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

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Can Christians defend biblical truth without fear—and with compassion? In this powerful episode of LIVE FREE, Pastors Carlos Erazo, Paul Cunningham, and special guest Katy Faust tackle some of today's most difficult conversations surrounding marriage, same-sex parenting, IVF, surrogacy, and children's rights. Rather than beginning with politics or personal preferences, they start with God's design for the family and ask a foundational question: What is truly best for children? Discover why Scripture calls believers to speak the truth in love, how a child-centered biblical worldview reshapes today's ethical debates, and how the Church can respond with both conviction and compassion in an increasingly complex culture. Whether you're wrestling with these issues personally or simply want to better understand the biblical perspective, this conversation will equip you to engage with wisdom, grace, and confidence. In this episode you'll learn: Why fear should never keep Christians from speaking the truth God's design for marriage and why it matters A biblical perspective on children's rights How to think about IVF, surrogacy, and reproductive technology How to stand for truth while reflecting the love of Christ Stand firm. Think biblically. Live free. 🍿Join us in person for At the Movies, our annual four-week series using scenes from popular films to bring biblical truths to life! Learn more and find a campus at https://lakepointe.church/at-the-movies/ ✝️ Find out what DID make it into the sermon: Join us in-person for At The Movies!  💬 This week’s giveaway: Comment HAT 🧢 Want a Live Free hat of your own? Visit LiveFree.shop 📲 Looking to grow deeper in your faith? Check out the Lakepointe App to access our Discipleship Guide, daily Bible reading plan, and more. Text APP to 20411 to download

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, Libfrey 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 a live host 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 Arazo, and I am here today with Pastor Paul Cunningham. Come on, man. 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 travel.

Now, I'm dismissing. He is busy prepping for next year 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. You know, I'm just saying I'm gone a week. I'm gone a week and I go to Israel. No, I did not. Everybody was commenting on that on social media, by the way. 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 joint. 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. Anyway, you can try. I'm gone for a week, and while I'm gone, apparently a new T-shirt is made a much. my honor. That's right. And, you know, about joking about me going to Israel and how I have not been yet. It's a serious T-shirt. But seriously, though, when Amy and I were posting pictures. Available where all t-shirts are sold on our merch shop, that's a joke. It's not there. It's not bad. But it should

know in the comment section if you want that shirt as 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 podcast posted, like when we were posting pictures, we were in Quebec, Canada, people were literally just like on social media was sending 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 way, I'm gone for a week and you go to the Capitol? You go to the Capitol? You go to D.C. and actually go to the Capitol?

That was not on my bingo card this year. Oh, man. Tell us about it, man. How did you get there? What was that about? Literally a couple days ago. So our friend, Frank Turrick, extended the invitation and had the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C., to the Capitol.

and we spend an evening with speaker Mike Johnson, which was phenomenal. No 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 can share with you, Paul. You've been there, right?

I've been. I've been to Israel. I've actually been to the Capitol multiple times. 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 because it was literally like we just went there.

But if you go in there, I mean, there's like a capital prayer room for members of Congress. There's like a stained glass window with a Psalm 161 that says, preserve me, oh God, for in the do I put my trust? There's like literally artwork depicting faith and religious elements like literally everywhere. There's like a painting of like the baptism of Pacaontas. and so honestly like so much history it really shows just how Christianity profoundly impacted the 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 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 small.

Lots of history. This is where the representatives meet to pass on to debate laws, to vote on legislation. Basically, like, 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 more 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 like what it looks. These are like 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, Hamarabi, et cetera.

And every single one of these faces and portraits are looking towards the side except for one. In the middle, it right in front of. 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. Yeah. 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, we had, there's so much there. But very grateful for it. So good, man. We're going to be back with you, man. Got to be here with him. Hey, bro, week two of At the Movies.

Come on, dude. Come on. It's the best series here. Did you like the movie? Oh, man, it's so good. I love At the movies. We're getting to hear stories of people. We actually heard one at Allsath this week, talking about how literally sometimes this

will 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. We had a hundred and 70 plus students get baptized. So, big celebration. Here's a quick story, not from this weekend, but of a family I met literally

like a couple weeks before. Trinney, if you got that photo, this right here is Anthony and Eunice and their beautiful family. And they were telling me that they lived in Illinois. At some point, they stumbled up on 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 in a, they're going to look for a rooted group. And Lake Point is now their home. That's amazing.

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 Liffrey Nation coming out, We'd love to say hi. Yeah, man. We get to, honestly. God may call you to move here one day, man.

Be careful. Just be careful. Watch out. That's right. If you come visit, God might say, actually, I want you to move here. So 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. If 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?

Is that a part of it? Limited edition. If the people want it. Come on. And I want you to sign it for people. Hand sign all of them? If you want to find our merch, go to live free. 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 find a daily Bible reading plan amongst other things. Bro, we have a really unique episode today. Yes, we do. I'm so excited.

We have Katie Faust coming in as a guest. I think this is probably going to 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're 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 already 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 really 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, this 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 what, whatever it has God has called us to run towards. So here's what we're going to do, Paul, when we're going to try to make this super practical. Yeah. 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 the 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 a spot here. I know. I am putting you on 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.

And, yeah. I didn't share some of mine if you're, because apparently you're not afraid of anything. No, I didn't say that. I don't know if this is a fear. Go ahead. You share yours and then. Oh, I mean, for me, mine are pretty classic. What is it?

Snakes, spiders, sharks, you know. I mean, this is me, the three S is for sure. Also, like, for me, like, I'm- Have you seen a shark in real life? Yes, I have. Okay. And for me, though, like a random one. Actually, when we were in Canada, 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? That's a fail in 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 is anything manmade, I do not like it.

It's like a fear of my, like, 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 well enough. Or 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. That makes her nervous.

She made me go ziplining over a waterfall that's taller than Niagara Falls. Okay. And so I had to walk up these stairs up the side of a cliff, like 487 stairs to it, which I was freaking out the whole time. And then I had to zip line. and we were up high. Are you afraid? Oh, are you kidding me? Oh, yeah.

So, like, if you actually, 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 surviving.

You enjoyed it when it ended. When it ended. You said, yeah, huge smell on my face when it was over. Yeah, I think, 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 eb-g-bees or, you know, just something. It's rats.

I hate rats. Okay. Whenever I hate it, I absolutely hate it whenever, you know, we've had not in my current home, but in my previous home. It was an older home and we had a rat once in a while, like somehow get inside. And, bro, I absolutely hated it because I'm like, dang it. Now it's my job to figure out a way to like squish this thing somehow, kill it. and then but and I don't like it I really like it

and by the way for context for people that didn't you know we're not able to join us for at the movies the movie was Twisters yes so we're talking about fear and facing that

You're afraid of tornadoes or storms? 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 thing no no yeah yeah so

that's the context what do you got for how to face your fear Probably I was just interested as we were sharing it. It just dawned to me had never asked you these things. Good little ammo to know that you're afraid of frats in case you ever pick on me too much about Israel. Okay. Okay.

No, I would never do such a thing. Oh, boy. Okay. Anyways. No, but also, we're 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 because 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, tell people overcome it. I don't want to feel like I'm going against something that Pastor Josh said in a sermon, but in a sermon, he said, face your fears. I'm going to amend it a little bit because one thing I've said for a while, although not amended. I think it's the same basic point. You're like, oh, yeah, you waited until 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. 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 about.

If you look in scripture, so many of the places where it says, do not be afraid. Isaiah 4110 or Psalm 23, what you're going to be. So you see as 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. It's usually, by the way, something that they had a reason to be afraid of. That's right. So even when you think about it, any time 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, feel fear. But don't feel fear because I am with you. And so the way you can overcome it is not just how to face your fears, but to make your fears face your God, because whatever fear you're facing actually might be bigger than you. Yeah. It actually might be something that you cannot overcome on your own. Yeah.

But God is bigger than anything that you possibly facing. And so it even kind of put this as an illustration or an analogy for how I like to think of this sometimes as, you know, when we were growing up, I don't know if you did this, but, you know, if any time 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 feeling 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. Yeah. Yeah, just go back and forth. Find your own fights, bro.

Yeah, well, what was fun is my dad was a pastor. So I was like, well, my dad will beat your dad of. 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 drunk car that would then send the kid home crying and get me in punishments.

Anyways, but the point is, what would I do that in that moment? I feel so bad now saying that out loud. That's very interesting. I never heard that before. But 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. That's great. 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. Yeah.

Another thing is for you to honestly either be paralyzed by a fear or there's a point where like it becomes an anxiety that's just like 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. 1 Peter chapter 5 verse 6 to 9 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. 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 you and I both have kids, when your kids are scared and like, what's their instinct to go to dad? That's right. 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 one, bombard your mind with truth. Number two, pray. It's simple. And number three, 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 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 in that situation,

but it wasn't until he must be moved that God, you know, did something. When Israel leaders, when 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, whatever it is God is calling you, man. And 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. That's right. And so 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.

It's 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 will feature 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 1 and 2. And 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 2041. Now, let's get back to the conversation. Katie Fowse, welcome to the Live Free Podcast. It's been a long time coming. Come on. Really glad to be. 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 in 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 Fouse 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 That's so true Yeah, in the Capitol being toured Out of all places By Mike Johnson That's right

About all these like secret places And like What I feel like is like Newly unearthed historical knowledge About our amazing founding It was fascinating It was so amazing Have you been there?

No, no Well, I have been to D.C. 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 seminators 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, it was really fun. It was amazing. What? And I want to 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. That's right. And I want more pastors to be bold. I want them to be clear.

And I'll tell you what, like with all of the like smoke machines and, jazz hands that a lot of people are adding to that. I mean, I say this as, you know, someone who was a pastor's wife for almost 30 years. Like, 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. He does. He has 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 want to 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 then 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 315, 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 want to do in this conversation is I want to 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 going to be able to cover every single thing regarding those conversations. So this is such a huge conversation at some point likely. We might even do like 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 going to 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 Giposi, how are you, man? I'm doing good.

Were you earlier going to 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 this. I just see him. They have an ongoing joke with me if I've been to Israel. You know what I was going to say? And you have not.

You know what I was going to say? Yeah, because we were in D.C. Yeah. I was going to say, Chad D.C. Have you been to D. I have been to D.C. I used to live in the D.C. Oh, thank you.

Thank you. So I've been to the capital multiple times. Oh, more than me. Wow. Wow. Yes. Yes. That makes me feel so good.

but I've been a place more than him. He's Mr. Worldwide. He's been pretty much everywhere. Him and Pibble. 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.

Let me talk about gay marriage for a second. Please, too. 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 plus. Love is Love with Paul. Me and Paul, I think it was like a month ago. We're going to drop that in the show notes and in the description of this video. Arthur's going to 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 as 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 fill. And that is the idea that for romantic relationship, God is designed for a 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 going to 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. Okay. And his very tight definition of marriage had three specific characteristics to them, right? He said, a man, well, leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. The two shall become one flesh, what God is 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. 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 is 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 we he gets to decide. So what is it that he cares for? What is it that he loves? And you will see all

throughout his, laced 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 promote separation. Dads are the ones that are saying, you can make it, run higher, go faster, go bigger, swing the hammer, climb the tree. And the moms will say, not so high, 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 you need that 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 invest 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 for 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 increased 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 the 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. That's right. 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. It's not 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 things. One is I intentionally start with that idea. 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. those things aren't in place, things go wrong. Right. And it's because we're not using things according to God's design. When that happens, society is not going to flourish. And individual couples in people's lives are not going to flourish. So I just want to connect those dots for people.

That's probably really wanted to start with the idea of it's God's design. And when you don't do it, of course, you guys design, things can go wrong. Okay. So let me help some people here. Yeah, Katie, but you're talking about children. Honestly, I just want to know, like, I just see my best friend who's a man is in love with another man. And they just want to be together because they're happy. Like, they're not bothering children.

They're not, maybe they won't even have children. They just want to be happy together. Who are you? Like, what's wrong with that? So we, 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 re-election. 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 Lock, the junior high lock and at 3 a.m. And everyone's asleep and that one kid wants to stay up. And they're crying. And what are they talking about? Where is my father? Where is 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 Obergefeld 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 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 Obergefeld decision? He said same-sex couples, in the name of non-discrimination, 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 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. Okay.

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. 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. Yeah. Okay, so that's not a right. And even to maybe connect some dots for people, maybe 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 when your original questions was, 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 going to be in an endless cycle back and forth to people. It sounds like you're advocating. We're saying, no, let's actually change the venue of this discussion. because, and I know that not everyone were talking to it, obviously agree. Most people wouldn't on this.

But it's interesting that I just opened up Genesis again. And literally right out it says, so God created man his own image and the image of God. He created male and female, he created them. What is the first thing he says? Now be fruitful and multiply. So marriage, yes, as we laid 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. or at least it'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. Yeah.

But one of the things he said is, you're divorcing the wife of your youth, in essence, to marry the trophy wife, right? And he was speaking specifically to the religious leaders, right? And then he gives an explanation for, 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 do to get to that question? You're appealing to a really specific edge case. So this is a really common tactic when 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? Right, which is less than one percent of the cases. Right. And that's not to say that it doesn't deserve a response. It does. But let's talk about the 99% first. Yes. 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 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 law 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 list 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. Yeah. So when I say that the world of children's rights insists that all adults do 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 going to sacrifice for the week as 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 turn 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. You know, 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 net, but based on all the different options, that was the best fit for the child. right and what is adoption adoption 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 especially kind of surprised. 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 talking about gay marriage and gay parenting until somebody's like, how it 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 studies, 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 like open and shut. The third is that maternal or paternal loss harms children, whether through death, divorce, abandonment, or third-party reproduction. 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 kids' 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 than 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, you know, people will say, Katie, but your view, they're 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 Greek or Roman world

it was not unusual for there to be same-sex relationships as well then comes the Apostle Paul writes Romans chapter 1 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 and 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 Greek 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. 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 soldiers 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 oppose 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, Infantzite was outlawed in AD 374 because of the strong influence of Christians pushing for that. And so 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 going to talk about today as intrinsically valuable and made in the image of God and worthy of our protection. Can I just add to that?

Please. 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. Foot binding in China was rampant. And the Christian missionaries hit the shores. And they're like, what is going? And they were like, not on, get off our lawn. I mean, like, they literally, 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, you know, 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's 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 four. 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 Slesinger, Mary Slesser, 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 footbinding. 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. You know, 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. What's, if somebody's asking, 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? Yeah. 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 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 screened.

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 customized, I don't mean create a child, a boy that has a specific color of blue eyes. By customized, 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 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 they've been very open about theirs. And we just know a lot of people listening. A lot of people to our church struggle with that.

And I don't in any way want to make it sound like we're being insensitive to that or downplaying that. So 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 had 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. That is not what we mean by that whatsoever. So I just want 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 we're rendering to 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 in 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, 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 of 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. He said, you saw my unformed substance. From conception, we have value. And even not, okay, if you may can go back and forth and these kind 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 to it and 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. Exactly.

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, okay, yeah, yeah, it is. But in fact, when it's first created the Cemprio, it's one cell. It's called a zygote. Yeah. Okay, yeah. And whose cells are those? Actually, what kind of cells are there? They're human cells. Are they living or non-living? They're living. Oh, so living as in their life. 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 mothers and fathers of 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, I know, I think, in fact, Pastor Josh, believe, even talked about this. We did. We did.

We put that in the show guide and just make sure that people can go. listen to that. Pastor Josh responded the day, 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 going to go into this, this is a tightrope. This is, I wouldn't say, a minefield. That it is theoretically possible to get through it, but you've really got to do it carefully because if not, you're devaluing and throwing way 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 add in some other qualifications. I'd love to hear you say some other things if you're going to do this in a way that honors God. Because this is a mind field. 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?

Yeah. Like everybody has to bend here, right? Somebody with same sex attraction that would be a wonderful husband or be a wonderful father, 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 going to 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. You know, 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, create, that they were encouraged at least to create multiple embryos. They know that they were probably pressured to grade their embryos. They know that 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 prays 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 Day of children that are fertilized in vitro, 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 three percent of children created in the laboratory will be born alive. Only two to three percent. Wow. And every one of those children, we have about 100,000 children born in the United States through IV.

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 going to have the same chance. And those kids deserved protection too. they deserve to be cherished. They deserve 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 going to 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 want to 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-sum. surplus embryos, what do I do? I'm just in agony over it. The answer is like, 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, you know, 30,000 to maybe 60,000 children of those 100,000 that are born will also. We'll 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, a third to two thirds 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 spurned from a catalog? What are you doing if you pay another woman to care? 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 right to their mother and father, and violating their right to be born free and not bought and sold. Right. Well, as I say, so distinguished, I even kind of help summarize this, you would not say that IVF is sinful in and of itself, just like the practice that there are, you would say, I think we talked about 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 got to 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 got to know if you're thinking about that, you were 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, I would say you might want to 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 going to go into this with pro-life convictions, with pro-child convictions, you're going to be alone. You're going to 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.

There was three different couples. The embryos were lost because they were dropped and they were thought 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 problem. We can't do business here. Wow. They said our whole,

I have quotes from doctors. All of our services to adults. 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 going to make any money if we cannot eliminate the undesirables for whatever adults wanted, 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 sounded about Carlos, you probably some follow-up questions. I just feel

certain in my heart right now just to share this. If you're listening to this or watching this, and you've 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 matter so much. And so I would encourage you, for sure, take everything we're saying in conservation. This is something that would encourage you, for sure, if you're home here at Lake Point, but also anywhere where you're coming from, may be part of a good local church and talk to your pastors. Number one, they want to we with you and more with you in your struggles. Scripture tells us to we put those weeks

more with those this morning. 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. I walked to this with a couple one time, and they took a very near 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 of their local church through it, 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. I think that we're just sharing these things that you can be aware of things you maybe not, we're 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, 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 going to be able to earn anything. If they actually resolve the low sperm count or the endometriosis, it's going to 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 hormonal 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 depending on the problem, their success rates, far outweigh what you're going to 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 and which one dies.

So there's actually a lot of hope for people struggling with infertility, and there's a good chance your doctor's never going to tell you about it. That's helpful. Okay, 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 hyperstimulate 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 couple? Yes. Can you explain that? There's international organizations that specifically case. 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 going to use it as a launch pad for future episodes. Explain why you are against that.

I mean, again, if in regards to surrogacy, the Carrie and mother is actually giving an infertile couple of the greatest gift imaginable. Katie, why would you oppose that? From the adults' 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 these 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, who's 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 ways 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, the word, the word, 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. Trinidad, if you can pull it up, it says couples who surrogate who refused to abort their baby over a minor birth defect.

And what happened is a Canadian same-sex coupleist who in 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 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 that 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 eugenics 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 line the plane here with two videos that I want to react to. And then, Paul, I'm going to give you a little bit of time to just give final 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. Train, if you can play it. We're ready for it. Hey, hey, who do you want, dad-da or pop? No, mama. Do you want dad-da or pop? Who do you want?

Dada or pop? Nope. Do you want Dada? You want 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. 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, you know, Western languages?

Because it is the first, it is the easiest sound for a baby to make. make. It's the same movement as what they're going to 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. 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. Yep. 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 going to 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 going to act like men around children. And that's good as long as they have a mother that's going to act

like women around children too. And that kid did not have it. And it's just, you know, that's such an example of these are human realities about children that you will never legislate away, are never going to 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 going to override. That's right. Any thought on that before we want to the next video? Yeah, it's honestly hard to get out. I don't know.

There's something about that video. It hurts. I'm honestly just kind of being raw right now. I couldn't even watch it anymore at one point. You know, just to double-click something on you said, Katie, that I thought a lot that you've been sharing today has come up multiple times of 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. Yeah. 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, we're like, no, we're interchangeable. We're the same.

And we think when we say that, it's actually, especially, and especially men will be think, 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 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 lie from 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 it. the gut level. So I think when you see something like that, that to your point that you said it so well, that basically you've robbed that child of ever being able to receive what only its mother was designed to give. It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy. So again, sorry if it's a little bit wrong 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 lie. And 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 you do then that's just not how it works that how works that's right uh we have one more video here and then we're landing in the plane here 11 year old carter wiles is about to get the christmas surprise of a lifetime this is from all of us give me all of us that's his aunt leah kipphart offering him a final gift to unwrap on christmas morning inside this family photo of the kipphearts 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 kid part and be in our son and brother with? What do you think, buddy? His aunt and uncle surprising him with an adoption. We're going to adopt you, Carter.

Oh, thank you so much. 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. This might have been the last time that we were ever going to see Carter and felt that it was really important for us. I'm just going to open it up the thought. 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. 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. Right.

Well, I think so much of what you've been trying to say to us is that, and really since we talked about at the beginning of the idea of 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. 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 in my junior year and had a season of a season and walked away from the Lord, which I'm not timed those together. I'm just talking about sequentially. She broke up with me and they just had a season around then. 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 win the picture, but refused

to sign birth certificate, didn't visit or anything. And I found out, and God just put in my heart to pray for my wife, not then but now. And for this only time I ever say her son is when I'm telling the story. But pray for her son. And I prayed for them from afar. for about three or four years. And God brought us back together in the same city. And we just reconnected.

Had no idea how she was doing if she was still far from the Lord. But we got connected and we're just catching up. And the Lord had brought her back to himself. Just restored her to fellowship. And I got to just share how I've been praying for them from afar for a few years. Well, God just rekindles that romantic interest there. And we just knew pretty quickly this is where God was leading us. And I had the honor and the privilege of my life of on our wedding day.

My son, not biologically, but he is my son getting to walk my wife with her dad down the aisle. And I'm the same day I became a husband and a daddy. And it's the honor of my life. And Nate is my boy. But to even what you were sharing, 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 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 did 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 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. And I'd also to share that to encourage you, I think you gave this encouragement earlier, is that if you're out there, I would genuinely 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? Well, thank you for sharing that, man. I know you personally. And I need to you to know that you're a great pastor. Thank you.

You're a great husband. You're a great dad. And I've seen you be that. So, bro, that's an example for me. Thanks, man. Yeah, well done. Well done. That's amazing.

Katie, any final thoughts? I got a couple things to say, but I want to make sure that you have any final things. 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. Yeah. You know? And you were able to bear his burden when he was asking the very human questions that children ask. He's like, why and where?

And hard, I think hard for so many of the people. those kids because especially if it's that conversation's 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 but the kids need other adults to bear those burdens with them. So thank God he had his dad there to do it with him. Thank you.

Man, here's what we would say, you know, as we wrap this conversation, what you believe about these issues matters. They are not inconsequential. Your idea is 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, is about your legacy, about your children.

And so 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 husband's, wives, parents. Mom, you have a unique responsibility that is a gift to your family, to your husband, to your children. Dad, you have a God-given responsibility to love, serve, lead your family, take responsibility. And when we align with God's purposes, blessings happen, and we flourish. This is literally how God designed the world. Reality always wins. When we don't, chaos happens.

This order happens. And so if somebody's listening right now, and maybe you are in a spot where you're like, maybe I've been in a spot where I haven't done that. This is why we love Jesus, because there is hope in Christ for reconciliation and restoration. 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. 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. It was such a joy to be with you guys. Thank you.