#STRask - Everyone Deserves Love and Happiness

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Questions about how to answer someone who says, “Everyone deserves love and happiness,” in response to objections to same-sex weddings, and how to think about same-sex adoption when looking through the lens of the greater good.   How would you answer someone who said, “Everyone deserves love and happiness,” in response to my objections to same-sex weddings? How should I think about same-sex adoption when looking through the lens of the greater good? If same-sex marriage is legal, what is the greater good in terms of children—giving a child a home or fighting against same-sex adoption ever occurring?

Welcome back to hashtag STR Ask. And hopefully you heard our last episode. We had a question about making a biblical case against, quote, gender affirming care. Right. And one thing I forgot to say, so I hope Christy is still listening. I wanted to point her to a website called sex change regret.com. And this is Walt Hire's website. He lived as a woman.

I don't know for how long. And then he came out of that. And the reason why I wanted to point this out is that it might be helpful to give her, her brother wanted to have, quote, gender affirming care. And it might be helpful for her. As a Christian. Yeah, thank you. Yes. He says he's Episcopal. So it might help him to see examples of people who have left and their stories and what they went through and why they went through it. And that might be helpful. So that's sexchange regret.com. So having said that. Let me add one thing to that too. And just keep in mind, like a lot of things kind of broadly in these categories, the cultural narrative is always rosy and all regarding these different things.

And the whatever things seem out of sort in the lifestyles of those is all because of people like us who think they're wrong and aren't giving support. Two observations on this. It's hard to imagine any way of thinking, living, doing, acting, breathing that has more cultural support than transgender stuff or LGBT issues. A whole month is dedicated in the cultural calendar to celebrating these things everywhere, okay? So, and even so, the suicide rates for transgender is really, really high. And you can't pin that on Christians here because the same is true in Scandinavian countries where people are a lot more flagmatic about this, I mean, sanguine about these kinds of

things. It's because people, there's something going on inside that's just not right and they know this. And that would be my assessment. And obviously there are going to a lot of people disagree, but I just want folks to think about this. God's made things a certain way. This was our argument last time around. And he said that it was good. Therefore, if you deviate from that, if you say no to God's way and move another direction, it's not going to be good.

And this is precisely what we find in the lives of people who pursue this. Not maybe every single one, but on balance, it's just, destructive in people's lives, just like every other way that we rebel against God and his purposes. And Nancy Piercy makes this point that she wrote a book called Love Thy Body, and I think that would be a good book for people to read to kind of understand the worldview. But imagine if you were divided, if you felt divided all the time from your body. What Christians want you to do is live within in concert with as a whole person with your body and not be divided. And that is the way to wholeness. And that's what we would like people to see.

So let's get on to the questions here. This first question comes from Chad. What are your thoughts on the statement? Everyone deserves love and happiness. I heard this in response to my objections to same-sex weddings. I would obviously start with Columbo number one, but what else? Thanks for everything you do. I don't understand this statement.

It seems this first statement. Everyone deserves, what, happiness? Love and happiness. Okay. Why? Now, I'm not saying no to this, but this has baggage attached to it. And there's a, the assumption is that who would disagree with that? And then the next step is to plug a bunch of other stuff that, that it seems to be entailed

by an acknowledgement that everyone deserves loving happiness. Therefore, whatever I choose to do with my own life sexually, and usually this is the way it works out, then that makes me feel good in the moment. Then I deserve that. I'm owed that. And therefore, if you say otherwise, if you get in the way, if you don't abet that whole enterprise, you're taking away something that is owed me. So I'm going to want to start right from the beginning.

If there is no God governing the universe, then no one is owed anything by anyone, anywhere, anyway, anyhow. there is no normative the way it's supposed to be conditioned for the world. It is just, you know, if you think of it in a molecular level, it's molecules in motion. If you think about it in terms of living things, it's just competition for survival. It's just think of the animal realm. They just do what they do to reproduce and eat and try to get what somebody else has. We got a little bird feeder on our window above the kitchen.

sink, you know. We actually have two of them. One of them is for hummingbirds. The other one's got seeds in it. You wouldn't believe the combat we watch as these, as the birds are chasing each other away from the food source, you know. It's just the way they live. So we're different. And we have moral elements in our life that that guide how we behave. So this idea, that everyone deserves love and happiness, that needs to be defended. Now, if you're going to defend it outside of a theistic worldview, I don't see where that comes, because that's not moral obligation, so you've got objective moral obligations that apply to us to make sure you get the love and the happiness that you deserve. That is your right. Okay. The next thing is, what is, what is,

is love. And are there any moral restraints on what makes you happy? There's a whole group of people who get pleasure from having sex with children. That makes them happy. Oh, well, that's hurting someone else. Well, okay. Well, now you're beginning to qualify it. That's good. Okay. In other words, our happiness isn't just an unrestrained right, even on your view. There may be moral restraints on it, but the way it's offered, it's an unrestrained right. And then all of a sudden, all these other things get entailed into it. If we're looking at the way God made the world, you already have, as a human being made the image of God, you already have love, God's love for those he created. And you can get that love in a much deeper, richer way from God. If you quit fighting

him. And this is another element that is not mentioned very often. Jesus says in John chapter 6, I'm sorry, John chapter 14, the upper room discourse, if you, I can't remember exact words, but if you follow me and believe in me, then my father will love you. And the point is that there's a special love that God has for those inside the family. Remember in Gospel of John, 1st chapter 14, 12 verse, as many has received him. To them he gave the right to become children of God. Okay, so I think I've talked about this on the year not too long ago. Yes, there's a filial relationship God has, but there's also a sovereign relationship over subjects. And for most people, it's sovereign subject. It's not father-child, because the father-child

relationship comes in after we resolve the rebellion that we're in as subjects to a sovereign. Okay. So inside that relationship, which is available to us, once we acknowledge who the sovereign really is and bend our need to the sovereign, receive forgiveness. Now we got love and the kind of happiness that is really consistent with the way God made us. So the ancients called it Eudaimedea, the good life. Living consistently with your nature, I don't mean your fallen nature, I mean the way you're created.

And this takes this back to Genesis 1 and 2. So those are some of the factors I think that are involved in this particular issue. And I think that this particular question that people ask is really loaded and requires lots and lots of questions to unpack it before you commit yourself to other things that seem to be entailed with this very unusual notion. Because there are hidden things in here. and the first level of hiddenness is he's not really asking, or they're not really asking everyone, you know, saying everyone deserves love and happiness. They're saying everyone deserves the kind of love that they want and the happiness that they want in the way that they want. Probably more like I deserve it. That's what they're saying.

Yeah. And if you go even deeper, what this specifically is saying is, is. everyone deserves to marry whoever they want to marry. Yeah. Or whatever, actually. There's no actual principle behind this that would say you can't marry an animal or you can't marry a minor or you can't marry a minor or you can't marry an object. Nothing in this has any sort of boundaries. But of course, we all actually, even someone who says this has in mind some boundaries.

But if you make this the principle, everyone deserves love and happiness. there's no boundary to that. Right. Because if we're defining what gives us love and happiness, then no one can define that for us. Actually, the boundary is interfering with whatever someone thinks will give them love and happiness. So that's the real question.

So if you want to get from here, get into questions about marriage, this whole statement in this context of same-sex weddings gets to the very heart of what marriage is. And here is the problem, and this is what everyone missed. The whole thing where people were changing the definition of marriage, it was a change in the definition of marriage. It wasn't that some people were excluded and now we're including them. Anyone could have married the opposite sex according to the definition of marriage. Nobody was excluded from that. But what they really wanted to do is change the definition from the union of a man and a woman to two people. Now, again, Once you change it to two people, what is the principle to limit it to two people? The reason why there's two is that there are two sexes, and that's the two come together to create a unique union that creates life. That is the reason for marriage. When you remove that reason, marriage no longer has any sort of boundaries.

And this is the problem. People were not thinking principally. They were just thinking, I want to make this person happy. Right. But the real problem was they changed the entire definition of marriage by changing it from the reason why existed, which is to protect this particular union that creates life and then say, it's just two people who love each other. Well, why two people? And why love? There's no, why even humans?

Yeah. There's no reason to limit it at this point because it's just two people together who want. to live their lives together. That is not what marriage is, and this is the problem. So if you want to get into a whole explanation of marriage and why marriage exists, we're going to go into this a little bit more on the next question. But we have so many resources on our website about why marriage is to find the way it is by God and why we shouldn't mess with that. And we're starting now to see all sorts of the issues that result from that. We're seeing because what happens is if you remove that union, that particular union, from the definition of marriage,

well, now you get people who are coming together who want what that union provides and thinks that marriage automatically gives you the right to that, even if it doesn't involve that union. So we see people ordering designer babies and using surrogacy and having to be. to create a whole other area of law demanding that people, that their insurance pays for them because they're, quote, infertile when they don't even have the union necessary for those things. So you can see once you remove it from man, woman union, and you try and get all the benefits of that, you're going to cause a whole bunch of other issues. And again, we're about to get into this. It's the dominoes. It's the domino's fall. You know what I, it just occurred to me is that, that little aphorism about once.

It's something about deception when you lie and how so many things like domino's fall, more deceptions have to follow from that. I can't remember how that goes now. If at first you do deceive. No, no, that's a different one. That's better than Franklin. If you want, if you don't succeed, try it again. This isn't deceived try to try.

But it's something along that line. And the point of making here is that once you make this one TV. But what a tangled web we weave. First we practiced. Yes. Okay, this is it. So this is excellent. So this is a lie that people are believing about the nature of reality.

It's a distortion and a lie. And then all kinds of other lies follow from that. It's the dominoes begin to fall. I want to make one clarification because sometimes the way we use our life, language is really important, and this particular distinction did not occur to me until many years after. I will say for myself, this issue of same-sex marriage and largely homosexuality, but especially same-sex marriage, took me years to try to figure out the right way to understand how this all fits together, and it required me being very careful about my language.

And so what I would say now is marriage is not defined. Although I think you're right that with Obergefeld, we changed the definition of marriage. But the implication there is that marriage is just a definition. And so, well, you divide it one way. We define it somewhere, they define it, whatever, like it's up for grabs, as you, how you define it. And the distinction I made here is marriage is not defined. It's described. Just like gravity is not defined, like you can.

can define it any way you want. We're going to change the definition of gravity, but doesn't change gravity. Marriage is a feature of reality based on the way human beings are made. Now, God made them. We ground that in creation, but even if I left creation and God out of it, we see that it, you know, how did I put it? As a rule, as a rule, as a group, and by nature, same, long-term same-sex unions produce the next generation. Opposite sex unions produce.

Oh, what did I say? I'm sorry. Same-sex. Opposite, yeah. Yeah. Opposites, they produce the next generation. Now, this is a function of reality. It's the way reality is structured when it comes to human beings, reproduction, and culture.

And so the fact that we see these particular kinds of relationships play a particular kind of role in culture, then culture which is made up of these, that's the foundation of culture, decided to protect this thing. So we give it a name. We call it marriage. But we didn't just define it into existence. We saw something that was there like gravity and find a name for it because it does a certain kind of thing. Anyway, I just, I won't pursue that anymore right now, maybe in a further question, but my point is, marriage is not just arbitrarily defined one way and it can be defined in other ways.

Marriage is a word that we use to describe a human institution that is foundational to civilization. It's a pre-political institution, not created by government, but recognized by government, similar to our natural rights given to us by God. They're recognized by the government, not given and created by the government. That's excellent distinction. Pre, how'd you say that? A pre-political institution. Did you make that up?

No. Oh, okay. Oh, that's a good one. I'll have to add it to my vocab. Oh, I'm trying to decide if we have time. Well, let's go ahead. Here's a question from Daniel. How would one think about same-sex adoption when looking through the lenses of the greater good?

In other words, if same-sex marriage is legal, what does? is the greater good in terms of children, giving a child a home or fighting against it ever occurring? I'm struggling on how to work this out. Well, I'm glad this question is worded the way it was, Daniel, nice job, because I think there is a greater good concern. You look at a set of circumstances and you ask what is right, all things being equal, but sometimes all things are not equal. and you end up settling for something that's less than best, but better than what might be the case.

So you have single moms, for example. Well, single moms, that's not what God ordained, but sometimes my wife was a single mom when I married her. So sometimes one finds themselves in the circumstance, whatever. Well, if a woman gets pregnant, God wants a child to be part of a family. All right, don't have a family, so kill the child with abortion. Well, that's not right. So the greater harm is to kill the child, and you take the lesser good of a single parent family because a full parent family, two-parent family is not available, given the

alternative in the scenario I'm constructing of abortion. Now, of course, that's not in real life. That's not the only alternative. You can adopt out whatever. But what it shows, though, is that sometimes we are faced with circumstances that are not ideal, but we adopt them because the alternative is worse. So, in principle, I think that it's not in keeping with God's purposes for a single person to adopt a child.

I think that children should be adopted by families. And in the same sense, I think it's better that the family be not a same-sex couple, but a mother and a father, all right? Now, one could imagine a scenario. I'm not going to try to paint them because I don't want to sound like I'm endorsing this, but one could, for the sake of this question, one could imagine a scenario where the circumstance for the child in question is going to be much more damaging to the child. And I'm just, I'm stipulating it would be much more damaging because I don't want people to try to think of

examples of that and maybe justify some wrong relationships. But just for the sake of stipulation, it's much worse for the child to be alone and not part of any family than it is to be with a single parent or to be even with a same-sex couple. Now, that's anath about to even suggest that, but this is why I'm making the stipulation. I'm not even trying to imagine what that would look like. But since the question was asked with regards to a kind of a moral dilemma, and the option that we have to take in those circumstances is the greater good or the lesser of two evils, however you want to construe it,

well, there are going to be lots of times when the place a child grows up in is not going to be ideal. and, but it may be the best considered other alternatives. And so I think that Daniel's thinking correctly when he's trying to assess these things in terms of the moral dilemma, the greater good or the lesser evil, whatever. But, man, I'm really reluctant to give kind of material examples of that because I don't want to sound like I'm encouraging this kind of thing. I think most of the time it's not the case that those kinds of circumstances are going to be

better for the kid. And that's the problem. When we make policy, we're making policy for the way things usually are. It's hard for me to imagine any example where that would be the case since I know so many people who want to adopt. And the even bigger problem is now what we're seeing is the creation of children through surrogacy for the purpose of denying them a mother or a father. So they're either going to have two, well, usually they would have two fathers if they need to have surrogacy. So they they just don't have a mother. So you're creating this child to intentionally remove them from whoever their mother is, plus remove them from the surrogate mother and not have a mother at all. And the problem is that we need mothers and fathers. This is how we are created and this is how we

thrive. And when you deny them that, now you're harming the child. So this is not, what's out there right now is not, oh, all of these same-sex couples want to adopt these children, nobody will adopt. I I don't think that's the issue right now. The issue right now is that they want to special order children that they desire. Right. And so that the, you've got the problem of removing that child from their mother. That's a huge problem. From their biological mother. Biological mother. The one that carries the child. Right. And any mother, because you've just got two fathers now. But then secondly, you're also changing the way that they view the child. because it's a special order. You create these embryos. You pick out the one you want.

If it doesn't turn out the way you want, you just kill it and start over again. This is changing the entire way our culture views human beings. So nothing about this. So you just keep getting into deeper, deeper levels of how this is affecting the way we view human beings and how these children are living. And we're getting farther and farther away from what is good. Now, think about it. if you have a mother and father who are married and they get pregnant, they receive that child.

It's not something that they set out and they special order and they decide, oh, I want a boy or a girl, and I want this trait or that trait. And if it has this defect, then get rid of it. And there's all sorts of things going on treating these human beings like commodities. Yeah, right, right. And so there are all sorts of repercussions to this beyond even the child. There's repercussions for our entire society. Yeah. I just had a refreshing moment recently talking to a couple who were going to have a baby, and I said, is it a boy or a girl?

And they said, we don't know. We'll tell you when he or she is born. In other words, old school on this one, they could have found out without creating a problem, but it was just the general perspective. I kind of liked that. What's so interesting, in the last couple episodes, we have what's common. up is this idea of receiving from God certain aspects of reality, of your life, and embracing that versus fighting against that and or creating what you want instead of what you receive. And it just changes the entire way you live.

And we have to look at what's causing the misery and what's causing the flourishing, even beyond what is true. And the answer is the Christian worldview is what causes people to flourish. and it causes us to value human beings as made in the image of God. So it goes way beyond the question of this one particular kid, are you really going to deny them these same-sex parents? Well, you have to make policy based on the aspects of reality that the government can control. And you can't make it based on a hypothetical situation

of one kid that maybe nobody wants to adopt except this one same-sex couple. It's hard to imagine that is the case. Yeah, hard cases make bad policy. The same goes. And I don't think that everybody has a right to a child. What I do think is that once a child is born, they have some rights to things, and they have a right to live in the kind of world that God made, which is a mother and a father. And we've talked, if you want more information about this, we've talked about,

the different things that a mother provides from a father, and there have been all sorts of studies about this. You can find this on our website and learn more about the reasoning behind having male-female marriage rather than same-sex marriage. All right. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you have a question, you can always send it to us on X with the hashtag SDR-ask. Or you can just go to our website. It's at STR.org.

I should have mentioned that when I was sending them to our website. at STR.org. And if you go to our hashtag STR Ask Podcast page, you'll find a link there to send us your question. We look forward to hearing from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.