This past month, our organization, Them Before Us, put up a handful of billboards across the country with a message that has been uncontroversial for all of recorded history: “No child has two dads. No child has two moms.”
Within days, LGBT activists were organizing against them, trying to bully the billboard company, raising funds for counterprotests, and lobbing accusations at our organization, calling us a hate group. The collective outrage has now begun trending on X, drawing millions of views across platforms, thousands of comments, and tens of thousands of likes in just a few short days. All of that fury is aimed at a sentence that every person alive knows to be true, because every person alive arrived here through one biological mother and one biological father.
The rage begins to make sense once you understand why these words pose such a threat to a certain ideology. “Mother” and “father” are real words with real definitions that carry real responsibilities anchored to the creation of a child. If we turn “mother” and “father” into feelings, into roles anybody can claim or set aside, we allow adults to abdicate (or sell) their responsibility by way of this redefinition, detaching them from the children they have created. These detached children then sit in a legal limbo, waiting to be assigned to whichever adults the state sees fit. This transformation from a person who needs protecting to an asset that needs allocating is a project extremists across history have long dreamt about.
Children have always come into the world making a claim on the adults around them. If a parent takes home a child, refuses to care for her, and the child is injured as a result, we do not arrest the nurse who sent her home or the neighbor across the street. We arrest the mother or father, because built into how we define a child is a biological responsibility laid at the feet of the people responsible for her creation. That definition is how every child has always known who she is, whose she is, and what she is owed: to be known and loved by her mother and father.
Now, our billboard detractors were quick to recite a list they thought disproved biology: children growing up in divorced homes; those who no longer have a father or mother on earth due to death; and those said to have multiple mothers or fathers because of stepparents, blended families, or adoption.
Their concerns highlight an unfortunate reality: Millions of children do live without or apart from their biological parents. But every situation on that list is also a result of a circumstance nobody premeditated or desired. Society has long recognized this and even constructed a process in response to the worst of these tragedies, called adoption, which is a process for a child who has already lost his or her mother or father and sees those responsibilities pass to two vetted adults. Adoption honors the biological definition rather than undermining it, because it begins by admitting the child lost something.
On the other hand, this new regime of redefinition deliberately deprives a child of her mother or father before she is born, through purchased eggs, purchased sperm, and rented wombs. This is not a difference in degree, but in kind: a market in which the child is the product of adult manufacture and state assignment.
Just this past week, news broke that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier was intervening in a surrogacy case that shows this ideology carried to its logical end. A single man in China rented the womb of a Florida woman, and when she gave birth to his triplets, he never came. Their birth was met with silence. The death of one of the boys from RSV complications was met with the same silence. For 20 months, the woman cared for the boys; then, the moment she moved to terminate his parental rights and adopt the survivors, the Chinese national hired a lawyer, who has since had the two boys pulled from the only woman they have ever known and placed in foster care while he fights to ship them to a country from which no court could ever bring them back.
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