Deliberately depriving children

In March of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, dropped a truth bomb on the nation in what became known as “The Moynihan Report.” The actual title was “The Negro Family” with the urgent subtitle “The Case for National Action.”

How much has the Democratic Party changed in the last 60 years? It was a Democrat in 1965 who launched our current national debate on the personal and social virtue of favoring the married, mother/father family.

Moynihan was ringing our national alarm bell over an emerging family formation trend that was threatening the entire society—the rise of the fatherless family. As Moynihan revealed, the fatherless family was even then causing demonstrable harm to black Americans struggling to realize their part of the American dream. He was asking leaders to appreciate how evolving changes in family formation erode child and community well-being.

There was a vicious backlash against Moynihan, including charges of “blaming the victim.” He told a close friend later that year, “If my head were sticking on a pike at the South-West Gate to the White House grounds, the impression would hardly be greater.” The intervening decades have proved his warning to be accurate, but our national leaders were silenced by false accusations of prejudice, and a serious problem grew even worse, harming untold millions of children, their parents, and entire communities.

Moynihan never slowed his advocacy. In the preface of his posthumously published gem of a final book, The Future of the Family, Moynihan lamented how the irreplaceable married mother/father “process of making human beings human is breaking down in American society.”

Yet the devolution of family formation continues, and Moynihan’s experience tells us there is no “good” way to push back on it. Anyone who does so will be called nasty names. Count on it. But that should not keep us from recognizing how LGBTQ politics and Pride Month celebrate family erasure.

This fact is found in organizations like Men Having Babies (MHB). This growing organization, holding seven U.S. and international conferences this year, exists for the sole purpose of helping same-sex attracted men acquire children through legal financial payments to a child’s biological or gestational mother via egg or womb purchase. So we are looking at intentionally motherless homes created by men raising intentionally motherless children whom they legally bought.

MHB’s guiding ethos of “fertility equality” is as impossible as the organization’s name. The group website boasts a playful cartoony graphic claiming male-only unions are qualitatively equal to and no different than female-only unions and both are just as vital and beneficial as natural mother/father families. Of course, this is demonstrably false. The assertion that any man with money can perfectly replace a child’s natural mother is madness. Ponder that assertion a moment and try to imagine a stronger patriarchal denunciation of the feminine and motherhood than that.

But that is what Pride Month celebrates. Be sure that MHB is certainly not alone in this work. There are many such organizations across the United States and around the world. One of MHB’s international competitors proudly boasts, “Redefining family, one journey at a time.”

This is tolerated because our society bought the lie that adults have a right to children. They do not. Children have a right to what they need most and where they find their natural origin: Their own loving mother and father. A caring society has an obligation to make sure this happens as often as possible. Each successful effort by groups such as MHB, by definition and intention, denies every child it touches his or her own mother, and it does so to satisfy adult wishes. Who can say that is ethical or loving?

Contractual surrogacy is a major part of what groups like Men Having Babies help broker. If that sounds coldly transactional, then you properly understand what these organizations do. As with high-priced prostitution, the money paid by male(s) to the child-bearing woman is the mechanism that dismisses her after her services are given. In MHB’s statement of “ethical surrogacy practices,” the needs and rights of the women are secondary, literally. They are also ever so minimal. Their first ethical principle guarantees the man gets what he’s after. No consideration of the child’s needs is stated in MHB’s ethical guidelines. Not one.

Make no mistake. This is the logical consequential fruit of legalized same-sex marriage.

When the U.S. Supreme Court, in the name of “marriage equality,” redefined marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015, it also redefined parentage and the family itself, a package deal. Nearly 40 other countries have done the same. As a result, the U.S. Uniform Parentage Act (UPA) was rewritten in 2017, effectively neutering the family. The National Center for LGBTQ Rights explains, “The UPA of 2017 fully protects both married and unmarried same-sex couples, and includes many important provisions protecting LGBTQ parents, including provisions addressing children with multiple parents. …” The group adds, “Reproductive justice means fully protecting all families under the law.” No worries that it utterly ignores what reproduction requires.

Obergefell, by codifying same-sex families, fundamentally relativized the family and parentage away from what children need most. It erased any consequential meaning of motherhood and fatherhood because it had to.

New York state is now poised to do this very thing, having just passed S9316, which the bill’s official summary explains, “Replaces the terms father, mother, and filiation to gender neutral language” in state law. It changes the natural understanding of parentage to be anything established by artificial reproductive contracts between various experimental parties in exchange for money.

In pursuit of a wholly novel conception of “human rights” we have defined away the origin and essence of humanity itself: the family established upon the marital union of male and female. The very thing that Sen. Moynihan furiously argued was essential for every community.

This is not progress. But it is precisely what Obergefell created and Pride Month demands.