you throw off? I mean, there can be times for legitimate reasons for a marriage to end. But that is not what was happening in Malachi. That was not necessarily what the Pharisees were asking Jesus when they were saying, when can a man get divorced? There is something that God seeks from marriage, and it is godly offspring. That has always been a major focus of why God is advancing this critical institution. The offspring, the offspring matter. So there have been authors, and there have been even prominent Christian teachers that have not included this aspect of fruitfulness and procreation when they think about the definition of marriage. God always includes it. It's always central for him. But when it comes to Christians entering the public square and wanting to talk about why marriage matters, I would say, yes, you want to talk about permanence, complementarity, and monogamy. That's all really important. But I would say the bigger factor for Christians is God's people in the Old Testament or the New Testament or throughout the pages of Church history. We have interfaced with all manner of hostile religions and cultures in the same way, and that is a posture of child protection. There's probably 39 references in the Old Testament about the mandate to protect the fatherless. You know, in the New Testament it says, you want to test your religion? You want to know what's pure and undefiled? Watch yourself. Care for orphans and widows. So there's always been this aspect of, if there is a vulnerable child, it is your job to protect them. That should be the motivator for Christians when it comes to interfacing with and engaging with culture. Not to be welcoming and affirming. I mean, I don't want to unnecessarily trigger. I want to love the people in my life that disagree. Never, never at the expense of child protection. Never if it means that I'm going to forsake truths that will make children more vulnerable. So what's happening in the legal world post-gay marriage, what's happening in the technological space around reproductive technologies, and what's happening in the cultural revolution, the sexual revolution, in terms of normalizing children raised apart from their mother and father, it is the exact opposite of caring for the fatherless. It is the manufacturing of the motherless and the fatherless. And that is why Christians have to get very, very serious about understanding and engaging on all these marriage and family issues. Yeah. But Katie, isn't it better for a child to be adopted by a gay couple than to not be adopted at all? Yeah. So this is a really popular objection that people will bring. And I

want to say like, what do you have to do to get to that question? You're appealing to a really specific edge case. So this is a really common tactic whenever you want to overhaul some kind of social norm, is you will bring up the most morally problematic example that you can find. This is why if you're in a conversation about abortion, somebody will say, but what about rape and incest? Sure. Right? Which is less than 1% of the cases. And that's not to say that it doesn't deserve a response. It does. But let's talk about the 99% first. So what is the 99% as it relates to marriage and family? The 99% is that a child's own mother and father are going to invest more money in them, more time in them. They're going to be more protective of that child. Those children are more likely to graduate from college, have money saved for college, not go to prison, not be teen pregnancies, not find themselves on the street, not have behavioral issues, not deal with drugs and alcohol. They are going to be able to form and maintain their own relationships if they get married in the future. Period. You can make that case statistically from research, from the stories of children from natural law. That is the ironclad rule. Now, there are sometimes So when biological parents are abusive, or they can't or should not raise their own children, or tragedy strikes and that child is deprived of their own mother and father, in those cases we mourn. Yes. And we seek to mend the wound of the children who have experienced that kind of parental loss. And as an adoptive mom of a child who spent his first two years of life in an institution, I will say that all children need a mother and father, but children who have undergone the significant trauma of mother or father loss and institutionalization, and maybe a revolving door of foster homes, they might need a mother and a father more than anyone else. They especially need that soft, nurturing, understanding motherly presence,

and the father that says, the answer is no. I said no. You can run into me and you can beat my chest as much as you want, the answer is still no. So even those kids that are in that challenging situation, the answer is not, we'll give them same-sex parents. The answer is more heterosexual couples that understand it is their duty to care for the vulnerable need to step in and adopt kids. There are years-long waiting lists for white drug-free infants when it comes to adopting. There's not enough heterosexual couples that want the sibling group, the older kid, the disabled child. So when I say that the world of children's rights insists that all adults do hard things, that's what I mean. Some of you out there that are listening have great marriages, no fertility problems, you're in strong relationships. Maybe the way that you, the strong, are gonna sacrifice for the weak is being called to bring a child into your home that doesn't have parents. So once you say all that, is it better for a child to remain in an orphanage overseas, be in the foster care churn, rather than placed with a same-sex couple? There might be times where a same-sex couple is a better fit for a child than a foster care situation. But those are decisions that need to be made individually

by a social worker who's seeing the whole landscape. I know a child who was deaf and was adopted by a single deaf mother. So that's a situation where the child's not having their ideal met, but based on all the different options, that was the best fit for the child, right? And what is adoption? Adoption is not a delivery system so that infertile couples or same-sex couples can have a family. Adoption is an institution centered around the best interest of the child. They are the client. If adoption happens properly, the child will always get what they need, but not every adult is going to get what they want. So even with adoption, we have changed the way we think about it. This is not about adults completing their family. This is about children's needs being met and usually adults bearing what is often a lifelong burden. I did a little research about this and it's actually kind of a surprise. Research, some research actually shows that children that are adopted by same-sex couples do well. In light of that research, Katie, why oppose it? So you can be, I guarantee you won't be in a conversation with somebody who's talking about gay marriage and gay parenting until somebody's like,

how comes for children with same-sex parents? And up will pop a return from I think Cornell or Columbia that says 75 out of 79 studies show that children with gay parents fare no different or even better than kids raised by heterosexual parents. And they'll say, see, all kids need is love. So I looked at every single study there. I looked at all 75 of those studies and the other four as well. And what you see when you actually look at it is you can create an awful lot of trash studies really fast. And that's what it was. It was trash studies. So I often like to pose it this way. Whenever researchers are studying anything other than same-sex parenting, when they're doing studies on family structure, which we've been doing since the 60s, like right when no fault divorce came on the scene, we really started to study what kind of configurations can we arrange this in? How do kids do? So we've got decades of family studies, family research under our belt. Whenever researchers are studying anything other than two men or two women raising a child, they all agree on three things. Number one, complementarity matters. Mothers and fathers offer distinct and complementary benefits to children.

Dads do things for kids that moms don't do. Moms do things for kids that dads don't do. The second thing they agree on is that biological parents advantage children and unrelated adults put children at risk. Again, that is so airtight that the evolutionary biologists are open and shut. The third is that maternal or paternal loss harms children, whether through death, divorce, abandonment, or third-party. production. There's no scenario where a child loses their mother and father as a population and they fare just as well, even if they're adopted by loving heterosexual parents. So it's sort of the sociological miracle that you have 75 studies where children are always missing a biological parent, always raised by an unrelated adult, always deprived of maternal or paternal love, and have always suffered the trauma of mother or father loss. How do those kids fare no different? And the answer is all of those studies show significant bias. They didn't survey the actual kid's experience. They asked the parents themselves, hey, does your kid love having two moms or two dads? They recruited their samples at an LGBTQ activity center or something, or a bookstore. They didn't find their participants at random. They tended to be small sample sizes.

So they didn't use the gold standard of the social science method. Now, those four studies that showed significant difference, three of them did use the gold standard. And they showed that these kids are significantly disadvantaged, especially as it relates to their emotional well-being, which should not be a surprise at all. That aligns with everything else that we know about what children need for development, for identity, for safety. So we've written a lot about this at Them Before Us. We've got a substack, Them Before Us. We've got several same-sex parenting studies posts. So you don't need to go into any of those fights unarmed. There are really good answers to them. That's great. So let me zoom out before we move on to IVF for a second. So when it comes to gay marriage, I think people will say, well, people say, oh, Katie, but your view, those are so traditional. And it's interesting when people say that, because actually, when you look at history and all the different cultures in history, what the Bible actually says about sexuality has actually stood against the tradition of the culture. And you see this pattern all over history. Let me just give you a couple of examples. So for example, you kind of alluded to this, but polygamy, all throughout history, that's been the norm.

Then comes Genesis 1 and 2 written 3,000 years ago. And here you see God saying, hey, it's one husband and one wife becoming one flesh. And then Jesus, you said this, Katie, he reaffirmed this in Matthew 19. That is not traditional. That is literally against the tradition of the day. Homosexuality is not new. There's been homosexuality all throughout history, all different cultures in the Greco-Roman world. It was not unusual for there to be same-sex relationships as well. Then comes the Apostle Paul, writes Romans chapter one, he explicitly names same-sex behavior between men and women. I believe this is the only time in the whole Bible where lesbianism is explicitly mentioned again. And he talks about how those things ultimately, it's a rejection of God's design and God's glory. In some ways, it's a form of God's passive wrath. That is not traditional. That is literally against the tradition of the culture. And then same thing with this idea of seeing children be less. There's this practice in the Greco-Roman culture called exposure, which is basically like back in the day, if you had a baby and you just didn't want it, you could just dispose of it by basically just putting him out in the street. And when that happened, usually two things would occur. Either the baby would die because of starvation

or because of somebody would take it or just being abandoned. Wild animals. Wild animals, or it would be taken to become a slave or be forced into prostitution. And again, it was actually legal and common for that to happen if there was a baby because it was unwanted or because it was a female. There are letters by Roman soldiers that have been found where the soldier's telling the wife, hey, if it's a boy, keep it. If it's a girl, dispose of it. And history tells us that Christians radically opposed this practice to the point where they're saying, hey, this is actually a value. Our Bible tells us this is a valuable human being made in the image of God, and we have a responsibility to protect it. Christians actively rescued these babies. They picked them up. They adopted them. They started institutions to protect them and care for them. And then at some point, infanticide was outlawed in AD 374 because of the strong influence of Christians pushing for that. Here's the point. Ideas have consequences. It is a pagan idea to see children as useful or convenient or disposable or even valuable only if they meet certain conditions.

And it is a Christian idea to treat children, including the unborn and also pertaining, all this conversation regarding IVF and everything we're gonna talk about today, as intrinsically valuable and made in the image of God and worthy of our protection. Ideas have consequences. Can I just add to that? Okay, because this is what I'm saying, like Old Testament, New Testament, and the pages of history. So threats to children have changed across cultures, across countries, across centuries. One of the first terrible examples of that was exposure. But, you've got offenses against children in so many different ways, you know, foot binding in China was rampant, and the Christian missionaries hit the shores, and they were like, what is going on? And they were like, nah, get off our lawn. I mean, they literally were like, we are going to do something about this. Because it was cruel, right? It literally was mutilation of children, right? In the name of, often, improving their marriage prospects. And so, the Christian missionaries, they started schools, and they said, anybody can come to schools, boys or girls, but only girls with natural feet are going to be able to come, unfortunately. Bound feet is not going to work for us. And they started campaigns against bound feet, and within a century, bound feet were completely eradicated. They changed the entire society because they brought these child-dignifying principles to the fore. Christians around the world were the first to start and then maintain orphanages in every country, right? Unwanted children have been a part of nearly every culture, and it was the Christians that said, we will care for them. You have situations in Nigeria where there was a tradition, a superstition,

that one of those children was probably born of a demon if they were twins, and so you couldn't tell which one was the demon child, so they would put both children in jars in the jungle and leave them. And there was a Christian missionary named Mary Schlesinger, Mary Schleser, who was like, absolutely not. So she came in, and she started protecting those children, and she slowly started to change the culture. So it's like, what do we see? Cultures have endless ways of victimizing children. Children have, Christians have always had one response, and that is, stand between the cultural threats and the child victims. So the threats to children are going to morph and change, but the Christian response is always the same. It is always, not my millstone, no, not me. I have a duty to protect children. And so today we're not necessarily dealing with foot binding. We're dealing with other kinds of child mutilation. We're not dealing with exposure in the same way, but we are dealing with, in many ways, the commodification of children in the world of reproductive technologies that we can talk about. We're not talking necessarily about offloading our children to pay off our debt, but we are talking about freeing children up from their mother and father to be acquired by anybody and everybody with a valid contract. I mean, the threats change. The Christian response does not. Good. Let's talk about IVF. Yeah. Pastor Paul, let's put on our pastor hat for a second here. Explain it for somebody that maybe is new to this whole world.

There's a lot of terms here. I want to make sure we get them right and people understand what we're talking about here. Actually, Katie, what is IVF? Okay. IVF is in vitro fertilization, so fertilization of a human. Well, actually, you can do fertilization of all different kinds of animals in vitro, in glass. So it's literally making a baby in a Petri dish. That's what in vitro fertilization is. Most of the time, if you're going to go through in vitro fertilization, if you're going to spend the $10,000 to $25,000 to create embryos, you don't want to create two. You want to create as many as possible. So very often somebody will be done with a round of IVF, and they'll have 10 or 15 or 25 embryos that they will then decide, what am I going to do with them? Very few people are prepared to parent 25 children, but the fertility doctors and the clinics will encourage you to mass-produce children because they will go through a process of grading the embryos, genetically screening the embryos, often sex-selecting the embryos. If you'd like to pay a little bit extra, you can get biomarkers for 1,200 different traits, early baldness, premature blindness. You can test the eye colors of the children. You can customize the baby. And by customize, I don't mean create a child, a boy that has a specific color of blue eyes. By customize, I mean you mass-produce children, and you eliminate the ones that don't fit your specifications. So a lot of times these surplus embryos are then frozen, and then every time you go back to the clinic after the first or second or third IVF transfer fails, you go back and get a few more embryos and try to implant again. Okay.

And before we jump into some of the theology around it and connect some dots for people, just a few things. One is I just want to recognize that it's a very sensitive topic for people. Fertility struggles are very real. Pastor Josh and Jen, they've been very open about theirs, and we just know a lot of people listening, a lot of people at our church struggle with that. We don't in any way want to make it sound like we're being insensitive to that or downplaying that whatsoever. In fact, I was even thinking earlier when we were discussing same-sex marriage, and I talked about one of the main things that God designed to be in marriage is for the procreation. It showed in my mind when it's like, oh, I hope a couple did not hear that and think that if they're dealing with fertility issues that their marriage is less than. is not what we mean by that whatsoever. So I just want us to be sensitive and know that this is something that people struggle with. Also, some people may have already gone through in vitro fertilization and don't know some of the things we're about to bring to bear. And that's another thing I would say is, as we're entering into this conversation, what's really hit me the last three to five years is just how little Christians are prepared to have this conversation and how little we know. Because the first, I think, flinch, Katie, at least the people I've talked to on this, has been like, well, why wouldn't we want to have more babies and any means possible to make that happen without asking some tough questions exactly of how that happens. And hey, well, hey, if we dispose of these embryos, then what did we just do?

And so I just want to say, hey, this is a very sensitive topic and so we're going to handle it with care, but also we're going to try to give a lot of the details so that people can make more informed decisions and really understand if they're thinking about IVF, really what they're getting into. So I just wanted to say that before we get into some of the theology of it. Here's some theological things that really intersect with this that really should inform the conversations we're having. And that's really just this basic principle that every person is created in God's image from conception and have worth and value from conception. We see in Psalm 119, David says, you saw my unformed substance. I love that detail. Not my body, not my heart, but he said, you saw my unformed substance. From conception, we have value. And even now, Katie, you may go back and forth on these kinds of questions. I say from conception because at conception, a new life is created. Because I don't know in the conversations you're having with people, but oftentimes like, well, that's just a clump of cells. In fact, what do you say to people when they're like, oh, this is just a clump of cells? What do you say?

I'll give my response. I say, but what do you like to say here? I'm like, so are you. You're a clump of cells too. I mean, we're all just an organization of cells at different stages of development. I mean, and the truth is you're saying that because you must dehumanize this thing so you can do what you want with it. Exactly. And often what I'll do is I'll say, okay, yeah, it is. In fact, when it's first created, the simpereo, it's one cell, it's called a zygote. Okay, yeah. And whose cells are those? Actually, what kind of cells are they? They're human cells. Are they living or nonliving? They're living. Oh, so living as in they're alive. As in other words, they have life. So it's a life. Is it the mother's cells? No. Is it the father's cells? No, in fact, it has unique DNA. The first cell, the first zygote from this moment of conception, it is alive and has a unique DNA that is a combination of his mother's

and father's DNA, but it is unique. So we're dealing with the human life that is precious from conception. Here's where this interfaces with IVF is that if you have these embryos that have been fertilized artificially, that means that each of these embryos is a human life. They are cells, they are human cells, they are alive. So they are lives. And so then if we just dispose of them, that means we are disposing of people that were created in the image of God. And so when we talk about IVF, Pastor Josh, I believe, even talked about this in an episode, we'll put that in the show guide and just make sure that people can go listen to that. Pastor Josh responded today and I would as well, but I would love to have you fill out some details because it's a very nuanced topic is that, hey, what about if people want to pursue IVF? We'd say, well, hey, in order to do this ethically in a way that honors God, you would for sure not be able to do this in a way that disposes of those embryos. But as you've said, that is the standard practice. That is normal practice. So you know that if you're gonna go into this, Christian's gonna, this is a tightrope. This is, I would say, a minefield. That it is theoretically possible to get through it,

but you've really gotta do it carefully because if not, you're devaluing a throwing away and destroying life that is precious to God. So Pastor Josh said, and I would say that, hey, if you can do this in a way that does not dispose of those embryos, then yes, it's possible. But you would actually, I'll add in some other qualifications. I'd love to hear you say some other things if you're gonna do this in a way that honors God. Because this is a minefield. How would you tell people, hey, it's possible if you do X, Y, and Z, what would you say, Katie? So remember how I said that nobody gets a pass? Like everybody has to bend here, right? Somebody with same-sex attraction that would be a wonderful husband or be a wonderful father, a wonderful mother, they can either form a family that denies children their mother and father so they can have what they want, or they can conform their life to make sure that the children they have have both their mother and father loving them and loving each other every day. Those unhealthy marriages might feel called to adopt where they're gonna do the hard things on behalf of children. People struggling with infertility, this is their opportunity,

their call to do hard things on behalf of children. And that means that as you work through your struggles with infertility, you cannot victimize children in the process. And big fertility offers so many ways to victimize children. It's not just the loss of life. Well, first, let's talk about the loss of life. So because couples are encouraged, and the people that have gone through IVF, they actually know what I'm talking about. They know that they were encouraged at least to create multiple embryos. They know that they were probably pressured to grade their embryos. at 75% of clinics, they will do genetic screening, right? 74% do sex selection. And so like, these are menu options that are given to people who are desperate for a child. And I think that Big Fertility preys on that desperation, like really, really exploits, especially women who have this God-given desire to be a mother. And they'll just take you for all your worth because of it. So the people that have gone through IVF, they know that, especially if they went in with pro-life convictions, a lot of them found themselves fighting their doctors to not discard embryos, or they were told, well, this is not viable, so we have to discard it. And the truth is viability is a very subjective term, right? So it is very hard to go into this honoring the Imago Dei

of children that are fertilized in vitro, fertilized in glass, because you're working against an industry that does not have the same priorities. Given all the different, the gauntlet of really eugenics-like screening that these little lives have to go through, maybe 10% of them will even be transferred to the womb. Maybe 10%, the vast majority will be screened out of existence or frozen forever. Of the, we don't know how many children are made in vitro every year, because Big Fertility has no requirement to track or share what they do with these little lives, where they go, who takes them home. But our best estimate is only two to 3% of children created in the laboratory will be born alive. Only two to 3%. Wow. And every one of those children, we have about 100,000 children born in the United States through IVF-free. Every one of them is precious, have dignity, they're worthy of life. There's just a good chance they had nine siblings that are never gonna have the same chance. And those kids deserved protection, too. They deserved to be cherished. They deserved a chance to just know the warmth of their own mother's womb. So, if you are going to do IVF,

it cannot be at the expense of children. No child can lose their right to life. That means no genetic screening. That means no sex selection. That means no selective reduction, which is what the doctor will encourage you to do if you have multiples, or if a child doesn't look like they're developing properly. They will encourage you to abort at 12 to 20 weeks. It also means no freezing, because when kids go into a freezer, they very often don't come out. Maybe you think, well, we're gonna go back for all of them, but then on your third pregnancy, because IVF is a high-risk pregnancy, you have a hysterectomy, and then what do you do? Or then you end up getting a divorce, and he doesn't want any more children, and you desperately wanna have those babies. I mean, at Them Before Us, we get letters weekly, multiple times a week, of people saying, I have these five surplus embryos, or I have these 15 surplus embryos, what do I do? I'm just in agony over it. The answer is, there is no path forward that does not involve significant child loss here. There's something about manufacturing children in mass and keeping them in frozen orphanages that inherently puts them at risk. But that is not the only problem with IVF. About, our best estimate is anywhere from 30,000

to maybe 60,000 children. Of those 100,000 that are born will also lose their mother or father in the process. So if, for example, you are infertile, and I say infertile because a lot of times, doctors aren't even diagnosing infertility, they're not even doing the work to figure out what are their fertility challenges, they're just saying, IVF pipeline, get you into the IVF pipeline. But a lot of times they'll say, well, your eggs aren't good, and sometimes they're not, so you need to use a donor egg. Well, what does that mean? That means you are going to commercially deny children a right to their own mother. That's what it means. So probably 30 to 60, 1 3rd to 2 3rds of the children born through IVF every year will lose their mother or father or both in the process. And that's a violation of children's rights. And then, children have a right to be born free, not bought and sold. And what are you doing when you hire, when you purchase egg from a catalog or sperm from a catalog? What are you doing if you pay another woman to carry your child? Contractually, you are paying them to relinquish their parental rights for money. And in the adoption world,

when I used to be in charge of compliance for our adoption agency, whenever a birth parent, whenever money went from intended parents to birth parent to transfer custody of the child, that was not adoption. That was now trafficking. When you are paying adults to hand over their parental rights for money, that is baby buying. So unfortunately, big fertility gets a lot of mileage off of this idea that we have that this is just a way for our infertile sister to have the baby she desperately wants. In reality, it is an industry that victimizes children on the level of violating their right to life, violating their right to their mother and father, and violating their right to be born free and not bought and sold. Right. What I was gonna say is so distinguished, I even kind of helped summarize this. You would not understand to say that IVF is sinful in and of itself, just like the practice that there are, you would say, I think we talked about it before, that there is a very, it's a very thin line you can walk to be able to get to it, but you would say, you gotta know that the industry, so it's almost like separating people

who are thinking about IVF, saying, hey, it could be theoretically possible to do it in a way that would not dishonor God, but you gotta know if you're thinking about that, you are going into an industry that this is their standard operating procedure, is to do it in ways that would dishonor God. Is that a helpful distinction to make? Well, and I would say, you might wanna do it that way, but you probably don't have the money. You probably don't have the money to do it in the way where you only create one or two embryos that you don't screen, that you immediately implant, and then you go back for a third or fourth or seventh time because those fail over and over and over. And if you did want to go into it with pro-life convictions, you probably will argue with your doctor and clinic about it because they don't want you to use the low-grade embryos. The one thing that fertility clinics actually have to publicize and share is their live birth rates. How many of the babies that are, how many of the embryos that are transferred result in a live birth? So from their perspective, they don't want poor embryos to be transferred because it will drop their live birth rate. So they will encourage you to discard. They will encourage you to freeze the undesirable children. So if you're gonna go into this with pro-life convictions,

with pro-child convictions, you're gonna be alone. You're gonna be on your own. There was a really famous, well-publicized decision by the Alabama Supreme Court in February of 2024 where couples sued a clinic for the wrongful death of their embryos. Their embryos were mishandled. It was three different couples. The embryos were lost because they were dropped and they were thawed or something. And they brought a wrongful death claim against the clinic as if their children had died because their children had died. And the Alabama Supreme Court said, yes, you can sue a clinic for killing your children because they mishandled these frozen embryos. It was the most pro-life decision that any court had ever handed down because it was recognizing the personhood of these little lives, even though they were outside the womb. The immediate result is IVF ground to a halt in Alabama. Every clinic and every hospital that was conducting IVF said, whoa, you're telling me we are responsible if embryos die in this process? We can't do business here. They said our whole, they literally, I have quotes from doctors. All of our services to adults are conditioned on being able to grade

and select the child that's right for them. And freezing is a really important part of this process. What they're saying is we're not gonna make any money if we cannot eliminate the undesirables for whatever adults want it, especially if that has to do with purposeful and accidental. So the doctors themselves are not going into this with a pro-life understanding. They will make money by mass-producing children and help you choose the ones that you want. I just don't know, Carlos, if you have some follow-up questions. I just feel sore in my heart right now just to share this. If you are listening to this or watching this and you have been struggling with fertility issues and have been thinking about IVF, let me just encourage you, this is why being in a good local church matters so much. And so I would encourage you for sure to take everything we're saying into consideration. But this is something that I would encourage you for sure if you're home here at Lake Point, but also anywhere where you're coming from, be a part of a good local church and talk to your pastors. Number one, they wanna weep with you and mourn with you in your struggles. Scripture tells us to weep with those who weep to mourn with those who mourn, and we would love to do that. Number two, it's also why, because they can help you navigate all these nuances.

Because we're talking very broad things. This is where people can walk you through these conversations and I'll be, we, I walked through this with a couple one time and they took a very narrow path and they had the means to do so. But I know that was not the norm, but I love that they wrestled with the elders, their local church through it, of which I was a part. So I'll just encourage you right now, if there's something you're thinking about, I don't want you to hear condemnation from us or judgment from us. If anything, we're just sharing these things that you can be aware of things you maybe were not aware of. And to encourage you to wrestle with it with your pastors and your local churches. That's right, well, regarding surrogacy as well, Trina, can you? Before we do that, can I just say, let me give some hope. Yeah. Your doctors probably haven't even looked and asked to see why you're struggling to get pregnant. Because they will not get a lot of money. They're not gonna be able to earn anything if they actually resolve the low sperm count or the endometriosis, it's gonna cost them money. But there's a whole branch of medicine called restorative reproductive medicine

that exists specifically to identify and diagnose the underlying fertility issues of which there could be dozens on his side and her side. And when those are resolved, sometimes it's as simple as a hormone. supplement in the woman, so maybe you're getting pregnant but you're not staying pregnant. Sometimes there's lifestyle changes on his part that can allow you to more easily get pregnant and this is called restorative reproductive medicine RRM, restorative reproductive medicine. Go to one of these doctors and a lot of times they are going to be able to solve this and they're, depending on the problem, their success rates far outweigh what you're gonna get through IVF. You will be healthier on the side, on the other side, and you won't have to deal with these gut-wrenching struggles of figuring out which embryo lives in which one dies. So there's actually a lot of hope for people struggling with infertility and there's a good chance your doctor is never going to tell you about it. That's helpful. Katie, before we show this, explain the connection between surrogacy and IVF. Okay, if you are going to outsource the production of a baby you need three things. You need sperm, egg, and womb. Sperm is easy to access. We've been able to get to it for a long time. Eggs are harder to access but we've figured out ways to hyper-stimulate a woman's ovaries and laparoscopically extract them. You know, not one that women tend to release per month but maybe 10, 20, or 30 if you're young and healthy. But you also need a womb and so now there is a whole crop, a whole new industry of wombs for rent, surrogacy, so that an infertile heterosexual couple or a single, double, or triple male couple or just a celebrity couple that doesn't want to ruin the bikini bod or interrupt the movie career, you can outsource pregnancy to another woman. You say single, double, or triple male? Yes. Can you explain that? There's international organizations that specifically cater to gay men so that they can have children without being connected to or in a relationship with a woman at all. They globally source all the different parts of the female from different places

around the globe. They'll navigate you to countries where you can easily acquire the child and take them across international borders. It's called Men Having Babies and they specifically advertise to single men, double men, throuples of men, HIV positive men. But that womb, that womb is really, really important. It's very, very hard to secure. I'm sure there's a lot you can say about this and again if you have any questions as we, somebody's listening right now and maybe you have all these questions that I'm sure you will, let us know in the comment section and this is what we're using to continue to, you know, we're gonna use it as a launch pad for future episodes. Explain why you are against that. I mean, again, if in regards to surrogacy, the carrying mother is actually giving an infertile couple the greatest gift imaginable. Katie, why would you oppose that? From the adult's perspective, surrogacy is awesome. The person that's selling her egg is going to be able to pay off her student loans. The military wife who's renting her womb is going to be able to cover some school fees while her husband is abroad. The intended parents love it for whatever reason because maybe they don't have a womb, you know, there's a man or two men. Maybe it's in a retired couple, like we have a higher, an increased number of people that are significantly older, maybe even elderly who are using surrogates to have children because their womb is no longer functional, you know, or maybe it is a pedophile who can't get an adopted child because there's too much screening, vetting, and fingerprinting so they can access children through surrogacy. So the adults in the surrogacy arrangements tend to be very, very happy with the outcome. It is always an injustice to children, regardless of who takes the child home, and the reason is because what surrogacy does is it splices what God intended to be one woman, mother, into three purchasable and optional women. So surrogacy allows you to separate off the genetic mother, right, the egg donor. And if you want, you can go right now on your phone and you can look up egg donor catalog and you can filter your child's genetic mother like you're shopping for a purse on Amazon, okay? But that genetic mother is so important to children because she gives kids half of their

biological identity. You know, that mother helps children answer the question, who am I? It's hard for kids to answer the question, who am I, if they can't answer the question, whose am I? So that's the mother that gives kids that biological identity piece. The birth mother is the one with whom we bond for nine and a half months. She is the one that the baby knows in terms of her voice and her smell. It is her body that drops baby's cortisol levels after they're born. It lowers their stress in a way that skin-to-skin contact with other adults do not. You know, we don't put babies on their mother's chest right away so they can form a bond. We put babies on their mother's chest because they have an existing bond, right? An existing bond that does something to the child's neurological system that allows them to adapt to this brand new world in a way that skin-to-skin with even the biological father won't. But then the third mom is the social mother, the one that's there every day, the one that's wearing the baby and wrapping the baby and simplifying her language right down to the child's level, whereas dad walks in and says, you wouldn't believe this incredible commentary that I bought, and I just learned so much about the word ruach today. And the, you know, mommy would be like, Bible is so good, it's God's Word. You know, like, children need that female presence that is going to interact with them differently than men. Surrogacy requires that children lose at least one of those mothers, always the birth mother, very often the genetic mother as well. And sometimes children go home to a house where there's no mother at all. So the problem is every one of these three mothers is important to children. And surrogacy allows you to treat each of them as optional, purchasable or disposable. So from the child's perspective, there's no form of surrogacy that does not inflict an injustice on them. There's this article that actually went viral literally this week. This is what the article is, Trinity, if you can pull it up. It says couples who surrogate who refuse to abort their baby over a minor birth defect.

And what happened is a Canadian same-sex couple is suing the surrogate who carried their now two-year-old son after she refused her request to abort the pregnancy at 22 weeks upon learning of a minor heart defect and a cleft lip. What's your response to that, Katie? So it's so interesting because a lot of the times the way you pitch surrogacy is, well, I'm not the mother. I'm just the oven for somebody else's bun. But very interestingly, what we see is the oven tends to love the baby more than the people that paid for the dough. And you see it in this story. There was another story that I just posted this morning on Twitter of a black woman in Florida who carried triplets for a single Chinese man, and he didn't come get the babies. So she's raising these three triplets with her husband and just loves them. And he's like, I'm going to get over there soon. I'll be there at some point. He like sends a black car to like collect them. And she's like, I don't know who these people are. You can't have these babies. Wait a minute. You can't have these. And she's protective of these babies. And now she's fighting for custody of these babies. And the single Chinese father hasn't even stepped foot in the United States yet. So there's something about that bond that actually seems to deliver a level of protection that a contract doesn't, strange. And if we think that the woman has a bond with the baby like that, even though she has dozens or hundreds of other relationships, how much of a bond does the baby have to her when the baby has no other relationships? You would think that the only person in the whole pantheon of our human experience that we are connected to by a literal cord would matter to us.

And they do. They do in terms of outcomes for children, the long-term ability to bond and trust and attach. It's critical for kids, but we are treating it as disposable. As if two men who are contracting for a child who probably have burned through dozens of embryos through that eugenic selection that we've already talked about, why do we presume that if they're paying six figures for a baby, they're not going to return a defective product? We're going to land the plane here with two videos that I want to react to. And then Paul, I'm going to give you some, a little bit of time to just give kind of thoughts as we wrap this conversation. The first one, it's one that's going to be more of a, you know what, let's just watch it. Here's the first one. Trina, if you can play it, we're ready for it. Hey, hey, who do you want, Dada or Papa? No, Mama. Do you want Dada or Pop? Who do you want, Dada or Pop? Nope. Do you want Dada or Pop? No way, Jose. I think, oh, there is no Mama. I'm so sorry. You have Dada, you have Pop. Two choices. No Mama. No Mama. Dada or Pop. Well, of course, that's the video that broke the internet. I mean, everybody was sharing and looking at that. And, you know, he, there was such outrage because he's like, hey, it was just a funny video.

And the baby doesn't speak English. The baby doesn't know what they're saying. But the reality is that why is it? And that's true. Yeah. Yeah. But why is it that Mama, some form of Mama? is the word for mother in Chinese, in Hindi, in South Korean, in most of the Western languages, because it is the easiest sound for a baby to make. It's the same movement as what they're gonna be doing when they're nursing. And so it makes sense that the first sounds that a baby make universally are attached to the first person that the child is connected to. So what this child was doing was actually so much more profound than understanding what English is, right? They were voicing that there is a primary person that I don't have. I have this innate, instinctual response, and the person that's supposed to be connected to it is gone. The other thing that I noticed about this video is the dad is doing what dads do. They're being playful, right? They're being, they're much more tactile. What would a mom do in that situation? If a mom had said, who do you want, mama or dad? And he went, mama, what would a mom do?

Oh, baby, baby, right? She would have pulled the baby really close. When I talk about how mothers are more intuitive, more emotionally connected, that's what I'm saying. That five-month-old baby at that moment needed the person that would pull them in. They didn't need more tactile excitement, bouncing. They needed the connection. Dads can't turn that on. Maternal love is not a switch that somebody can flip and say, now I'm gonna be a mom. You will act like a man to that child. It does not matter if you've got long hair or you're wearing an apron or you're more maternal. Men are gonna act like men around children, and that's good as long as they have a mother that's gonna act like women around children, too, and that kid did not have it. That's such an example of, these are human realities about children that you will never legislate away, are never gonna go away, even if you gestate a child in a third party, even if you take them to pride parades and you're around a diversity of families, that child has fundamental needs that culture, law, and technology are never gonna override. That's right. Paul, any thoughts on that before we move on to the next video?

Yeah, it's honestly hard to get out. I don't know, there's something about that video. It hurts. Mm-hmm. I'm honestly just kind of being raw right now. I couldn't even watch it anymore at one point. Just to double-click something on what you said, Katie, that I thought a lot that you've been sharing today has just come up multiple times. A lot of times in our culture, and it's funny how all these different issues are related, in our culture and our society, there's such a resistance against the idea of complementarianism, against the idea that God has made us male and female and we are distinct. We're both created in His image, we both have value and all those things, but we are different. And in our culture and our society, it's like, no, we're interchangeable, we're the same. And we think when we say that, it's actually, and especially men will be thinking, oh, we're valuing women more now because we're saying, no, we're the exact same, when actually you're devaluing women. That's right. Because if I say that, hey, you and I are the exact same in every way, I'm basically saying there's nothing

that you have to give to other people that I can't give to. When that is simply a life in the pit of hell, that God has custom designed you to be able to give things to your husband and to your kids and to society and to the church that I will never be able to give as a man and vice versa. So that's why complementarianism is not an ugly thing, it's a beautiful thing. I think it's something to your point that we all feel at a gut level. So I think when you see something like that, that to your point, you said it so well, that basically you've robbed that child of ever being able to receive what only his mother was designed to give. It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy. And so again, sorry if it's a little bit raw and coming out, it's just, there's something about that video that just hit me hard today. Yeah, and that's why, you know, I think our culture has bought that line. That's why you see a lot of young women trying to quote unquote compete with men because they think, well, we're the same, so therefore this is even playing, so we need to figure that out. And then you see a lot of men that don't know how to engage with women

because they're saying, well, I'm just treating you like I would treat my bro and like a little dude, and that's just not how it works. It's not how it works. That's right. We got one more video here of her landing the plane here. 11-year-old Carter Wiles is about to get the Christmas surprise of a lifetime. This is from all of us, all of us. That's his aunt, Leah Kiphart, offering him a final gift to unwrap on Christmas morning. Inside, this family photo of the Kipharts, showing Carter's aunt, uncle, and his cousins, along with a very special letter. Carter, this is our most recent picture of our family. All of us would love for you to be in the next picture and to be part of our family. Carter, would you like to be a Kiphart? And be in our family brotherhood? Ha, ha, ha. What do you think, buddy? His aunt and uncle surprising him with an adoption. His aunt tells us Carter's adoption status was nearing a deadline, about to change so someone outside the family would be able to adopt him. I'm just gonna open it up. So you know we talk about the importance of a child's biological mother and father and a lot of people say well you must be anti-adoption and you know that's not the case because adoption is a situation where adults are doing hard things on behalf of children and it's actually a pretty potent way of describing the distinctions between and the shortfalls of big fertility

because in the world of adoption what you see is whenever, when it's done according to kind of the guidance of like adoption best practice, the child is going to have their needs met. They're going to have their needs met by people that are seeking to mend their wound, right? The child has a wound. That child has a wound. I don't know the backstory there but obviously their own mother, his own mother and father were not able or willing to do what he needed them to do so other adults came and stepped in and said we're going to seek to mend your wound. In the world of big fertility, the people raising the child are the ones who inflicted the wound. They're the ones who decided that the mother or father would be out of the picture. They literally paid the child's mother or father to stay out of their life forever. So there's one study that we have that compares outcomes between adoptees and children created through sperm donation. So the sperm donor kids were raised by their biological mother, maybe as a single mother, maybe with a social father, maybe with another mother. The adoptees had neither mother nor father but the adoptees did better than the kids created through sperm donation and I think because both of these kids have a wound, both of them have suffered loss, but the adoptive parents are in it with them. The child is not isolated in their grief. They're not asking those questions alone. You know, when my adopted son asked me, you know, why did my birth parents leave me in a box in the town square, you know, I said, I don't know but that makes me really sad. I'm so sorry and I wish that I could have been there right away. I wish that you didn't have to spend that time without your Chinese mom or me. These kids over here, they have the same kind of questions. Why am I, where's my mother or father? Do they love me? Do they know that I exist?

Would they want me if I were to write them a letter? But the response from these kids is often, you should just be grateful to be alive. You wouldn't exist without these technologies. You know, all you need is to be safe and loved. So these kids are supported in their grief. These kids aren't alone in their questions. These kids often have to mourn in isolation and that creates a real significant psychological burden for them. So adoption is a just society's response to children who have lost their parents. It is adults doing hard things on behalf of children. And it's the exact opposite of what's happening in the world of big fertility. That's right. Well, I think so much of what you've been trying to say to us is that, and really since we talked about the beginning of that, if God being the designer and the creator is that we're talking about what should be the norm and what society is trying to do is to up in that norm and it's wreaking chaos and the data backs it up. But we also know that even though that God does have a design, we live in a sinful fallen world or unfortunately not every kid can be raised by their biological parents. And sometimes it's because of death. Because again, we live in a sinful world where there's death. Sometimes it's because the sinful choices of one or even both parents. And in those cases, man, God calls us to step forward and do this beautiful thing of giving ourselves away and adopting a kid that by the way, then ends up blessing those who are sacrificing. Yes. And I'll just share this. I wasn't planning to, but I'm not speaking from theory on this one. So my wife and I dated in college and she broke up with me my junior year and had a season of seasons and walk away from the Lord, which I'm not tying those together. I'm just talking about sequentially.

She broke up with me and they just had a season around then that she was just walking away from the Lord and got pregnant and the guy wanted nothing to do with him or with her. He wasn't a good guy, not a guy that you would probably even want in the picture, but refused to sign birth certificate, didn't visit or anything. And I found out and God just put it in my heart to pray for my wife, not then, but now. And, uh, for this only time ever say her son is what I'm telling the story, uh, but pray for her son. And I prayed for them from afar for about three or four years. And, um, God brought us back together in the same city and we just reconnected, had no idea how she was doing, um, if she was still far from the Lord, but, uh, we got connected and, uh, we're just catching up and the Lord had brought her back to himself, just restored her to fellowship. Um, and I got to just share how I've been praying for them from afar for a few years while God is rekindles that romantic interest there. And we just knew pretty quickly that this is where God was leading us. Um, and I had the honor and the privilege of my life of on our wedding day, uh, uh, my son, not biologically, but he is my son getting to walk my wife with her dad down the aisle. And on the same day I became a husband and a daddy and it's the honor of my life. And Nate is my boy. Um, but to even what you were sharing, um, as he got older, you know, we had to tell him, Hey, the story behind that. And he struggled. And especially in his late teenage years. And, and I even remember there was a night where he had to be pretty blunt honest. He was just really struggling with, Hey, like to your point, like why'd my dad leave me? Because that's hard. That's hard. But I just got to sit beside him in that car and he said some things that, uh, not, not at me, but just back, you're not my biological dad.

And I just sat there and I listened to him and I just was able to say, I love you, bro. And I'm here for you. And I was able to walk with him through that. And so I just want to share that to say this isn't theoretical. Um, and I'd also to share that and encourage you, I think you gave this encouragement earlier, is that if you're out there, I would genuinely, um, encourage you to pray. Could God be calling you to be a part of this adoption process, to have the same privilege and honor that I got to have for my son. So. Paul, thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. Um, I know you personally, and I need you to know that you're a great pastor. You're a great husband, you're a great dad, and I've seen you be that. So that's an example for me. Thanks man. Yeah. Well done. Well done. That's amazing. Um, Katie, any, any, any final thoughts? I got a couple of things to say, but I want to make sure that you have, uh, No, just that adults doing hard things is kind of the way out of this, you know, and that he did suffer significant loss, but he didn't have to process it alone, you know, and you were able to bear his burden when he was asking the very human questions that children ask is like, why and where? And hard, I think hard for so many of those kids, because especially if it's that conversations only happening in their head, oftentimes it ends up manifesting as, um, self depreciation, right? It must be me. There was something wrong with me. So it's really important to have those redemptive adults in your life to say, no, he's missing

out on something great. You know, it wasn't you. That's right. You're a great kid, but, um, but kids need other adults to bear those burdens with them. So thank God he had his dad there to do it with him. Man, here's what we would say, you know, as we wrap this conversation, um, what you believe about these issues matters. They are not inconsequential. Your ideas, what you believe actually has real life consequences, not just for yourself. It's not all about you. It's actually about the people around you, it's about your legacy, about your children. And so, uh, God's order matters. That's why we look towards God's word, not towards the world to inform us on what we do, who we are as husbands, wives, parents, uh, mom, you have a unique responsibility that is a gift, uh, to your family, to your husband, to your children, dads, you have a God-given responsibility to love, serve, lead your family, take responsibility. And when we align with God's purposes, um, blessings happen and we flourish. This is literally how God designed the world. Reality always wins. When we don't, chaos happens, disorder happens. And so, um, if somebody is listening right now, and maybe you are in a spot where you're like, man, maybe I've been in a spot where I haven't done that. Um, we, this is why we love Jesus because there is hope in Christ for reconciliation and restoration. Um, this is literally the good news. The gospel is not just something that happens after you die. It is good news for you today that there is healing and hope and restoration. Um, the ultimate invitation in scripture is from Deuteronomy chapter 30, verse 19. This day, I call the heavens and earth as witnesses against you that I have said before you life and death, blessings and curses now choose life so that you and your children

may live and that you may love the Lord, your God, listen to his voice and hold fast to him. Katie Faust. Thank you for joining. Yeah. It was such a joy to be with you guys. Thank you. You