Sacrificing children on the ideological altar

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Last week, a judge granted three-way custody of a child to a “throuple,” the new term for a romantic relationship between three people. In this case, two members of the one-man, two-woman group were the child’s biological parents, but one was not.

Slate magazine called the judge’s custody ruling in the case “a necessary next step in a vision of parenthood and child-rearing that extends beyond the boundaries of monogamous marriage.” John Stonestreet called it something different: a social experiment on children.

Three-parent custody is the logical extension of an argument that began with no-fault divorce and continued with same-sex marriage, he said.

“The first thing we did is we pretended like marriage is just a label we can slap on any human relationship we want as if there would be no consequences,” Stonestreet said. “That’s not true. Marriage is actually something in reality.”

Then, he said, society crafted slogans and sayings to justify the irrational twisting of reality.

“We say things that we have no idea whether they’re true or not,” Stonestreet said. “We have no reason to believe them, but we say them. Things like, ‘Kids don’t need married parents; kids need happy parents.’” But no evidence has been found to suggest that’s true: Every study shows that children do best in a home with their biological father and mother.

Stonestreet had a dire warning for the culture, which he said was sacrificing the well-being of children for the fulfillment of its narcissism and sexual desire: “Future generations will look at us similarly to the way ancient religions sacrificed children. We might not be doing it on actual altars, but we are doing it on ideological altars, and it’s just disgusting.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the March 31, 2017, edition of The World and Everything in It.