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Them Before Us Podcast
Them Before Us #071 | Marriage, Family, and the Battle for Truth – A Convo with Glenn T. Stanton
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Them Before Us podcast. I'm your host, Jen Friesen, and today we are joined by a a friend of our organization, Glenn T. Stanton. Glenn is the director of Global Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family. He debates and lectures extensively on issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and parenting at universities and churches around the world. He's a prolific writer. I think you have over nine books, it says. He is a contributor, senior contributor at the Federalist and is our big connection to folks on the family really supporting us and helping us get the big projects we're doing off the ground. So, Glenn, thanks so much for joining us.
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Good to be with you, Jen. You and I get to hang out every once in a while doing work and stuff like that, but this is the first time in this setting, so.
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I know, yeah, this is super fun. And I already cleared with Glenn that we can have him on more regularly because, you know, you really do even just in hanging out with, you have such great insights and knowledge into these topics. I'm newer to this because I just started this work, you know, five or so years ago. And you've been doing research and writing and considering these topics for a little bit longer than that. So.
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Long time.
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Yeah. Okay, so let's start off with more, kind of a broad overview. But I thought this was really interesting. One of your articles, you, you've written and talked about marriage and family structure for a long time, but you've written that marriage is still important even to younger people or young adults, where a lot of us would probably think, eh, marriage is kind of, it's passe now. Nobody really cares about it anymore. People aren't really getting married. But you say it is still important. Can you start us off there? Why is marriage still important, I guess, generally, but why is it still important to young people?
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Well, that's a great, great question. And I'll start with this. It's. I make a bold statement and it's backed up by data. It's actually becoming more important. Scholars are finding out. But what we have to do is like, go back and understand what marriage is. Marriage is a fundamental human institution. We like to think, oh, marriage is about, you know, the nuclear family of the 50s. But actually, like Aristotle is the one that coined the term the nuclear family. He said, when we think about civilization, we have to think about the most fundamental microcosm that makes up society. And he says, that is man, woman and child. He goes, that's the nucleus of civilization. And marriage is the one that marriage is the relationship that clarifies that relationship. And the first book that I wrote in 1997 was called why Marriage Matters. And it was a collection of research on how marriage improves human well being in every single measure of human well being for men, for women, for children, and society as a whole. And like, I would dare say pick out any measure of human well being. And if you look at that measure of well being by marital status, either children growing up with married parents or young adults being married or living together or just dating, people who are married are consistently going to track better and more consistently with any measure of well being that being physical or mental health, doing well at work, being employed, staying employed. I mean, this was interesting. They even did a study, I remember this a number of years ago. They even did a study of medical students in their rotations. You know, heavy duty level of life, you're studying, you're staying up 24 hours at a time, you know, going on rounds. You've got to know what you've got to know. And they studied medical students on their rounds in their residency. Did married students do better or less well than non married students? You would think non married students, because they have the freedom, they don't have responsibility. But they found that married students did better in that very stressful period of life than anybody else. They didn't freak out, they didn't drop out of school, they weren't doing poorly. And what they also found out was that people who married in the middle of their residency, they tended to become better students. And a lot of that is because you've got another person coming alongside you to have your back, to connect with you, and you also have a greater purpose. You know what? I got to make it through this program because I've got somebody that I want to succeed for. Marriage is a clarifying relationship. I did Another book in 2012 called the Ring Makes all the Difference. And it explains why cohabitation is not a good idea. And one of the biggest reasons why marriage is so beneficial and cohabitation is so harmful is marriage clarifies the relationship, right? Cohabitation is, one scholar said, it's suffused with ambiguity. The guy thinks it's one thing, the woman thinks it's another thing, and the family around them don't know what it is, you know, so that clarifying aspect of marriage is really in the commitment and the clarification is really what makes marriage such a powerful social institution. And really, to be quite honest with you, you cannot have a civilization without marriage. And that's how powerful marriage is.
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Yeah. With it being so important and with people being happier and more successful and healthier with it, why has it declined? Why is it on the decline? In, I guess, probably the Western countries is primarily where maybe it used to be a higher value and maybe now it's not. And then what do you think we could or should do to try and right that ship?
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Yeah, it's interesting. Just real quick, culturally. I mean, like in the United States, if you look at marriage rates among Asian individuals, significantly high.
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Right.
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But it is declining, really, in every other demographic. So the question that you asked, why is it declining? That is a great question. And I think, first of all, we, as a. As a people, as a nation, but as individual civilizations, we have not been doing a good job at being. I remember one scholar described it this way, and I love the word that she used, being custodians of marriage. Custodians, those are people that clean up at school like. No, custodians are people that care for something. They keep it maintained. And we have got to, as a society, realize that marriage is a virtue, it is a benefit, and that with anything valuable, you have to maintain it. You have to help people understand its benefits. We have not been doing that in society, and we have defaulted to. And you guys at them before us are super big on this of a. Well, all relationships are valid. And one relationship is just as good as another, as long as it's chosen in, you know, authenticity. And that's just not true. It is not true. So there are two things that we need to make marriage work. One is personal commitment between the husband and the wife, the man and the woman. The surrounding family around them needs to have the expectation that, hey, we were at your wedding. We heard you make commitment to one another. That's why I'm not a real big fan of destination weddings. You know what? You should get married in your community, the community in which you live, and have all the people around you that you share life with and let them hear you make the commitment that you made to your beloved so that they can come along and help you. But the larger society as well, needs to understand that marriage is a social value and that we should encourage all couples. I mean, we should basically say to them, you're going to trash your marriage over our dead body. We need you to succeed at this because you succeeding at marriage makes all of us better people. And we have lost that ideal. We have lost the communal ideal and significance and importance of marriage itself. And we need to recover that.
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Yeah, that's good. Well, and I think the stat people continue to use that half of marriages end in divorce, which is not even accurate. Right, but. But that's the things that are in our cultural.
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Right. No, and that's. That's another thing is, is scripts that we put into our psyche matter, and that's just absolutely not true. That. I mean, it's interesting that even for some people in the population, I mean, I'm. I'm a Christian, that there are Christian values that Christians hold. And if you look into the data, those things are profoundly powerful at making your marriage work. So there are people that go into marriage if you have not lived together before marriage, if you have not slept together at all or a lot, if you are both have a college education or going through college, if you have a family behind you that believes in your marriage. Smoking was another thing. Individuals who smoke, and especially one who does, one who does it, they're significantly more likely to divorce. So there's all these crazy little factors that either elevate your risk of marriage or significantly decrease it. And there are a lot of people in society today. There are a lot of couples who are thinking about marriage, but they're like, oh, my goodness, 50% of all marriages end in divorce. I don't want to be that person. But they've got qualities in their life that actually make their risk of divorce nearly nil. And we ought to get that data out there so that people can hear it and understand it and know and have a kind of informed consent sort of thing. But that's another thing is like, so many people, like 76%, almost up to 80% of marriages that are taking place today are preceded by some form of cohabitation. And most of these people are cohabiting, thinking cohabiting, living together is a effective test drive for a relationship. It's not. It's one of the most dangerous, harmful things you can do to sandbag a future marital relationship. Young people need to know these things.
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Right? Yeah. That's so good. You touched on this a little bit in the previous answer. But the idea culturally that love is what makes a family, as long as you can get an assortment of adults that sort of care for each other and they care for the kids. But your work has, you know, the data shows otherwise. Can you walk us through some of the evidence that children do the best when they're raised by their biological mother and father? Well, and married biological mother and father.
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Yeah. Yeah. So those two factors, married and biology, have an incredible impact. And this is interesting. When I first Started doing this research. I've been doing it for over 35 years. And I was a 30 year old when I first started doing this research. And I had the idea that like, oh, biology really doesn't matter in the long haul. You know, like love is really what matters. Like if you have two adults in your life as a child who love you and care for you, like that's all you need. Well, that's just not true. Love does matter. And love is better than non love, right? Or negligence. But biology is a profound thing. You know, it's not just like two humans come together, trade their reproductive, you know, material, an egg and a sperm, and then like they're done beyond that, like, no, the people who create the babies are the ones that nature has equipped to be most effective, most committed, most caring, most safe to provide for that child. And you see that time and time and time again in the social science literature. Biology really does matter. A biological mother is a very different kind of mother than a stepmother. A live in mother, a girlfriend mother. A biological father is far more protective. He's far more likely to spend his financial resources on this child than a stepchild, his girlfriend's, you know, child, things like that. And it's another interesting thing is like when you look at domestic violence, sexual abuse, domestic violence, all these different things. Even like look at a story in the newspaper about children that have been abused. Usually it will say a stepfather or a live in boyfriend. The most dangerous place a child can be is living in a home with mom's live in boyfriend or even stepfather. Even marriage there is better, but it's not an absolute protection for the child. Biology really, really does matter. It's a protective factor and function in the lives of children. And this is significant. And it makes us as men, better men, more caregiving, more sensitive, more compassionate, more protective than really any other factor that we like to tout, you know, makes a good family. This, this love makes a family ethic that we have adopted into today. It's a dumb talking point. I remember Pete Hegseth when he was testifying to become Secretary of Defense, he said one of the stupidest lines that we have in the military today is our diversity is our strength. He's like, that is just absolutely not true. Love makes a family is the same sort of thing. It's a stupid hallmark kind of statement that sounds good, but in real life it has no impact whatsoever. In fact, it actually ends up harming kids.
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Well, it's funny, we've talked about this. You even see in the animal kingdom that, you know, an animal that's not a lion or something will intentionally go and kill the offspring of other, other lions. Offspring are like gonna get killed.
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Yeah.
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So there's just something biologically and not, you know, from the Christian perspective. I don't think God's designing it that we're supposed to go kill other people's biological children. But you're saying the protective, caring features is somehow embedded in us to care for those that actually came from us somehow.
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Yeah, no, and that's exactly right. And that's where that biology and the genetics, I mean this is a fascinating thing for me is that the evolutionary biologists have big, big thoughts about this and big explanations of the whole thing of evolution is the race to pass on your genes to the next generation. And so, you know, I have my beliefs as a Christian. They're not quite evolutionary biology, but in many ways we absolutely agree there. They're like, oh no, like biology absolutely matters. Male and female contributing to the well being of children absolutely matters. So that's an interesting thing that like evolutionary biologists and Christians, like we don't agree on God and you know, questions of ultimate value, but we absolutely agree on does biology matter? Do male and female matter? Do moms and dads being married to one another matter for the well being of children? Absolutely. We have different explanations for that, but we strongly, strongly agree that, yeah, marriage matters, biology matters, sex difference matters, the binary matters most significantly. And that's over and against the messages that are being thrown out there in our culture today. And we need to understand the truth. We need to know the truth and not be ashamed to speak it boldly.
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Yeah, that's so good. That's a great transition to the next thought is one of the other phrases that our culture likes to say is gender is a social construct. Right. So I mean, because it makes sense if you think about it. If you really believe there's no difference between a male and a female, it's whatever, then you can justify same sex marriage. It's okay if two men, you know, use a surrogate and it's, it's all just body parts and there's, there's little bits of differences here and there, but it doesn't ultimately matter to children. Can you help our listeners understand, you know, are there real differences between a man and a woman? And why does, why is that important to kids?
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Yeah, so, and that is so important. You're right. If, if you go to a gender studies class, first day of class, they're going to teach you rule number one, gender is a social construct. But no matter where in the world you go or even where in the universe you go to take that gender studies class, guess what? There's only going to be two types of people taking that class, and there's only going to be one type of person or two types of people teaching that class. It's going to be a man or a woman. It's going to be men and women taking that class. And wherever. Wherever you go in the world. Just think about this. If male and female are social constructs, then we could go to different social situations and meet and learn about other genders outside of the male and female binary. But do you have that look at National Geographic magazine? They have never presented. Oh, in this culture here, they have three different genders and hear the different genders. I mean, when you hear these people talking today, they can't even decide on what these things are called. At. At. There was a big political meeting just two weeks ago from the Democratic National Convention, and they were voting on a leader, and they said if a male or a female or a non binary. And they couldn't even, like, define that. So if gender is a social construction, we would all know the 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 different genders that there are. But everywhere in the world that you go, I don't care who you are, I don't care what you believe, you're only going to find males and females, and you can always determine who the males and females are. There are differences in dress. There are differences in roles and domestic responsibilities and the way they care for children and the way they divvy out duties. But nobody is ever confused who the men are and who the women are. To be human is to be male and female. There is no third option, and we need to not apologize for that whatsoever. And do not ever be bullied into going along with this false idea of that. Well, yeah, male and female are just social constructs. You could be anything you want. You know, what is a social construct, what is an ideological construct is transgenderism. Transgender individuals, and that thing doesn't even actually really exist. They have to go above and beyond to create a new identity for who they are that does not exist in nature. And that's very important for us to understand it.
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It feels like we're just coming out of this. I like to use the story about the emperor having no clothes like something everyone knows is true, but now people are so scared to say it in terms of what pronouns we're going to use that we would have to pretend a man dominating women's sports is not a big deal. But it does feel somehow like we reached a peak and we're kind of pulling, coming back. Not just. Just because Trump got elected, but maybe that's why he got elected. But can you explain sort of maybe, why did it get as bad as it. As it did? And then why do you think it's starting to maybe come back to reality a little bit?
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Yeah, that is a great, great question. And it's a big question. It's a question that all of us really need to understand, and we have to see that. And this is controversial with some people, but the transgender ideology is tied to the same sex marriage ideology. They're all one in the same thing. Although you have big advocates for same sex marriage saying, yeah, I'm not on with the trans stuff, like, I'm done. Like, no, I. But the two things really have something to do with one another. Very importantly. We'll come back to that. But what really happened was the movement went too far in saying we can be anything we want to be. And if you truly believe that male and female are just social constructs and they are malleable and can be redefined and reshifted and made into anything, then. Then it leads us to transgenderism. That's exactly where it leads us. But then we saw a big towering, you know, six, six and a half foot person swimming against girls, right? Or a volleyball player, big, huge male body spiking the volleyball into the face of young girls and tough girls, girls that can take care of themselves in the general sense of things. And we as a society said, yeah, that's too much. You know what else went too far? Dylan Mulvaney being a caricature of womanhood. In fact, he didn't even call it womanhood. He is. It's my 365th day of being a girl. Dude, you're not a girl. You know, the movement went too far. But here's the connection. If you can say that the argument for same sex marriage was always the argument for the same sex family. Those two things always went together. And if you can say that a good family unit does not need the mother or the father of that child that two guys or two women can be do just as well, then you have defined the feminine out of existence. If two moms can just create a rocking family that we all have to embrace and all have to be excited about, then you have defined the male out of family. So same sex marriage really did annihilate the idea that men matter for the family, that women matter for the family. And if men and women do not matter for the family, then they do not matter for anything. And therefore, you can have a six foot guy show up and say, hey, I'm a girl and I'm going to swim with the girls. Or you can have Dylan Mulvaney say, I'm going to take this journey into girlhood and you have to understand me and salute who I am. That is the craziness that all of this has come to. And it really comes down to this, is it comes down to the binary. The LGBTQ community, which is not a community. These people do not get along together. They do not show up and share the same spaces. They do not have an affinity. It is an artificial affinity that they seem to have. But the L's, the G's and the B's, fundamentally binary. They are as binary as the most conservative preacher on tv. You know, what does it mean to be gay? It means I'm a guy. I'm not a woman. I'm not any of the other 20 genders. I'm a guy and I like guys. What are the other genders that I like? Not interested in any of them. I'm a guy who likes guys.
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Right?
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The, the L is the same way. I mean, it's very binary. I'm a woman who only likes women, right? I exclude men. The B's, I mean, they've got stinking binary right in their name, right? So, and then you have the T's and the Q's come along. The T used to be binary. You know, if you're a trans person, in the good old days, somebody would ask you, are you an FTM or an mtf meaning female to male or male to female binary, right? But now it's more Q. It's queer. It's like, oh, I can just be anything. And so that's the thing that really has divided and has blown apart the LGBTQ construct is the binary. Do you believe in the binary or do you reject the binary? That's why you have a movement in the LGBTQ community. And I don't even use those phrases because they're meaningless Alphabet soup terms. But there's a movement of LGB without the T and the Q, like they're rejecting that radicalization of the meaning of the binary. But the L's and the G's and the B's have to understand that they started this annihilation, annihilation, if you will, of the binary itself and same sex marriage and the same sex family effectively did that.
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Yeah, we've seen a lot of, you know, maybe more like the Reddit commentary or those sorts of things where it will be, you know, like, lesbians of Reddit, and then there'll be men in there that are offended. And, and, and it's like you're saying there's so much, there's so much spectrum of what they're allowed to have done and still call themselves women. So it's not even like, it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm woman presenting, but surgically, no different or, or whatever. And not like surgery literally can make you a woman either. It's just like the level of what you could see or not see, like if a woman's had her breast chopped off or whatever. And then they're offended when a lesbian is like, well, no, I don't like men with male anatomy. And then they're roasted by the teen community. You're a transphobe, you know.
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No, they are brutally roasted. Brutally roasted. I mean, if you go, like, I'm a lesbian, I'm one of the greatest people in society today. But if you're a lesbian who is not down for dating a dude in a dress, you have just immediately become the worst person ever. And you think about, okay, J.K. rowling, of course, you know, not a lesbian. But, like, she was a fan and a hero of the gay community until she came out and said, no, women are women and trans women are absolutely not women. Trans women are dudes, you know, and so the nice lesbian, if you will, who takes that position, she is now public enemy number one, and she will get the most vile, vicious, life threatening threats online that anybody can have. This is another thing. And, like, people should look this up. The Lesbian Bar Project. The Lesbian Bar Project is an effort to bring back lesbian bars. Lesbian bars are dying, and they're dying because of trans inclusion. You know, like, if you are a lesbian and you think, okay, this is a safe space for us, you know, men aren't coming in here. Well, what about trans? Like, it's just nutty. But this is an interesting thing. Even the Lesbian Bar Project, the effort to resurrect the lesbian bar, says lesbian bars are safe spaces for everybody and they welcome men who are posing as women to come in. So, like, they don't even get it. So that shows us that this completely false and artificial LGBTQ construct is artificial. It cannot hold together. It is not a community. These people are so viciously against one another, but they keep that hidden they keep that secret, but we need to know that. Everybody needs to know that. And it's being broken apart because of disagreements over the binary.
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Well, in this, I just have another thought that might take this a little far, farther afield or maybe a not safe for work, you know, part of the podcast. But it does make me wonder. It. It seems like it's been primarily white men. If you think about the big major ones. The guy who wins the swimming competition, the man who was put as the first woman, was it director of health or something in the United States? Rachel Levine or.
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Yeah, Richard Levine, yeah.
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And so it's all these politicians or it's these big celebrities or it's just, you know, random anecdote. You see a person, but it seems like it's primarily white men that we see and, you know, middle aged or something. And I'm kind of thinking when you look at sort of the way culture has treated white men, it's like you're basically the worst kind of human there is. And I'm like, the only way for them to get back into the oppression Olympics circle is now if they can identify as a woman, then they're now the most at risk or the most vulnerable or whatever. And then. But we've also talked about, there definitely seems to be more going on in terms of like porn usage or. Yeah, fetishization, where men start trying to be like their wives. They're trying on their clothes, they're doing things like that. So I don't know if you have a take again, I didn't like prepare you for this or anything, but yeah, if you have a take on what. It kind of feels a little bit like this epidemic that's a part of this trans movement.
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No, no, you're. I mean, you're hitting on something very, very big, Jen. And this is interesting that we think about like one of the relatively recent big social movements was the Me Too movement. You know, like men, you don't get to tell us how things are going to be and you don't get to abuse us. But trans ideology is exactly that. And you're right, it is largely driven by white men. Kara Dansky, she has a book called the Abolition of Sex. And I love. She is, is a liberal, she's a feminist, but she is fierce on the gender issue and she says gender ideology and transgenderism, she always puts that in quotes to remind people it's not a thing. Gender identity in quotes is not a thing. It doesn't exist. She says that is misogyny on steroids. Absolutely. It is an invasion. Not only just an invasion of women's spaces, it is a redefinition of, of the feminine. And I'll get a little bit political here. Think about this, how quickly this happened, okay? In 2015, 16, we had an election as a nation, and Hillary Clinton was one of those candidates. Nearly everybody expected that she was going to win against Donald Trump. And do you remember what her election celebration was going to be? It was going to be at the Javits center in New York City, and the glass ceiling that they had constructed was going to shatter. That was woman empowerment writ large. And we all felt it. Whether you agreed with her politically, you know, like, I'm the father of four daughters. You're like, you know what? Like, yeah, the message that women can do anything that they want to do, like, that was powerful. Okay, Hillary didn't win. Donald Trump won. We had four years of Donald Trump. And then somebody else came into the White House. His name was Joe Biden. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order basically affirming the rightness and truth of gender ideology. So Hillary didn't get in. Women didn't break the glass ceiling. But the power of woman was very culpable there, very palpable there. When Joe Biden, just four years later, when Joe Biden came in, he obliterated the meaning of woman, the definition of woman. That definition is how fast this happened. And it happened on the Democratic side of the aisle. It has been conservatives largely, that ironically have been defending the rights and the dignity and the very definition of woman itself. That is how crazy these politics have been. And we need to understand that the sides that we think, oh, yes, that side defends woman. This side isn't like, no, no, no, all those categories are confused. And gender ideology has confused all those categories.
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B
Yeah, that's crazy. That's so interesting. Well, and like, people have pointed out, Hillary and Obama campaigned, I mean, kind of for the primary, saying that marriage was between a man and a woman. I think that was.
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Absolutely that. I mean, like, I use their words all the time when we were defending same sex marriage. Like, you know, I would say, like, okay, I'm the guy from Focus on the Family. I'm this religious conservative, but don't miss it. I have the same position that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had. Now, we know that they weren't real strong in that, but they articulated that. And actually, Hillary Clinton probably two decades ago had a very good explanation for why marriage needed to be between men and women. She didn't hold that real strongly. But no, she believed that. She held that. That kids need mothers and fathers and family and marriage is the delivery mechanism that society has created to be able to deliver that which children need, which, of course, is what them before us is really all about. And it's why I love the work that you guys do.
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B
Yeah. Well, let's end on kind of a positive picture just for. For listeners to. To leave with of why is it important? What are the important differences that a man and a woman offer to. Whether it's to each other in marriage, whether it's to the children they produce, or just to society in general? Because we're saying they're not interchangeable. It's not just that. It doesn't matter. And you can just switch between whatever you feel like. It's like, no, these are intrinsic parts of who a person is. You're either male or female. And then there's something really good and unique about that that we believe God intentionally put in there. But it's something that is good for society.
- [38:27]
A
Yeah, no, that's a great, great question. And Jen, like, you know, like, you well know, we could do two whole shows on this, but just to break it down and just to tease it and go into it is it's the male and female difference that creates everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. You and I would not be here right now having this conversation if a male and female that I'm very close to got together on one particular evening or, you know, and, and. And created something very important. You're the same thing. Every listener listening to us, their origination is. Starts with a male and a female, called a mother and a father. But somehow we've gotten to the idea that, well, yeah, male and female egg and sperm are essential to creating all of us. But any configuration of people can parent us. No life demands the continued participation and cooperation of that mother and father in the raising of that child. And mothers and fathers are different. We used to have the idea that they're not. But the more research that secular scholars do who don't have any kind of faith, ideology or political ideology, they're telling us constantly that, yes, fathers are unique parents contrasted with mothers. Not many of us are arguing that kids don't need mothers. That's pretty basic. Fathers are kind of negotiable. But the research shows us that no kids need the input of fathers and they need the input of mothers. And the reason that mothers and fathers matter really comes down to this. And I want to make this brief we don't have a whole lot of time to get into it. But basically fathers are oriented toward the child differently than mothers are. Mothers bring the child in close and comfort and nurture and protect and they get close to the child. Look at a father holding a child. His orientation is more outward, worldly oriented. He sees his child in relation to the rest of the world and he sees the rest of the world in relation to his child. Just think about this whenever you go anywhere. And I've traveled all over the world and I see this. If you ever see babies being thrown up in the air, you know they're not flying babies and it is not, well, moms do that, dads do that. It is always either a dad, a grandfather or an uncle throwing that child up into the air. Let me tell you why that matters. Mother being protective and holding the child close. The benefit of that is clear. The child feels secure and safe. And that is a fundamental need for human development. If you don't have that, you are not going to be a healthy individual. But dad, not just in throwing the child up in the air, but throwing up in the air is the symbolism of the dad pushing the child out into the world. The child who gets thrown up in the air, the first time this happens is they get a freaked out look on their face, it's palpable, and mother freaks out. But the child goes up. They always come back down, and they always come back down into dad's arms. The minute that child hits dad's arms, they start giggling. If they're verbal, they say again, that child just learned a big important lesson about life. Life can be scary. Risks can make you wet your pants. But guess what? The risk is worth it. And that's why that child says again, like, that was thrilling. Mom will never ever, ever give that child that experience. Dads give that child that experience. That's why it's usually a dad out helping the child learn how to ride their bike, or hey, climb up one limb higher in that tree or throw that ball a little bit harder, a little bit farther, swing a little bit higher, climb up a little bit higher. On the jungle gym, dad is helping that child come out of themselves and explore the world. Children who are deprived of either of those mothers comfort or dads pushing the child out into the world are limited significantly in their psychological, emotional and physical development. That is one of the big reasons and ways that moms and dads matter and their contrast and differences really do matter for children.
- [43:45]
B
Yeah, I heard this somewhat anecdotally, but we saw it a little bit with the assassination attempt on Trump where there was female Secret Service as well. But there's one picture where the secret Service agent, female is behind. Crouching behind.
- [43:59]
A
Right.
- [43:59]
B
These male Secret Service. And it made me think too. I remember. So I heard this anecdotally that some soldiers were saying that it's hard to have women in their, whatever their group.
- [44:10]
A
Right.
- [44:10]
B
Not in the military battalion or whatever because they will be. They seem more afraid. So they're not as willing to go rush out or to whatever.
- [44:20]
A
See. And like if we were on a CNN panel right now. Yeah. Would have so many people rolling their eyes. Oh, women are just not as strong. No, women are strong. They're strong in their protective nature. It's their nature to like, duck and like, you know, to, to. Even though, you know. And we, we know that picture that you're talking about. Well, somebody would go, well, she's not a mom.
- [44:49]
B
Well, but she's not her child.
- [44:52]
A
Exactly.
- [44:53]
B
I was going to make a contrast is compare those a military situation or a Secret Service situation to a mom that has two kids, that they're in a fire or they're in a car crash, whatever. Then you do hear these incredible stories.
- [45:06]
A
Yeah, no, absolutely. Because her DNA screams, you know, whereas the dad, he's protective too, but he is more inclined to. Like when I'm in a situation like that, I'm watching out for my kids, but I also have the ability to say, I'm going to watch out for my kids, but I'm going to watch out for as many people as I can. And society needs that. Society needs that value. And that's the lunacy or the idiocy that we can think, no, this are just human beings and some of them wear different clothes and some of them wear opposite. Like, no, in our DNA, like, our sex is not just in our physical bodily organs. Our sex is in every bit of Google that. I encourage anybody to just Google that. Is sex in every cell of our body. Absolutely. The best science in the world tells us that it is deep within us and it's deep within human civilization and human society. And we deny that. We try to redefine that at our own peril. And that's the very moment that we are in today and we are finally getting our sanity back about us to say, no, I'm not using your gender pronouns. No, I'm not going to call you by your other name. I know what a woman is. I know what a man is. And I can love you. I can affirm you. I can respect you, but I'm not going to play in an alternate reality. You said it earlier, Jen. The emperor has no clothes. I am not going to play that game anymore. And we all need moral and intellectual courage to say we refuse to play that game.
- [47:05]
B
That's good. Well said. Well, Glenn, I feel like I could easily talk to you for another hour, so it'll be fun to have you back on for other things that are popping up up. But thank you so much for all your work and your research and your time today.
- [47:16]
A
Yeah, it's fun. I enjoyed being with you. Thank you, Jen.
- [47:19]
B
Everyone, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Just let us know comments or email us your your thoughts or any questions that you have. Thanks so much for listening and for joining the Them Before Us movement.