A response to your podcast: Gay Parenting and Pitfalls. Dave Rubin & Dr. Jordan Peterson. 9.7.2022
Published by LifeSiteNews on August 24, 2022
Dear Jordan Peterson,
I read your book “12 Rules for Life” some years ago and gave it as a Christmas present to my son. Occasionally, I listen to your podcasts. Recently, I was delighted about your article in The Telegraph, We are sacrificing our children on the altar of a brutal, far-Left ideology, and rejoiced about your response to your ban on Twitter. A man standing for the truth, who would rather die than delete his tweet. A few days later I saw your podcast with Dave Rubin titled, “Gay Parenting: Promise and Pitfalls” and I was shocked. In the podcast you rolled out the red carpet for gay marriage and artificial reproduction. You have become famous and followed by millions as an honest voice seeking truth without bowing down to the politically correct. You seem to have given in to the immense cultural pressure of the sexual revolution, and for that, I am deeply disappointed. Right at the beginning of your conversation with your friend Dave Rubin, who is preparing for gay “parenting,” you tear down the walls of the anthropological foundation of human existence: Mankind, created as man and woman, called to procreate. You say: 1. Ourcultureseemstohavedecided,gaymarriagehasbecomepartofthe structure of marriage itself. 2. Marriageistheunionoftwopeople. 3. Itistheunionoftwopeopletoprovidethefoundationofchildren.
Objection 1: Our culture has not decided that gay “marriage” has “become part of the structure of marriage itself,” rather, Western culture has been subjected to a relentless and radical culture war. Using the weapons of propaganda, namely the control of media and big tech and the undermining of the judiciary and academia, the dominant culture in the West now seeks to ruin the existence of people who do not comply, mobbing and persecuting any voice that dares to stand in the way. The more prominent, the more devastating the persecution, which includes the initiating of show-trials against opponents, so that nobody would dare to oppose the agenda. The highly sophisticated propaganda techniques were laid out in detail in the book, After the Ball, How America will conquer its fear & hatred of Gays in the 90s, published in 1990. Considering the current state of the West, it would seem that the authors of said book, Harvard-trained homosexual activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, have achieved what they set out to do. The totalitarian agenda of the activist minority fighting for the interests of less than 3 percent of the population are openly displayed to the world by the Yogyakarta Principles of 2007, expanded by 111 “additional state obligations” ten years later. Nobody will later be able to say: We did not know. History will have to grapple with the question: Why did the powerholders of the world of finance and politics support an agenda that destroys the family and the necessary ethical foundation of a viable society? The fact that the overwhelming majority of the people caved in to the LGBT-ideology is not surprising, since opportunistic spinelessness seems to be an anthropological constant. But Jordan Peterson? Objection 2: One word is enough to overthrow what marriage meant to all those who went before us in human history: The union of a man and a woman open to give life to children – the word people. Never in human history were same-sex relationships brought “inside the traditional form of marriage” since the meaning of marriage and its cultural function are destroyed by this revolutionary act. You speak of marriage as an “ideal”, even a “divine ideal” which you and Rubin do not want to “blow out” because that would “destabilize society on the level of the family, and that seems to be a really bad idea.” But this is just what you are doing. The institution of marriage is independent of the achievement of the “ideal”, a harmonious, lifelong, monogamous relationship. Rather, marriage is defined by the permanent and exclusive commitment of a man and a woman who are able and willing to become “one flesh” through the coital act, who both express an openness to the bearing and rearing of children. Under the pressure of the ideological and practical deconstruction of marriage and family, around 40 percent of married couples are unable to keep their commitment – to the detriment of children, but 60 percent still do. They are the foundation of stability of society. They need to be supported. Objection 3: The common good, which is dependent on the mental and physical health of the next generation, plays no part in your conversation with your friend Dave Rubin. Both of you ignore the rights and needs of children. There is not a single word that takes the wellbeing of children into account. The only criterion for overturning the existential order of humanity are the desires of adults who, in the case of Dave Rubin, want to have a meaningful life. Rubin’s motives are not difficult to understand or to sympathize with. For he himself heard you talk about the importance of family and “that you do not mature until someone else is more important than you.” Rubin wanted to overcome his narcissistic life, and was put off by the prospect of becoming an aging homosexual who shows disregard to “every norm known to man.” He expressed his fear of ending up like the stereotypical “spray tanned” gay men “with their little dogs” who spend their later years chasing “the same sexual escapades that they were chasing forty years ago.” “It is not a full life. I know that could have been me,” he admitted. But can we have a truly meaningful life at the expense of others – at the expense of children who are not asked and have no choice who their parents will be, how they will be brought into existence, and in which social and psychological environment they will have to grow up? Rubin set out “to do what is right” – by acquiring two children through artificial reproduction. But is it right, Jordan Peterson? “It is technically more difficult to have children if you are a homosexual couple”, you say. Let us look at the “technical difficulties” in more detail: Two men, who want to have children, need to buy what they are missing, since, after all, there are two biological sexes, even though YouTube cancels people who insist on this basic fact. They were missing the eggs and the uterus of a woman and need to buy/rent both. First, Rubin asked his sister, a mother of three, whether she would “donate” her eggs. “She was flattered and honored” by the proposal, said Rubin, but he and his “husband” foresaw difficulties if the biological mother of the child-to-be was around after birth, so they decided to find an egg-donor. On these websites one can configurate what is important to them in a donor. Ivy league school was less important to Rubin and his so-called husband, health most important, and her looks. A “6.5 Swedish woman, let’s say,” Rubin described. The woman of their choice donated two eggs, “one was fertilized with David’s [Rubin’s “husband’s”] sperm and one with my sperm.” Humans like to entertain the idea that their parents conceived them in loving embrace. Children produced by artificial fertilization will have to live with a different narrative of their origin.*1 For, in vitro fertilization, the sperm cells are produced by masturbation, and the egg cells are purchased for the purpose of being mixed in a test tube. Since that often does not work, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is used. In the glaring light of the laboratory, the doctor selects a sperm cell, sticks a hypodermic needle into the egg cell, and injects the sperm cell. Sixty to eighty percent of the embryos created in this way show chromosomal damage and cannot develop. Excess embryos are discarded or deep frozen at minus 196°C in liquid nitrogen by the hundreds of thousands every year. Most of these cryopreserved embryos are “orphaned” and eventually thrown away. If the parents donate the excess embryos for research, reproduction clinics give them a discount. It is very rare for pregnancy to take place at the first attempt, and in over 80 percent of the cases, it doesn’t even happen after the third cycle. Only around 15 percent of artificial fertilizations actually lead to a child being born. On average, around 20 embryos have to die for one successful implantation. Embryos are unique human beings. Naturally, people who want a child want a healthy one. Therefore, the artificially created embryo undergoes quality control to check whether it shows any signs of hereditary diseases or disabilities before it is implanted into a womb. This is called preimplantation diagnosis (PID). For a PID to be worthwhile, about seven embryos are needed. The embryos are examined for genetic defects and disabilities, and if necessary, discarded. Thus, the doctor becomes a selective eugenicist, deciding at the earliest stage of life who is worthy of living and who is not.”*2 And what about the egg-donor, that is the woman who sells her eggs? The hormonal stimulation is extremely stressful for the woman. In nature, only one egg is typically ready for fertilization during each menstrual cycle. For artificial fertilization, the woman must release as many eggs as possible, because the wear is considerable. Many eggs – both fertilized and unfertilized – go dead sooner or later. Because the woman’s body is forced by the hormone supplements to bring out more than one egg, “overstimulation syndrome” can result with severe health risks ranging from blood clotting to depression. For months, even years if she undergoes several cycles, her life is dictated by the demands of the fertilization clinic. More than half of all artificially induced pregnancies end in miscarriage or in an ectopic pregnancy. In that case the egg harvesting cycle must be repeated. No fun at all for the woman! If they do “succeed” at creating a number of embryos in the laboratory, they still need a uterus to grow them in. The deep-frozen embryos have to be transported to the surrogate mother(s), thawed and implanted (few survive). It needs more embryos than children are commissioned since implantation is rarely successful at the first go. It is unlikely that surrogate mothers have altruistic motives – as Rubin assumes – to make the impossible possible: procreation for a gay couple. They do it for the money. Ukraine is the European center for surrogate motherhood. Hundreds of ordered babies got stuck in Ukraine during the Covid lock-down. On a book tour in Kiev, I saw ads in the underground offering 16.000 Euros to women (with an average yearly income of 3.000 Euros) if they rent out their uterus to produce children for couples who cannot have children, or Hollywood-stars who want to become mothers without the labors of pregnancy and birth. No well-off woman would undergo the ordeal. The reality of surrogate motherhood: a poor woman will sell herself into slavery for nine months, during which the agency will have total control of her life. They will dictate what she can eat, which medicines she is allowed to take or which ones she must take, where she must reside, while making sure she agrees to “embryonic reduction” if more eggs are successfully implanted than children ordered. If the child shows defects in the prenatal diagnosis, she will be instructed to have an abortion. In addition to losing her autonomy, she may incur serious health risks, including: high blood pressure and stroke, preeclampsia, pregnancy diabetes and severe birth complications. The child is usually born premature by cesarean section. Once the child is born, she must hand over the child to the commissioning couple or hospital personnel immediately after birth and must never again have contact with her child again. And what about the child? The embryo, his features chosen in a catalogue, procreated in a test tube and deep frozen at the very beginning of his life, is transferred into the uterus of a woman who needs money. She has to suppress her natural impulse to love the child growing under her heart in order to save herself from the pain of having to hand over the child to strangers immediately after birth. Previously, a woman’s uterus was the ultimate place of security that imprints in the human heart an unquenchable longing for perfect unity. Not so for the child carried out by a surrogate mother. For him or her the womb is a dark dungeon into which not a single ray of love or joyful anticipation enters. The child starts his life in abandonment and loneliness within the womb from where it is transferred to an incubator because most IVF children come into the world too early and too small by cesarean section. Prenatal research shows that the embryo can hear, taste, smell and feel; the emotional state of the mother will imprint his soul. During the nine months of pregnancy, mother and child bond on the deepest level. A naturally created child knows its mother’s heartbeat, her scent, her voice, the songs she has sung to it, the taste of her milk. This provides security after the shock of birth. The “love- hormone” oxytocin, floods mother and baby at birth, the baby finds her breast, presses its nose into the soft skin, and sucks from the mother’s body what it needs for life. In the case of Rubin, the child will arrive in the arms of two strangers, men without milk-giving breasts who will feed the baby with bought mother’s milk, stored in “two industrial deep freezers in the garage.” “Mater semper certa est,” this old legal principle, is not true anymore. The two children that Rubin is expecting in August 2022 will never know their mothers, neither their genetic mother nor their surrogate mother. They have two fathers, a genetic father and a stepfather. Their sibling is a stepsibling. If the eggs are from one woman, they would have the same genetic mother, if not, the siblings wouldn’t be related. To lose one’s father or mother by death was always considered a hard blow of fate. Fairytales resound with it. With the discovery of in vitro fertilization, it became technically possible and legally authorized to rob a person of his heritage – voluntarily and intentionally.
You and Rubin discuss the possibility of adoption which would have been “way easier and way less expensive”. You ask Rubin why “genetic similarity was an important factor to take into account.” Rubin is somehow caught off guard by the question and answers “We just knew it.” You reply in agreement with the understanding that this desire for biological relation “is something people have always done since the beginning of time;” an answer that doesn’t even satisfy Rubin who responds: “That is not really an answer.” Could it be that there is meaning in biology, that there is a telos in everything living, which is to be discovered and fulfilled in order to have a fulfilled life? “Preference for your own biological children has self-evidence about it,” you say. It doesn’t occur to either of you that children have a preference for their own biological parents. If there exists a human right, this is the most basic human right there is. Children who have the ill fate of being separated from their biological parents by death or intentional robbery of their ancestry always search for their biological roots, even if it leads them to a masturbating father who sold his sperm and produced hundreds of siblings. A child that is adopted has usually lost both his parents – a great tragedy. Adoption agencies took great pain in finding reliable and responsible married couples who would be able to provide a loving home for the child – until same sex couples claimed “a right for adoption”. Not only has the child lost his parents, but the archetype of father and mother has been intentionally taken away, and the child must grow up in a homosexual environment, which among men is generally promiscuous and, as you state, “the most predictive risk factor for abuse. And what about the formation of children with same-sex legal parents in a gay community? The two children of Rubin and his “husband” David will discover in kindergarten that the other children have mothers, and they will begin to wonder why they don’t have a mother. A yearning will arise in their heart that will never leave them. They are robbed of the necessary condition of human development: “triangulation” between mother and father. But you, Peterson, deliver justifications: Can “good will” truly make up for this existential depravation, as you seem to imply? Are you, as a psychologist and therapist, really convinced that it is possible for a gay couple “to replicate both the feminine and the masculine influences in your children’s life”? Even Rubin is sure that the female role-models that they will bring into the household at the beginning – sister and grandmother – “cannot replicate a mother.” “Children are good at bonding with non-biological people,” you say. Yes, children are geared at bonding to survive and will bond with anybody available. “This bonding must be stable,” as you point out, “they hate having primary care- givers swap.” But grandmother and sister will only be there “at the beginning.” You offer a prospective legitimacy to same-sex marriage by suggesting:
“Do you think that the flamboyance that has been associated with the male homosexual community and the promiscuity... are a consequence of not having a more integrated and conservative path potentially opened in front of people?... By bringing those relationships inside the traditional form, things would normalize and that there would be a promotion of something like stable, mature, responsible, long-term monogamy.” But why then, is sexual exclusivity the exception even during stable partnerships? Why do only ten percent of LGBT Americans make use of the legal institution of same-sex marriage for which they have fought so hard? *3 Your hope that bringing same-sex relationships “inside the traditional form will promote stable, mature, responsible, long-term monogamy” is not being fulfilled. In a recent article social scientist Mark Regnerus cites a large study from the Netherlands that shows that 55 percent of children living with same-sex parents experienced the separation of these parents, compared to 19 percent of children of opposite-sex parents. What is more: “The presence of children tended to stabilize opposite-sex couples but destabilizes same-sex couples. Dissolution rates were 43 percent for same-sex couples, but only 8 percent for opposite-sex couples. *4 The relentless propaganda of the LGBTIQ lobby pushes the message into everybody’s mind: “No difference! No difference! No difference!” It goes without saying that in a culture that has abandoned the obligation of science to the search of truth, “studies” are produced that pretend to prove this. But do you, as a psychologist who deals with the depth of the human soul, really believe that the existential fabric of human life can be overturned without damage to totally defenseless children who become the objects of the desires of adults? When same-sex “marriage” was on the table of the Supreme Court in the case of Obergefell vs. Hodges in 2015, the renowned professors Loren Marks, Paul Sullins and the above-mentioned Mark Regnerus stated:
"The alleged consensus that children suffer no disadvantage with same-sex parents is a product, not of objective scientific inquiry, but of intense politicization of research agendas in social science associations. ... Given the mounting evidence of harmful outcomes in children raised in households with same-sex parents, state laws restricting marriage to opposite-sex partners have a rational basis." *5
Sociologist Mark Regnerus became known worldwide, because he had dared to refute the politically correct “no difference” notion based on solid scientific research. He calls it a “fire walk” which he began ten years ago. All disadvantages that children from broken heterosexual families have in comparison to those from intact families also occur with children who grow up in same-sex households — plus some additional ones: Worse performance in school, mental disorders, depression and, as they get older, greater tendency toward suicide, obesity, sexual victimization, identification as gay or lesbian, same-sex sexual partners. As adults, they are more likely to be unmarried, unfaithful, and have sexually transmitted diseases. They more often receive welfare, are more likely to use alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana, spend more time in front of screens, and commit criminal offenses. *6 No difference? It is not only scientists that are threatened and persecuted if they hold on to the truth, but also the victims of the reckless assertion of adult’s power at the expense of children – like Dawn Stefanowiz:
“As children, we are not allowed to express our disagreement, pain and confusion. Most adult children from gay households do not feel safe or free to publicly express their stories and life-long challenges; they fear losing professional licenses, not obtaining employment in their chosen field, being cut off from some family members or losing whatever relationship they have with their gay parent(s).” *7
Not only every scientist, every victim, but also every nation that is unwilling to fulfill the Yogyakarta “state obligations” has become an object of LGBTIQ-cultural imperialism carried out by international organizations like the UN and EU. Examples of this include Hungary, Poland, Africa, and now Ukraine. The lobby, experienced in overturning public opinion, laws and education according to the “Acitivst’s Guide to The Yogyakarta Principles” does not shy away from exploiting the war in Ukraine for their agenda by minor actions like demanding to replace a statue of Catherine the Great and replacing it with that of a gay porn star, and major actions: implementing same-sex marriage into law “in the utter absence of popular support” (Regnerus). Anybody opposing this agenda is now associated with the aggressor Vladimir Putin who has blocked LGBT-activism in Russian schools. Both of you also offer arguments which, if followed through, would clearly show that a society destroys its social fabric and ethical foundation when it “lets down the walls” of defining the marriage-institution as the long-term union of one man and one woman open to give life to children. (The voices who warned of the consequences have been silenced by public persecution and anti-discrimination laws.)
“You can’t flatten out distinction without tremendous loss”, you say. Rubin points to “the excesses of the woke culture that is destabilizing everything. I am sympathetic with conservatives that say: We let gay marriage happen and look what has happened now. Now we are into all that gender stuff, teaching gender theory to five-year-olds...” The excesses were part of the plan since the LGB was always followed by the T. One day after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, President Obama initiated the “bathroom battle”, attempting to force schools to allow boys that proclaimed they were girls into the bathrooms of girls. The new radical left- wing government in Germany hastens to put into law that there can be two mothers on a birth certificate but no father, that four people of any sex can form a “community or responsibility” for children, that children must be “affirmed” to transition to the sex of their choice, and that from the age of 18 one can, by verbal acclamation, change one’s name and sex once a year. You point to the fact that the risk for abuse is “way higher” for a child that has a step-parent to whom it is not biologically related, and even Rubin calls it “dangerous territory, that they are going after kids right now... because they are grooming them for sex.” Are these deliberations not enough to weigh the common good of a society against the desires of a small minority seeking fulfillment in a form that their lifestyle does not naturally allow? Strangely, Western society has calibrated the scales by “values” that outweigh the common good by the demands of minorities. Katy Faust, herself raised by two lesbians after her biological parents divorced, hits the nail on the head with the title of her book: THEM BEFORE US. A society that does not put the needs of children before the fulfillment of adult desires has no future, it slides back into barbarism where children are sacrificed “on the altar of a brutal, far-Left ideology.”
With best wishes Gabriele Kuby
*1 Some material of this Open Letter is taken from my book, The Abandoned Generation, published by St. Augustin’s Press, August 2022.
*2 Gabriele Kuby, “The Abandoned Generation, to be published in Fall 2022 by Augustine’s Press [Muss ich mich selbst zitieren?]
*3 https://news.gallup.com/poll/329975/one-lgbt-americans-married-sex-spouse.aspx *4 Mark Regnerus, “Will the Fog of War Smuggle Same-Sex Marriage into Ukraine?”, Public Discourse, July 18, 2022. https://www .thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/07/83469/ 5* Brief of amici curiae American College of Pediatricians, Family Watch International, Loren D. Marks, Mark D. Regnerus and Donald Paul Sullins. Also see: Paul Sullins, “It’s Time to Promote Good Social Science on Same-Sex Parenting,” in: The Public Discourse, May 17, 2019.
*6 Mark Regnerus, “The Data on Children in Same-Sex Households Get More Depressing,” in: The Public Discourse, June 26, 2016. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/06/17255/. *7 https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/quartet-of-truth-adult-children-of-gay-parents-testify-against-same-sex-mar/
Comments