Praying God’s protection around you and your family, Katy, and for Them Before Us as well. I love this response to the shameful article, and I’m sharing it with all of my friends…spreading the word as more need to know about the Greater Than Campaign and cover you with prayer.
Always putting family in quotes when it involves lgbt folks is so petty ;)
I point it out because it's evidence that people do treat these families differently. Your stated concern is for children, so I wonder how you think a child growing up with gay parents is affected when they can tell a subset of society interacts with them differently than children growing up with straight parents.
What some call petty, others call truth. The "families" you are talking about required loss of a mother or father. Pretending like they were created the same way erases the pain these children have experienced.
And to be fair, these children WERE treated differently by society. Our culture allowed them to be acquired by unrelated adults, bought and sold, deprived of a fundamental relationship.
So, no. We won't change our language to make the adults happy.
Ok, so what is your definition of family? It's only folks related by blood? It's both parents? Please share your definition and lets see who else it excludes. Just looking for consistency here, Josh!
Tim, the article you’re commenting on answers this directly. The campaign defends children from the intentional deprivation of a mother or father by the post-Obergefell regime. You want to know who’s being excluded? The answer is the child, cut off from her own mother or father by adults who decided in advance she didn’t need one of them.
Josh, I understand your moral objection. That's not what I asked. I asked what your definition of family is (since you suggested the quotes reflect truth, not rhetoric).
I also don't think you answered my other question, so I'll restate it here: how does publicly signaling to children in LGBT households that their families are less legitimate serve their well-being? Note, I'm talking about children, not adults here.
If you do, then you know that if any young child knows about this campaign it is because their parents have brought attention to it or their parents allow them a lot of unsupervised internet time.
There are many topics which adults need to talk about that are not appropriate for young children to know about beyond something age-appropriate if the child inadvertently hears something about it.
In this case, if a young child brings it up because they overheard a conversation, their parents can easily say, "Some people think every child should live with their mommy and their daddy." And then bite their tongue and not ask leading questions like, "But we don't and you're totally fine, right?" which a child might (because of their love for their parents) feel obliged to give a positive answer.
And any older child will have noticed that some children have a mom and dad and they don't and (if they feel safe) ask why they don't. Hopefully, those parents would give an honest answer and if the child expressed a desire to know more about their missing parent, help them to find out or work through their feelings instead of making them feel like they are wrong to want to know their missing parent.
I don't think we actually disagree here, because I was never suggesting children are reading this Substack.
My point is that the scare quotes reveal an attitude, and attitudes like that don't stay neatly contained to comment sections.
Regardless of moral concerns about family formation, Josh/TBU are not the arbiters of which households get to count as "real" families. That kind of linguistic gatekeeping has real social consequences for children living in those homes.
Maybe people treat these families differently because they are fundamentally different? They might feel awkward, they might shun them, they might over compensate with pleasantness ... sure, some hetero families may be completely at ease, but that is not always going to be the case. Hetero couples don't particularly want their children to grow up to be homosexual, so avoidance of that example is a natural response. They probably have a deep seated belief that every child deserves to have a mother and a father. They don't want to normalize behavior they don't want to encourage.
It takes a greater level of cultural enlightenment for hetero families to be able to truly relate to LG families as if they are no different. That requires assuming there is no loss to the children, which is the topic of the debate, except you are suggesting it is a chicken vs egg scenario. Are children from LG families seeing worse outcomes because of the inherent family structure, or because of societal responses to it? How do you suggest we find out?
This response actually makes a lot of sense to me, because I think it gets at the point I was making.
If some people intentionally treat these families differently because they don’t want to normalize them, then social stigma isn’t incidental. It becomes part of the reality those children are growing up in.
That seems like a pretty important thing to try to control for when evaluating child wellbeing in households with same-sex parents, because otherwise it’s difficult to separate outcomes tied to family structure from outcomes shaped by how society treats those families.
And that’s why the scare quotes around “family” stood out to me in the first place. Regardless of someone’s moral views about family formation, using language that signals some children’s homes are somehow less legitimate is not a neutral descriptive act.
I think it's almost impossible to do a study with effective controls. My hunch is that, yes, removing a child from one or both biological parents is a negative - and to some extent we have controls for that, vis a vis fostering and adoption. To do so by design, by premeditation to create a life knowing one biological parent will be missing, is extreme.
My instinct is also that children benefit from parents of both genders. This is where the controls get harder because of the social stigma issue. We still can likely test whether children raised by adoptive couples have outcomes equal to hetero natural parents.
I can absolutely appreciate the moral concerns around surrogacy, and I understand that for you “intention” is the hinge that makes it feel especially troubling.
But I do wonder whether it’s kinder to frame the intention not as “let’s deprive a child,” but rather “let’s bring a child into the world and love them the best way we can,” as most parents would describe their choices.
I also think this conversation keeps collapsing very different scenarios into one bucket. Not all LGBT families come about through surrogacy, and not every child being raised outside a biological mother/father household arrived there through the same circumstances.
Which brings me back to the broader thread we’re actually in. If the claim is that some of these children may already face disadvantages, I struggle with the idea that the humane response is to question whether their families are “real,” socially distance from them so as not to “normalize” them, or otherwise make clear that their home is viewed as lesser.
From where I’m standing, that feels particularly cold
I still had a great Mother's Day! <3 Thankful for all of you here supporting this work!
Praying for your safety.
It's very difficult to stay kid-centric; thanks for the perspective and prayers are with Katy Faust and TBU.
Thank you for all TBU does...light in the darkness.
Keep up the great work, TBU. You’re a target, because you’re telling truths that need to be told.
Praying God’s protection around you and your family, Katy, and for Them Before Us as well. I love this response to the shameful article, and I’m sharing it with all of my friends…spreading the word as more need to know about the Greater Than Campaign and cover you with prayer.
Well written rebuttal. 👏👏👏
Excellent response.
Thanks for covering this and for advocating on behalf of children. I didn’t realize this advocacy was happening. It’s badly needed.
Thank you!
Always putting family in quotes when it involves lgbt folks is so petty ;)
I point it out because it's evidence that people do treat these families differently. Your stated concern is for children, so I wonder how you think a child growing up with gay parents is affected when they can tell a subset of society interacts with them differently than children growing up with straight parents.
What some call petty, others call truth. The "families" you are talking about required loss of a mother or father. Pretending like they were created the same way erases the pain these children have experienced.
And to be fair, these children WERE treated differently by society. Our culture allowed them to be acquired by unrelated adults, bought and sold, deprived of a fundamental relationship.
So, no. We won't change our language to make the adults happy.
Ok, so what is your definition of family? It's only folks related by blood? It's both parents? Please share your definition and lets see who else it excludes. Just looking for consistency here, Josh!
Tim, the article you’re commenting on answers this directly. The campaign defends children from the intentional deprivation of a mother or father by the post-Obergefell regime. You want to know who’s being excluded? The answer is the child, cut off from her own mother or father by adults who decided in advance she didn’t need one of them.
Josh, I understand your moral objection. That's not what I asked. I asked what your definition of family is (since you suggested the quotes reflect truth, not rhetoric).
I also don't think you answered my other question, so I'll restate it here: how does publicly signaling to children in LGBT households that their families are less legitimate serve their well-being? Note, I'm talking about children, not adults here.
Tim, do you have children?
If you do, then you know that if any young child knows about this campaign it is because their parents have brought attention to it or their parents allow them a lot of unsupervised internet time.
There are many topics which adults need to talk about that are not appropriate for young children to know about beyond something age-appropriate if the child inadvertently hears something about it.
In this case, if a young child brings it up because they overheard a conversation, their parents can easily say, "Some people think every child should live with their mommy and their daddy." And then bite their tongue and not ask leading questions like, "But we don't and you're totally fine, right?" which a child might (because of their love for their parents) feel obliged to give a positive answer.
And any older child will have noticed that some children have a mom and dad and they don't and (if they feel safe) ask why they don't. Hopefully, those parents would give an honest answer and if the child expressed a desire to know more about their missing parent, help them to find out or work through their feelings instead of making them feel like they are wrong to want to know their missing parent.
Hi JT!
I don't think we actually disagree here, because I was never suggesting children are reading this Substack.
My point is that the scare quotes reveal an attitude, and attitudes like that don't stay neatly contained to comment sections.
Regardless of moral concerns about family formation, Josh/TBU are not the arbiters of which households get to count as "real" families. That kind of linguistic gatekeeping has real social consequences for children living in those homes.
Maybe people treat these families differently because they are fundamentally different? They might feel awkward, they might shun them, they might over compensate with pleasantness ... sure, some hetero families may be completely at ease, but that is not always going to be the case. Hetero couples don't particularly want their children to grow up to be homosexual, so avoidance of that example is a natural response. They probably have a deep seated belief that every child deserves to have a mother and a father. They don't want to normalize behavior they don't want to encourage.
It takes a greater level of cultural enlightenment for hetero families to be able to truly relate to LG families as if they are no different. That requires assuming there is no loss to the children, which is the topic of the debate, except you are suggesting it is a chicken vs egg scenario. Are children from LG families seeing worse outcomes because of the inherent family structure, or because of societal responses to it? How do you suggest we find out?
This response actually makes a lot of sense to me, because I think it gets at the point I was making.
If some people intentionally treat these families differently because they don’t want to normalize them, then social stigma isn’t incidental. It becomes part of the reality those children are growing up in.
That seems like a pretty important thing to try to control for when evaluating child wellbeing in households with same-sex parents, because otherwise it’s difficult to separate outcomes tied to family structure from outcomes shaped by how society treats those families.
And that’s why the scare quotes around “family” stood out to me in the first place. Regardless of someone’s moral views about family formation, using language that signals some children’s homes are somehow less legitimate is not a neutral descriptive act.
I think it's almost impossible to do a study with effective controls. My hunch is that, yes, removing a child from one or both biological parents is a negative - and to some extent we have controls for that, vis a vis fostering and adoption. To do so by design, by premeditation to create a life knowing one biological parent will be missing, is extreme.
My instinct is also that children benefit from parents of both genders. This is where the controls get harder because of the social stigma issue. We still can likely test whether children raised by adoptive couples have outcomes equal to hetero natural parents.
I can absolutely appreciate the moral concerns around surrogacy, and I understand that for you “intention” is the hinge that makes it feel especially troubling.
But I do wonder whether it’s kinder to frame the intention not as “let’s deprive a child,” but rather “let’s bring a child into the world and love them the best way we can,” as most parents would describe their choices.
I also think this conversation keeps collapsing very different scenarios into one bucket. Not all LGBT families come about through surrogacy, and not every child being raised outside a biological mother/father household arrived there through the same circumstances.
Which brings me back to the broader thread we’re actually in. If the claim is that some of these children may already face disadvantages, I struggle with the idea that the humane response is to question whether their families are “real,” socially distance from them so as not to “normalize” them, or otherwise make clear that their home is viewed as lesser.
From where I’m standing, that feels particularly cold