← Them Before Us
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to Them Before Us on American Family Radio, where we strive to put children before adults. Our goal is to educate the public on a child centric perspective of marriage and family and represent the rights of children on policy matters. Now here's the host and founder of Them Before Us, Katie Faust.
- [00:21]
B
Welcome to Them Before Us Radio. I'm your host, Katie Faust, here with my training director, Jenn Friesen on this very happy 4th of July, 2250th weekend. I'm really excited about this because I, I live on the west coast and I didn't even go to Washington, D.C. until I was 45. That was the first time that I ever, like, saw the White House and realized that it wasn't right next to the Capitol building, which in my brain, they were right next door neighbors. And I realized it was a lot smaller than the Capitol building. I was wowed by the size of the Capitol building. And I actually got to be in the capital for the fourth, celebrating with my husband and my daughter and her husband. And that's just a really big deal for somebody from the west coast because I know you guys over on the east coast, you, like, go to, like, Lexington and you take, you take your eighth graders, you know, on D.C. tours and you, you know, they go to the Smithsonian and like, for kids on the west coast, like, all we know about DC is from the movies. So it's really fun that I got to be there and not just alone doing work stuff, which I did get to do some work stuff, but mainly I got to be there with my husband and my daughter and her husband. And that was just amazing. Really, really magical. We're going to do some Bible time. But before we do, Jen, I have a question for you. Like, when did you first go to
- [01:44]
A
Washington D.C. i've never been to Washington, D.C. yeah. So. But I have a trip planned, meeting up with a family member. We're both just going to work during the day and then explore and do things either on the weekend or in the evening. So. But I feel the same way about Philadelphia. I just got to go to earlier this year, see the Liberty Bell, see a bunch of the history. I got to see where they signed the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson Hall, I believe. And yeah, it's the same thing, Katie. We're on the west coast and Washington, we live in Washington, but when everyone else says Washington, they mean Washington D.C. so it is funny. And there's so many amazing things people need to go see in D.C. that I've heard, like the Museum of the Bible and things like that I'm really excited to experience.
- [02:28]
B
It's just fun to, like, get a taste of history, like, where we are. There's no buildings built before 1920. I mean, every now and then you'll see, like, a cabin, maybe a few houses in downtown. But really, like, you go over there, and there's just so much history, and it's. It's really wonderful. And it's something that we should cherish, appreciate, celebrate, herald. So I love that for all its faults, this administration loves our history and loves the Capitol, wants to beautify it. We want to talk a little more about the founding of our nation, and we're going to get to that. But we do a little Bible time first. And this time, I want to Highlight Esther Chapter 3. I was reading with my daughter. My second daughter is home from college with me, and. And she and I, when we are in the same place in the morning, we both do Bible time on our own. But it's fun to do it together when we're both awake, neither at the gym, neither of us are working. So we decided to read Esther Chapter three together. And I tell you, the parallels for believers today was just leaping off the page to me. So I just wrote down some reflections that she and I kind of pulled out of the text. Um, you know, this is right after Haman has figured out how to condemn the Jews completely. An entire race of people, um, or at least, I'm sorry, this is like, right when he was elevated to power, like the prime enemy of the Jews. And everybody's bowing down because they all recognize, kiss the ring of this guy. They're going to be able to get ahead. Mordecai doesn't. He's the only one that doesn't bow down. He just stands there. And, you know, it's interesting because everybody's constantly asking him, why aren't you bowing down? What are you doing? Why are you bucking the trend? And he doesn't say, you know, we have this ancient feud, or, I don't like him, or, he's corrupt. He answers, I'm a Jew. I'm a Jew. And that answers the whole thing for him. His answer goes back to, not some personal animus, not some behavioral, you know, beef that he has. It goes to the core of his identity. People should be noticing Christians refusing to bow down. We should be so different that everybody's always asking for a reason, for the hope that is in us. And the answer is not, I object to, you know, the licentiousness of our culture. I'M anti woke. The answer needs to be, I'm a Christian. All of it stems from our identity. All of it is going to primarily come down to with whom we find our primary allegiance. And it has to be Christ. It has to come from the core of who we are, not little things that bother us, not our own disposition. It has to come down to we have been set apart by God, and therefore we are going to live and act differently later on. You know, Haman's angry and it says Haman was filled with fury, but disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone. And it's like Mordecai could stand alone. Haman needed groupies. And God bless the Christians who will stand alone. It's. It's hard to stand alone, but we will do it if we have to. But I'll tell you, the Betas out there, they won't act alone, right? They'll need people to reinforce. And then, of course, the ultimate way that Haman wanted to get back at Mordecai was not to destroy Mordecai, destroy everybody he loved. And that, unfortunately, is a reality of our world today, maybe more than ever in this country, that if you stand apart, if you refuse to bow, it won't just be that people attack you. They will come for your friends, they will come for your family, they will come for your job. It is kind of a father of lies original. And so don't be surprised when that happens to you. Jen, I know you are fighting the culture war. You've had so many opportunities to stand alone. What do you take from these verses? When you think about the lesson and the place that Esther found herself in 25, 2700 years ago, what do you take from this?
- [06:27]
A
Yeah, I thought you're grabbing the word allegiance was. Was really fitting. And you know, it's interesting because we do the Pledge of Allegiance as American citizens. And I read this really fascinating book. I just pulled it up again so I could remember the author, but it's called Salvation by Allegiance Alone. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's by Matthew W. Bates. I think I read it for a first school. And his point is that the verse, Bible verse that says, for you have been saved by faith alone, that if you looked back at the Greek, you would actually see a definition closer to our understanding of Allegiance. Because his argument is, even the demons know who Jesus is. They know he's Lord. They even say. They even, you know, hey, please don't hurt us. You know, do this or that they have to appeal to his authority to do different things. So the devil knows who God is, but the devil does not swear allegiance to him. He is opposed to him. So it. His point is, it maybe is can't just be an intellectual ascent of knowing who God is. It really is a. Whether you say God grants you this ability or whether it is some level of human determination, you decide to pledge allegiance to Christ. That is what saves you is saying, I swear my life to this king. And so then to Esther's point, Mordecai is saying, there's a higher authority, there's a higher king, and he is loyal to the king. He saves his life, but he's saying, there's a higher authority that has my higher allegiance. And I think that's why Christians have always stood opposed to. To these tyrannical governments, because we want to honor and care for our government and be a good citizen. Unless you turn us. You try to turn us against our sovereign, and that's what we should be like. You're saying in the culture, it's like, oh, man, those are people who. The allegiance to their king supersedes everything else, but it makes us the most loving, caring, best citizens there are. Unless they try to make us do something against our values.
- [08:35]
B
Yep. And if you have that proper identity, if you understand who you are first, it helps you order your loves, it helps you order your allegiances. And so, like, we're all about putting kids first here. Kids are not before God, you know, And I would say in a healthy marriage, kids aren't even before your marriage.
- [08:54]
C
Right.
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B
You've got to prioritize your marriage above kind of the immediate desires of your kids a lot of the time. So the identity is what helps us order our response, order our loves, know when we bow and know when we don't. And that actually feeds in so well to this 250th anniversary that we're celebrating this weekend, because the founding fathers had to figure out, how do we know where to put our allegiance, and to what? And this amazing, novel idea that our allegiance is not to an ethnicity, our allegiance is not to a family in terms of a monarchy. Our allegiance is not even to a shared national history. Our allegiance is going to be to this idea that we all share a human universal, the idea that all of us are equal before God. That has become so common for in our American parlance, that we don't understand how groundbreaking it was, how distinct it was from all the other systems that they were breaking away from or they had experienced or read about in the past. And it was the first time in history that we formed a political association that was not based on religion or ethnicity or ancestry. It was brand new, brand new. And that that idea of self governance that had implications for the individual and for the nation. So Jen, I know you dove into a document from the Heritage foundation that went into more detail about this. So what stood out to you there?
- [10:27]
A
Yeah, this was an essay called why the American Founding Matters by Colleen A. Sheehan and some of the big points that I, that I drew out of this article. One of the things was this was the first time the founders formed a government based on the consent of the governed. People have talked about it has to be a moral people. It has to be a people who recognize that I have to self govern. And I'm also looking at everyone else like they must also self govern, not that I'm going to self govern and also govern and make everyone else do what I want. And one of the lines I think is so good is that the success of this experiment, like self government experiment, depends on the justice of our national policy. And that's contingent on the morality of the individuals that comprise the nation. And that's why we're going to talk about birthright citizenship in the next one. Why it's so scary to import people who disagree with the values. It's not about skin color or nationality. It's about can self government and can the American experiment survive when you import people who fundamentally disagree with it. I have a few more lines if we have more time, but. Yeah, no, keep going.
- [11:42]
B
Well, let me just put a point on this. And you know, when I think about the founding and I think about limited government, you cannot have limited government on the national level unless you have massive amounts of micro level government in the self. So it's like Chuck Colson used to say, it's the conscience or the constable, like something will govern you. And if you want limited government, if you want to be self governed on the national level, that means you have to be individually governed. Nothing, nothing will do that except religion and morals, period. You have to develop a moral people if you want to have a small government, if you have immoral people, the only alternative is for the government to get larger.
- [12:19]
A
Yeah. One of the things that the essay ended with that I just, it struck me so deeply was, you know, the founders had this vision for America that's a quote, a story they'd written in their mind's imagination before they imprinted it upon the land. How it turned out we know 250 years later we get to see the success of it. They had no idea. None of them got to see what really it would become. And it just blows my mind the cost that they paid. This the essay is totally worth reading. It goes through 14 different founders, some that I had never heard of before. But you know, if they failed, they would have been ridiculed for all of human history. Oh, these people thought that they could do something. But another line that says the notion that all human beings have a right to liberty and self responsibility is not an old idea, it's an eternal idea. So they were really trying to tap and grab onto something that are these are universal truths. They were trying to recognize them and form a government around that which had never been done before and has been done. I mean, to the we've had the most powerful successful country in all of human history. But then it's like Ben Franklin says, if you can keep it, you know, if you can keep it going. And that's the question.
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B
I certainly look at all of these accounts and the stories and there's been fun like social media, Twitter accounts that have popped up to give you like insights into the past and what people thinking what was happening at this very day 250 years ago. And like, how incredible to like fight for something that has such implications for humanity. And they really did, you know, they were doing something brand new. And they've inspired our our style of government has inspired a variety of other democracies and republics around the world. Like we have been able to export because it's an eternal idea, because it's a human universal. It didn't just work in this portion of North America. It can work anywhere where people properly understand the nature of man, put thereby the nature of God, and then arrange your life and your government accordingly. So we're going to talk a little bit about the massive Supreme Court decision that came down last week on birthright citizenship and specifically the intersection that it has in the world of baby making and big fertility. Stay with us.
- [14:40]
A
We'll be right back. Welcome back to Them Before Us on American Family Radio.
- [15:06]
B
Welcome back to them before U.S. radio. I'm your host Katie Foust, here with my training director, Jen Friesen of Them before before us. And there was a lot happening from the third branch of the US Government this week, the Supreme Court. They handed down several decisions, a couple of which had really serious consequences. And this one on birthright citizenship is one that we've been particularly interested in. And that's because at them before us, we critique the baby buying and the baby selling industry known as surrogacy, known as big fertility. A lot of people think about surrogacy or donor conception or IVF as a way for infertile couples to have children. And sometimes that's true. But what it has done, especially in conjunction with birthright citizenship, is it has allowed an international industry to spring up specifically catering to foreign buyers. So people will come to the United States to customize their children, oftentimes because it's illegal in Spain or it's illegal in Germany, or it's illegal in Italy. So they'll come here to do it. But bonus, if you are able to shell out six figures for that surrogate, you also take a baby home who is a U.S. citizen. And that is something that has been exploited not just on an individual level, but a systematic level. We have accounts of, for example, Chinese billionaires who have over 100 US citizen children that they have procured through Californian surrogates. So I think we look at the birth, birthright citizenship debate and we're really familiar with the Mexican woman who comes across the Bor of Tijuana, makes it into San Diego, gives birth in the hospital, stays for a few weeks, she goes home with the US Citizen child, and then when that child grows up, they use that to sort of blockchain in an entire family into the United States. So I think we're familiar with that understanding of birthright citizenship. But there is a real specific angle here in connection to surrogacy that has caught our attention. So, Jen, do you want to talk a little bit about, just maybe give us some high level overview of what exactly the Supreme Court said this week.
- [17:19]
A
So this was a 6, 3 decision, meaning justice Roberts, who's the Chief justice, who many people call him the conservative one, but he often will go to the more liberal side in some of the decisions. And then Amy Coney Barrett, who's also one of the conservative justices, went to the other side and basically affirmed that if you're born on US Soil, you are a citizen of the United States, regardless of your parents immigration status or the intent even. And I pull, I'm pulling up the 14th Amendment because this Ben Shapiro wrote an article and he talks about this. But so the 14th amendment, the first section says all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Okay, Now, Ben Shapiro is making the point, and a lot of conservatives who are very upset about this are making the point that if you are in China or you're in another country and your entire purpose is to come here and make sure you have a child that's an American citizen and then take them somewhere else, and you want to use it so they can. One, we'll talk about this. There's ways people are trying to use this, you know, 18 years down the road. But, you know, if people are intentionally trying to do that, and you have no intention of being subject to the jurisdiction thereof, then you shouldn't be a citizen. And unfortunately, the Supreme Court kind of dismissed that language, and it seems like just based it on, if you're born in that physical location within the United States, you get all the rights, and it doesn't matter the intent of the parents, the nationality, the legal status, et cetera.
- [19:13]
B
Yeah, the interesting reasoning is there was kind of like dueling interpretations of the law. And in the opinions that came down, you know, Roberts talks about how well, the idea that the child's born under the king's protection, even briefly, that owed him an allegiance and he was a subject. And then Thomas's descent is like, you literally got that wrong. The. The United States broke away from this idea that your allegiance goes to a king. That's the whole point of the founding of our nation. It did not have to do with an allegiance to a king. And therefore, the protection that you get from him has to do with the allegiance to an idea. It has to do to the, you know, like we talked about in the last segment, this idea that there is a common, shared humanity, and you have to ascribe to the founding ideals. You have to actually have some participation in. And, yeah, you have to make a pledge in some sense, or your parents had to make a pledge to uphold this unique, distinct system, because it's not based on ethnicity and it's not based on religion. It's based on something else. And so I believe that Thomas's dissent was like, 80 pages because he just deconstructed all of the sort of false logic, false history, false reasoning of the majority in there. And Alito's dissent said, you know, this is one of the most consequential rulings in court history. And he warns that it grant citizenships to children of birth tourists, which, you know, is. There's a lot happening in the world of big fertility, arguing that the amendment was meant to cover only those who at birth owed an allegiance solely to the United States. And so many of these parents that come over here, there's no allegiance to the United States. They want their children someday to have the benefits of the United States, but they're still, you know, their allegiance belongs to China or Mexico or France or Italy. There's no allegiance to us. So they don't deserve to have children who are, in essence, dual citizens, which is something that would have been rejected by the founders. So very, very interesting. I think that these kinds of situations are always a battle of narratives where the other side is going to sort of paint a picture of somebody that is here. And they've been working hard, and they've been here working the fields of our agriculture business for five years, and then they had a baby. But they're undocumented. And why can' the baby. You know, this is the only country the baby is known. Well, there's other ways of looking at this, too. And, Jen, you found this interesting tweet where somebody was like, let me tell you how this actually looks. So tell us about this family with the Honduran connection.
- [21:45]
A
Yeah. So this was a tweet by Philip Greenspun on X, and he says, birthright citizenship tale. Our social circle in Massachusetts included a guy married to a hunter, and every time one of his wife's relatives is pregnant, she comes to stay with them. When it's time to deliver the baby, the relative ubers to one of the most expensive hospitals in the world, like Beth Israel. She gives birth, says the magic words to avoid ever receiving a bill, I'm undocumented. And after a few weeks heads back to Honduras with a baby, a birth certificate, and a US Passport. This one family has likely cost taxpayers at least $300,000 in payments to the hospital for uncompensated care and more. Ten US Citizens have been minted. When the kids are adults, they have an automatic right to sponsor their parents for green cards. So eventually, this one family will be responsible for perhaps 40 or 50 legal immigrants from Honduras to the U.S. so
- [22:46]
B
probably not how the people who drafted the 14th Amendment, not what they had in mind, which very specifically had to do with restoring and granting rights to freed slaves who were domiciled here, who had an allegiance here, who had no other country that they belonged to, whose lineage probably went back several generations. It was for a very specific purpose. It was not for the Honduran family to bring in 40 to 50 citizens at the cost of U.S. taxpayers. And obviously, you can look at nations of concern like China, where in California alone, our friend Emma Waters has written about. She was the first to sort of break the story, break down the numbers of what we could find, which is very hard to find data on this. What we could find about the surrogacy industry in California was that you had up to 50% of commissioning parents who were using Californian surrogates. About 50% of them were foreigners.
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A
Okay.
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B
So this isn't just, you know, a couple from Massachusetts that wants to have a baby and is going to. No, they are coming from Brazil.
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C
Right.
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B
They are coming from China. And that's what she found, that about half of the foreign parents were Chinese and 40% of the Chinese parents were single men over the age of 40. So you've got single men commissioning surrogate born babies. Oftentimes they don't even come to the United States. They will fly those children back to China without the commissioning parents even setting foot on US Soil. And those children could run for president even if they've never lived in the United States before. So obviously we look at this from the perspective of a massive violation of the rights of the child, the buying and selling of children, the intentional severing of the relationship they have with their birth mother, leading to struggles to bond and attach in the future. Many of these children are going to lose their genetic mother. Some of them will lose their genetic father in the process. We look at this as a human rights violation against children, but it is obvious that this is a national security concern as well. So then before us, we are going to be capitalizing on the renewed attention to birthright citizenship, how it is being abused and misused to push at the federal level banning birth tourism in the name of family building, in the name of big fertility. Because, you know, I think that if you can't ban a woman from coming across the border giving birth to her own child, at least maybe you can ban commissioning parents hiring somebody else to give birth to an unrelated child. I mean, like, this should be low hanging fruit that we can all agree on.
- [25:33]
A
Right? And I've, I heard someone saying, oh, well, it's going to be fine because Trump has. Because they've secured the border much better. There's a lot less of the, like this example maybe of the Hondurans, but that's only closing the border or protecting the border only takes one element out of it. It's the illegal immigrant who's to come across. Actually, that tweet is saying it's a family member visiting. So is the, Are they going to stop pregnant women at the airport? You know, that's a question. Or like you're saying this doesn't even touch a rich, successful Chinese businessman who's here for business all the time, who has no problem getting back and forth to the country, buying a child, custom designing and buying a child in the United States and having a surrogate born baby here and then taking them back to China doing who knows what. It's actually kind of scary, too, that, like, the national security concern is one of the less horrific things you can imagine happening to a child. Like, they're just being raised totally normally and they're loved. Well, but they have, oh, we want you to go back and vote, you know, for our interests, or get me an American citizenship when I come back. Like, that's still horrifying, but just imagine how much more horrifying it could be for single men coming, getting whatever kind of kids they want and taking them back and not tracing them back across the ocean. You know, so there's so many levels of horror that we could be thinking of. And like you're saying, I really do hope this lights a fire under the administration, the DOJ Republicans, it would be super nice if they would get on board and start really getting serious about this. But I do think, you know, when the court doesn't go our way, the court is only one element of the three branches of government, and they're supposed to interpret the law, but they don't make the law. And so we need to make good laws or change good laws. And I think that's within our power. But do they have the will to do it?
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B
People will often say to me, katie, what are you trying to do? And my answer is global takeover. We need to take over the world as it relates to putting children first in all of these conversations. And people say, well, that's nice. How are you going to do it? And the answer is, we need to do two things. We need to change hearts, we need to educate people, we need to tell the stories, we need to explain how children are being victimized, and we need to change laws. It's not enough to just podcast or have a radio show or give speeches. You actually have to do the work of getting in front of lawmakers. You have to convince them, and then you have to make sure that there is a political reward for them. I mean, there are some really, you know, people talk a lot of trash about politicians. I feel like I know some of the best ones at the state level and the federal level. I know the people that are really operating on principle, even though it's coming at a great cost. But if I have my way, we are going to raise up such an army of kind of normie Americans, but also influencers who, when somebody, a lawmaker at the federal or state level says we're going to end birth tourism, that there's a, a political benefit to that where people won't come in and say, you're trying to prevent people from having families. People go, thank God somebody's standing up for the child. So that's a big part of what we do with them before us is, you know, we are really in deep with a lot of different, especially conservative platforms and publications and influencers working to make them prioritize, help them think about all these issues through the lens of putting children first. Because then when we do introduce or help to encourage lawmakers to propose child centric legislation, we've widened the Overton window to such a degree that there isn't a huge backlash for them. Jen, I want to ask you. We are on the heels of another big anniversary week. Last week we saw the 11th anniversary of Obergefell, and then before us were spearheading a national coalition to overturn gay marriage, to overturn that Supreme Court decision. I want to know, you're super online. You run all of our social media accounts, not just our account, but did you see other accounts, other sources that were also critiquing Obergefell calling for its overturning, even some that maybe aren't as connected to us? Do you notice a temperature change in the online world?
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A
We definitely. We saw a lot of our coalition partners. Of course, all the family policy groups are posting. I. Someone, someone who is pro LGBT was tweeting our them before us account and saying, well, it's too bad, you guys, you know, you can't disagree with all these corporations. They're going to agree with our lgbt, you know, ideology. And I pointed out, no, you guys have seen a 65% drop in corporations wanting to be a part of, of the human rights campaigns, you know, equality index and things like that. So I do think we're seeing a huge temperature shift. I think we're giving people the language we talked about. Matthew Vines had a New York Times article where now he wants to, it's not just LGB without the T now it's LGB without the tq. Because he's saying, I'm gay, I'm not queer. I don't want to do the whole queer thing. He wants to kind of paint himself as, I'm a Christian conservative in this, these other ways. It's like, no, no, no. You don't get to throw away the parts that you don't like. Your extreme elements. No, it's already extreme. Pretending a man and a woman are interchangeable and they don't matter to children.
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B
That's our point.
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A
You're not normal. But just with that part, that's a not normal belief.
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B
Well, Matthew Vines wrote God and the gay Christian, which 10 or 15 years ago totally normalized the idea that same sex sexual relationships were okay a okay in the eyes of God. So he's very good about throwing away the parts that he doesn't like because he's been doing that with scripture for the last couple decades, contorting, distorting, torturing scripture to arrive at the place where actually God loves that these two men are engaging in sexual activity and cutting the mother of their children out of her life. Well, stay with us. We're going to hit some Q and A, some things that we've observed around the Internet next. Thanks for being with us this weekend.
- [32:01]
A
If you'd like to comment on the show, email comments thembeforeus.com hi everyone.
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C
Welcome to here for the comments a Them Before Us podcast series where we dive into the comments and questions that we get online and then we unpack the children's rights perspective. And I'm your host, Sam, and this is Jen and we are here for the comments. So Jen, I know you and Katie just spoke about this, but I thought it would be fun to talk about the US Birth citizenship because I had some questions about it. So. And I also wanted to go over just like a general reaction to it, what we're seeing online.
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A
It was really interesting. Katie and I talked a little bit about the 14th amendment and maybe the higher level thoughts about it. But we also wanted to find some tweets. I found one that was really interesting that was unpacking Justice Clarence Thomas's take on everything. And I saw this other funny tweet that said basically we need nine Clarence Thomases on the Supreme Court. We need a Clarence Thomas as president. We need 535 or something Clarence Thomases in Congress. And then we would be set as
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C
a country, then we're good, then we're safe.
- [33:16]
A
Because I think for our conservatives, he really is a very reserved, actually true conservative in the sense of he sees the Constitution, the things about America that make America America. And he wants to conserve those things and those principles and make you stay true to those principles. And so he, Justice Clarence Thomas broke down the whole thing and obviously this is very smart, but One of the things that people are trying to say is, hey, people who are born here just get to be citizens. That's what it was like for slaves. Because the 14th Amendment was in part to grant slaves who've been brought here against their will, forced to labor, etc, and then had been born here, you know, two, three, four generations, but to give them the rights of an American citizen. But Justice Thomas was like in his disagreement, his dissent with the ruling that just came out, he said these situations are nothing alike, even though both babies are born on US soil. But he's like a baby born on American soil of a stranger or a traveler who's passing through or temporarily residing here is not a citizen. They weren't ever considered citizens. You know, the founders didn't think of it that way. If you have a home somewhere else and an allegiance to a different country, you should not be granted citizenship just because you happen to be here when you gave birth. And I don't know if you heard one of the USA soccer players who's one of our stars, is only able to play for the US because his mom 20 something years ago couldn't get on her flight and she ended up having the baby here. She was too pregnant to fly home or something, ended up having the baby here. Now he's a US soccer star, I think one of the African countries or something. Someone was like, this is like the butterfly effect. This is crazy. But that's one of the main things is we talked about this with Katie. If you don't have allegiance to this country, you don't want to live in the and and be subject to the jurisdiction within. Therefore, you know, then that's not the same thing. And so that's kind of the main difference when people try to equate it to giving slaves back in the day the right to vote.
- [35:46]
C
Yes. And I know, I saw because I was wondering how this affects surrogacy or if it just helps surrogacy be more mainstream than it already is. Because I did see this segment from CNN where there was a woman, basically as a business, she's a surrogate and creates babies for people in China. And so she said there was like a gay couple in China that bought her womb so she could make a baby for them. And I saw Katie respond to it. She said, I bet these two Chinese men who ordered this child will never step foot in this country. They will have their motherless born baby flown back to them. And in 35 years that baby can run for president now because he's a Citizen that is so crazy to think of. And it's like, I know we live in this American bubble where like, you know, you do your day to day life, you go to the grocery store, you live your life, you see your friends, you have your church, everything that we do. But we don't see how like crazy the world can get where like people. There are people who want to destroy America from the inside out. And the idea that they could like create a baby here and that that automatically has citizenship and raise them to hate America, like raise them somewhere else and then bring them back here and they have full access as a citizen is kind of, of. It's crazy to think about.
- [37:06]
A
This is interesting. This was from Megan Basham. So she's had a daily wire. She said the court has not made birth tourism legitimate, it's made itself illegitimate. Thomas and Alito are right. Congress must start acting now to remove all foreign women from the country immediately and begin attaching pregnancy tests to visa requirements. Force the Supreme Court to confront the will of the people again and again and again. That's interesting. We talked about that, Katie. Well, the Supreme Court is one branch, you know, and the other branches also need to do their due diligence. If something, if a law needs to be changed, we need to change it. And we are hopeful that this might force them to really take surrogacy seriously. So securing the border is part of it. Eliminating international surrogacy would be a huge piece of it. And yeah, making we can make birth tourism illegal. Wouldn't that solve a huge piece of the problem? Even if you have. We talked in the previous segment about friends. A pregnant friend in another country, Honduras, would come and stay with the family, have the baby there at the most expensive hospital possible, take the baby home. And they had done it 30 times for different family members. So are there things like that that we can, you know, get changed in the law and. But that's on Congress to get done.
- [38:35]
C
Yeah, that is. It's like crazy to think of all the possibilities this leads to. What does it mean if, if a, if a baby is a citizen here and their parents aren't, does that give citizenship to the parents automatically or they still have to go through the whole process in.
- [38:51]
A
When they're 18. I think it's when they're 18 or 21, the US citizen child can basically get automatic green card status for their parents. That's why people say, quote, anchor babies. It's the idea that the child can anchor you to the country in some way. It's Harder for the country to get rid of you if you have a child here. Well, think about the talking points from the other, the more progressive side when they've said, you know, you're separating families. Well, first of all, Biden, you know, lost a quarter of a million children that were trafficked over the border. I read stories that said the kid would have a phone number on their arm or an address that led to a storage unit and they would call the number and oh, my aunt is picking me up. You know, some woman picks up the kid. That's it. Oh, that's your family member or it's someone who runs a brothel and is selling children. So this notion of like you're separating children because we're deporting children back out of the country, kids are being rescued out of sex slavery when we talk about the border and things like that. So it is just crazy to think about all the terrible things that could be happening with people who are buying children and bringing them back across the border. I just don't understand why we can't get bipartisan agreement on the very, like the low hanging fruit of some of this conversation. It should be legal for a single man to just come into the country, rent a woman, buy a kid and take it back. That should be illegal. Why is that hard for people to get on board with, like, understand, do you think?
- [40:29]
C
A lot of it, like when I speak to like pro abortion advocates and usually the common ground most people can find is like third trimester abortion where it's like, I think most people would say for an elective reason, if the baby's healthy, the mom is healthy, it should not be legal for them to have the baby. But I've seen a tide change where now even then, even people who think it's gross and awful and evil to have an abortion at that, that, that age, they would still say they want it legal because they say, but because I'm worried that if we make it illegal for elective abortion at that age, that might somehow prevent cases where it's medically necessary. And then those poor woman, you know, women and you know, I wonder if it's the same thing where they say, like, well, if we make it illegal for these, you know, creepy men to come in here and create babies, you know, what about the, the poor family that we do want to be able to do that, you know, we feel bad for them, so we don't want to limit their legal right to do it. And I wonder if it's the same thinking.
- [41:26]
A
Yeah, well. And isn't that why? I mean from the Democrats perspective we're always going to say children's rights come first. So at the end of the day national security concerns the adults. Whether it's a single man that's international or a perfectly sweet, awesome, blonde, white skinned American Christian conservative couple, whatever the example would be that they would try to get you to say yes, we can universally say no, never. All surrogacy should be banned. And I'm fine to incrementally ban it and get things going, start where we can start where we can all agree but at the, we're like ban all of it. There is not a surrogacy situation that doesn't violate the rights of children. So that's where we are at. You know, as an organization we would love everybody to get on board with that. Like you said though it is people are just justifying these broad exploit broad exploitation of women and children because they keep coming back to that sweet, perfect, altruistic my sister can't have kids because she had cancer situation that they think should justify it. It, the reality is it's never justified, it's always wrong. Same with abortion. There is no justification for abortion. There isn't. You're killing a living human. Rape, incest, it's a living human.
- [42:48]
C
Yes.
- [42:48]
A
You know, the argument is the same. I hate it when Republicans give any leeway on the rape and incest thing. Not that of course you should speak with compassion when you're talking about people who struggle with those things. But they don't even mean real people. They mean they're trying to think of the most gross example to try and justified. And they're like you're going to force a nine year old to have a baby. And I was like, well you're going to force a nine year old to get an abortion.
- [43:13]
C
She's going to. You're going to force a nine year old to kill her baby.
- [43:16]
A
Like how is that any better to deliver the baby? Either way you're going to deliver it alive or dead. It's going to be in pieces or whole. And if you think that abortion doesn't traumatize women, you have not been paying attention. So no, I'm not going to traumatize a nine year old by having, getting her to have an abortion. No birth is less traumatizing than killing the child and ripping it limb from limb. Even in those crazy circumstances where a very young person becomes pregnant because of evil done to her, you know. Yeah, and it's the same, you know, well, we're really going off topic here. But it's like we would talk to that side and they would not want the death penalty for the Raiders.
- [44:02]
C
Yes, yes.
- [44:04]
A
They're like, their solution is let him out 17 more times, right?
- [44:08]
B
Yep.
- [44:09]
C
Yeah.
- [44:09]
A
And don't support him if he's, if he's, if he's here illegally, don't deport him and let him out 50 times. So it's just like, why are we. You're trying to argue with me about we should kill a baby and you're gonna force a nine year old. It's like, can you focus on the person who's doing the evil?
- [44:24]
C
Yes. And the person who actually forced the nine year old. Because we didn't force the nine year old to do anything. The rapist did. He's the one who should be 10ft under the ground. It's 10ft, 5ft. I don't know. Anyway, he should be under the ground for that. Yeah. And like, we want justice in the realest form, which is for the perpetrator, not for the laws that are set in place that say once a baby exists, we protect that baby. And like that is also protecting the nine year old the best way that you can in a situation where they're pregnant and shouldn't be. Like, like, yeah. It's so crazy that they're ready to defend the rapist more than they are the baby.
- [45:07]
A
Yeah. And Ben Shapiro talks about this, that the government's job, especially when you look at it from the Christian, Judeo, Christian perspective, a just government is supposed to wield the sword so that the citizen will not do it. It used to be, you hurt my tribe, we go and hurt your tribe. You hurt my daughter, we're going to come and hurt your daughter. You kill my brother, I'm going to come and kill your brother. And there's, you know, what's one of Those Westerns, those two families, Hatfields, McCoys or real families that kind of have this crazy violence. Right. Because it was just lawless. West. The West. The problem is Democrats are pushing this society where they refuse to do justice and the legal citizen suffers, suffers, suffers. Not a single person should have died from an illegal immigrant. They're not supposed to be here and they refuse to do justice. And then the second someone stands up to do justice because the government won't, they will get thrown in jail. Like, they'll have the book thrown at them. We're seeing that in England and stuff. We've gone all over with this topic, so that's fascinating. But yeah, the government is supposed to do justice or you have vigilante justice. And that's what's going to happen if the government doesn't start doing what it's supposed to do. We're not advocating for that. I want the government to do it. I don't want mobs doing justice. I want the government to do its job. But if they won't, that it's going to be a problem for everyone, you know. Yeah.
- [46:40]
C
Well, now we're incentivizing people to come to the country illegally just to have babies because now they know that their baby will be citizens. So hopefully we do get this fixed. I don't know what that looks like. I'm not a legal person, but if that's a possibility, that would be great because this seems just like it's just going to add so much more trouble. Surrogacy is out of control already and I feel like this is just going to add on to it.
- [47:05]
A
Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining us. We enjoy hanging out in the comments with you. We'd love if you see interesting things around the web that you want us to reply to, send it to mediaem before us.com make sure you're signed up for us on all the socials. Join us in the comments. We love mixing it up with people and you should also go subscribe on thembefore us.substack.com thanks for joining us. Even though Katie's not here, I'll sign off for her on American Family Radio. If you're listening to us on the radio, if you're watching this as a podcast on YouTube, thanks for joining us and we will see you next time. See you channel.
- [48:12]
B
The views and opinions expressed in this broadcast do not necessarily reflect those of the American Family association or American Family Radio.