"Gay Parents" and Chesterton's Fence
There are good reasons to show that fence extra respect when kids are involved
I wrote an article about Le Gays, discussing what it means to “be gay” and some of the implications thereof. This post is a follow-up to that one focusing specifically on the phenomenon of “gay parents” or “gay families,” in which a “married” homosexual couple will have “children” via either adoption or surrogacy. I had more to say on this in the original article but found that it was too complex to cover there.
As with its progenitor “gay marriage,” this concept of “gay parents” appears to stem from our culture’s prevailing norms of liberal individualism. So long as everyone consents, you have a “right” to do whatever you want, more or less. This is why gay people find it unacceptable if I tell them that they cannot get married in the same way that a cow cannot fly. If everyone involved consents, then what business is it of yours? I reject your reality and substitute my own!
Of course, “gay parents” can be said to violate consent in the same way that abortions do—just as the dead children never consent to being aborted, the “children” of “gay parents” never consent to be raised in such an arrangement, either. But let’s just put that aside for now.
Under this worldview, one’s life is defined by this “right” to do anything one feels like, so long as there is consent. The issue that this worldview runs into, when it comes to being a parent specifically, is that this model of the world simply does not work for children. It is so obviously ill-suited to children that even in Current Year, we still do not allow children to live this way, and we still recognize that both a child’s parents and society as a whole carry responsibilities to care for children specifically because children are so lacking in agency of their own.
This means that as soon as we are talking about being parents or having children, liberal individualism goes out the window. Liberal individualism will claim that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you smoking crack and getting high on it all day—or, for that matter, with having lots of promiscuous anal sex with other men. But if you do either of these things around children, much less your own actual biological children? Well, we’ve got problems then, don’t we?
No matter how much of a liberal individualist you are in other respects, when it comes to children, you generally acknowledge that we all have a primal duty to act first in the best interests of whatever child is in question. If we sacrifice a child’s well-being in order to suit our own preferences or desires, this is universally recognized as heinous and evil. This means that “gay parents” have a burden of proof to demonstrate that their behavior is indeed in the best interests of the children involved.
It is not good enough to merely transfer over the liberal, “rights”-based narrative, to claim that gay people have a “right” to have a “gay family” in the same way that they have a “right” to get “married.” Even if we accept the “gay marriage” premise, the introduction of children to the relationship changes the equation completely. It is now a question of responsibilities, not of “rights.” I have not seen anyone who is supportive of “gay families” recognize this distinction, and I think there is a high chance that I never will, because it presents too great a threat to their priors.
Yet this is clearly the reasoning by which “gay parenting” has been advanced. People regard it as implicitly clear and obvious that of course gay people have a “right” to have a “family”; this is because they are still thinking within their Gay People frame, the frame under which they believe that gay people have a “right” to lead lives that are exactly like those of traditional family-oriented straight people, derived from the premises of liberal individualism as laid out above. To think otherwise would be bigotry and so cannot be entertained.
The most charitable term that I can think of for this attitude is moral short-sightedness. You do not plunge children into wildly different, wholly untested paradigms merely to satisfy your own political or ideological presumptions. If you do this—carelessly throw a child into something totally new and strange, without proper caution and proof-of-concept—and it goes badly for them, you’ve now done irrevocable damage to an innocent child for the sake of trying to prove a political point. This is what we have clearly witnessed with the phenomenon of “transgenderism.”
As bad as this already is, we have also seen that once someone has committed to this course of action, they become morally “locked in,” they are under extreme pressure to commit fully no matter what the actual consequences are. It becomes very difficult to back out halfway if it looks like things are going badly, because to do so would be to admit that you’ve engaged in something truly horrific and taken it this far. The incentive is to just carry it all the way and never admit that you weren’t acting in the child’s best interests, regardless of how it turns out.
This means that it is of paramount importance to be sure that you know what you’re doing before you go down such a perilous path. For these reasons, we should give special consideration to Chesterton’s fence when it comes to child-rearing; we should take pains to be absolutely sure that we’re doing the right thing before tearing the fence down. Yet not only do “gay parents” and their supporters not take such pains, so far as I’ve ever seen, they refuse to admit that the fence even exists at all. If you point it out, they either engage in emotional hysterics or completely disengage, often resorting to no-contact options such as blocking or banning.
I understand why a refusal to automatically approve and validate the actions of “gay parents” might provoke an extreme defensive reaction from them. To question them on this topic puts their entire worldview, something they consider central to their being, under serious threat. But they are the ones who chose to bring children into this. They are the ones who are tearing down millennia-old fences. And so the burden of proof is on them.
Let’s proceed now to a discussion of whether being raised by “gay parents” can actually be in a child’s best interests or not.
Obviously, “gay families” cannot be created the good old-fashioned way. By cutting oneself off completely from natural reproduction, the gays must resort to either adoption or surrogacy in order to have these “children” of theirs. In my opinion, adoption is the more palatable route of these two. In this case the gays can run with the narrative that they are giving a home and stability and such to an unfortunate child who is in need. Perhaps it isn’t a traditional home, but it is a home, and the story of how the child ended up there seems innocent enough. The child was failed by their parents, or by fate itself in the case of an orphan, not by the gays who have taken them in.
However, in order for this narrative to really be true, the gays would have to adopt an older child, probably one who is five years old or even older. Ideally one who also has developmental issues or some other type of complicating factor that makes them an unlikely candidate for adoption. This is because the adoption market is subject to laws of supply and demand, the same as any other. The demand for newborns to adopt far outstrips the supply; I recall reading one estimate that for every newborn available for adoption, there are thirty-seven couples who are looking to adopt a newborn.
Thus our hypothetical “gay parents” must move considerably further down the line of desirable adoption choices before they can say that they have truly arrived at a child in need—one that might genuinely not be wanted by anyone else. Is this typically how gay couples utilize adoption? I think not. Perhaps this discussion would be more difficult if they did. But to do that would be to admit implicitly that traditional families are preferable to “gay” ones, and someone who understands this would never reach the point of trying to pursue “gay adoption” to begin with.
The reason I bring all of this up is to make the point that “gay adoption” is not done for the sake of the child. This rips away the predictable first-line defense of the practice: “Well, we’re just helping a kid in need, why do you have a problem with that?” That clearly isn’t the actual underlying motivation, as I’ve just detailed. The motivation is to acquire the tradlife status that I discussed in a previous article, to achieve the social status of a functional family, and I imagine that the adoption of a newborn is seen as more amenable to this goal as it more fully simulates a “normal” family.
Hijacking adoption as a means by which to do this is deeply unethical. Children put up for adoption or through the foster care system are already often victims of trauma and other unfortunate life circumstances. Decisions about placement with families, whether permanent or temporary, should always be made in the best interests of the child. Attempting to use adoption as a substitute for natural reproduction so that you can LARP at having a “real family” produces a clear conflict of interest. Children put up for adoption are not there to serve this purpose for you.
This conflict already presents quite an issue with “normal” adoptions to actual married couples. How much more fraught are you making things by throwing in the issue of “gay parents” on top of it? Adoption is already an incredibly complex process—now you’re asking all parties involved to deal with your personal sexual pathologies on top of everything else. Can you really say you’re helping things by doing that?
Now we move on to the other option by which one typically attempts to create a “gay family,” surrogacy. This one is more offensive to me as the child created in this relationship is explicitly assigned the purpose I’ve just described above as their entire reason for being. They are given away by their mother in order to be used as a living prop of sorts, a stand-in so that two men can play house together.
Imagine having to explain the mechanics of this to the child once they are old enough to begin understanding them. Imagine telling your “child” that their mother only conceived them for a monetary payment of a few tens of thousands of dollars, then gave them away to strangers. They were nothing more than a payday for one of their parents, and to the other, the one that they have actually known, they are a way of keeping up with the Joneses. Look, we gays can have children and families too, just like everyone else in the neighborhood!
I would imagine that many such children will never think of themselves in such terms and will instead be quite happy to swallow full-throated a more positive story about their existence. Because how could they do otherwise? Again, this is the explicit purpose to which they’ve been assigned before they were even born. To question the reasons behind their own conception would thus be utterly ruinous to their conception of self. Of course they won’t be likely to criticize the Gay Pride flag when to do so might trigger an existential crisis for them.
I think there is a great evil in that situation, to bring forth life and intentionally force it into that position, where psychologically they have no choice but to be okay with something because it was done to them before they ever had enough agency to even understand it, much less agree to it. It strikes me as sort of an ultimate form of Stockholm syndrome. If one of them did question, though? If one such child decided that they resent being told the lie that they have “two dads,” and that it was wrong for their mother to simply give them away in a monetary transaction, as nothing more than an object to be bartered with?
What would their “gay parents” say to them?
I have no idea. That is a big problem. If you were going do this, wouldn’t the responsible thing be to at least try and figure out an answer to this question first? To make sure that what you are doing is truly ethical, rather than brushing such concerns aside and counting on sunk-cost dynamics to force people into accepting things after the fact? Yet I have not seen anyone, gay or otherwise, seriously attempt to do this. I have never seen anyone put forward a serious ethical defense of this practice, a real argument for why it is okay rather than an implicit assumption that it simply is.
The only such attempt at an argument that I can recall is the occasional comment that “well, those children wouldn’t even exist otherwise!” This doesn’t qualify as a “serious ethical defense,” as it should be trivially obvious that it is evil to bring forth a child and then mistreat them while expecting them to swallow “be grateful that you even exist!” as a justification.
It seems to me like a serious attempt at an ethical defense should be a minimum requirement for tearing down this particular Chesterton’s Fence. We’re talking about the creation of life, the well-being of children, the nature of parental relationships—this is a big one. If we screw it up, the stakes are high. How can someone find it acceptable to do this not merely without convincing the rest of us that it’s a good idea, but without even trying to demonstrate that it is?
This is a pattern that we’ve seen repeated over and over again as the left has continuously torn down one tradition after another. Serious reasons for tearing down the fences are rarely if ever given, not anymore, not for a long while now. The fences simply must come down, and those who object are not to be reasoned with, they are to be un-personed. It is not encouraging to see this same type of behavior from people who wish to greenlight “gay families.” If you really believe in what you are doing, you should be more than happy to explain yourself.
A refusal to engage usually suggests that one would rather not have anyone looking any further into the topic. I notice that this applies not merely to the subject of “gay families” but rather to the concept of Gay as a whole. I never see any discussion of why someone feels that they are gay, or what being gay is like for them, or how being gay has affected their personal and romantic relationships, and such. By far the most authentic account I’ve seen of what being gay is actually like comes from the ex-gay person whose piece I linked in a previous article. That seems a bit backwards, doesn’t it?
Perhaps this is a bias borne of sitting where I do, fairly far on the right. Maybe if I ventured far enough left I would find spaces where this sort of thing is discussed openly. Still, I would think that it would be more common, if people really wanted to get at the truth of what it is to Be Gay. The fact that these discussions never seem to happen suggests that people don’t really want to look under the hood, which of course suggests in turn people are worried that they might not like what they see under there.
That might be fine and dandy for things that are happening “in the closet,” so to speak. But the moment that you bring children into the picture, nothing is in the closet anymore. I think the trans issue has made this abundantly clear, if it wasn’t already. That means there is an affirmative moral duty to investigate these issues properly, determine the true nature of their inner workings, and make judgments accordingly. Again, as the trans issue has shown us—a refusal to do so for the sake of protecting feelings, egos, and political priors can lead to utterly disastrous results.
I like the reasoned and logical arguments in your post. This is from a 2018 article I read (and saved) about a magistrate that was fired in the UK for deigning to voice his opinion in favor of the nuclear family.
(Source: World News Daily by Bob Unruh)
“The old model of the adoption industry was that its customers were the children in need of adoptive parents. These customers, the children, were entitled to the best service available,” he said. “The new model of the adoption industry has somehow become that the children are now the commodity supplied, and that the prospective adopters are the customers. This has given adoptive parents consumer rights, at least in theory, such as the right not to be discriminated against on the grounds of protected characteristics.
“The demotion of children, from customers to commodity, and the exaltation of the adopters, from commodity to customers, is itself a great evil.”
I agree 💯.
Sadly in my deep blue state, gay adoptive couples are given priority over heterosexual couples.
This is some weird ass shit. Touch grass homie.