90 Surrogacy Being Used by Gay Men Goes Viral

Summary

---

Them Before Us – Episode 90: Surrogacy Being Used by Gay Men Goes Viral

Podcast: Them Before Us
Host: American Family Association
Date: April 25, 2026
Main Speakers: Katy Faust (B), Jen Friesen (C), Sam (D)

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Katy Faust and training director Jen Friesen discuss a recent viral incident involving two gay men using surrogacy, sparking widespread debate about children's rights, family structure, and the ethical issues of modern family-making practices. The conversation moves from a biblical reflection on friendship and the crisis of loneliness, into generational attitudes toward family and authenticity, and finally zooms in on the surrogacy controversy, examining the implications for children in both policy and personal terms. The episode closes with a Q&A segment addressing criticism of the hosts' expertise and a broader discussion of public backlash and the importance of centering children's rights in modern debates.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Biblical Reflections on Friendship & Family (00:20–08:06)

• Friendship vs. Romantic Love:

  • Katy opens with the story of David and Jonathan, arguing their bond was an example of deep friendship rather than romantic or sexual love:

    “It really is a beautiful picture, something that all of us should strive for, to be in that kind of a friendship where your souls feel knit together.” (B, 02:30)

  • Importance of friendship love for a healthy life and Christian productivity.

• Crisis of Loneliness:

  • Katy and Jen discuss an “epidemic of loneliness” (B, 05:31) stemming from breakdowns in friendship, dating, and marriage structures.
  • Advice for Forming Friendships:

    "You need to purposefully put yourself in situations where you have a shared goal..." (B, 06:17)

    • Examples: service projects, sports teams, intergenerational relationships.

2. Gen Z, Analog Life, and Family Longings (08:06–15:01)

• Gen Z’s Desire for Authenticity:

  • Jen shares an article, “The Beauty of the Flaw: Why Gen Z is Reclaiming Family and Faith,” asserting Gen Z wants authenticity and analog experiences over online perfection:

    “Gen Z craves authenticity more than perfection… They want to be something true.” (C, 09:42)

  • Examples: less posting on Instagram, interest in vinyl records, classic cars, vintage culture.
  • Gen Z’s openness to building intergenerational relationships and restoring family bonds.

• Opportunities for Christian Mentorship:

  • Katy: "This is a chance especially for Christians... sharing ourselves, sharing our lives, sharing relationship." (B, 14:22)

3. Viral Surrogacy Video: Incident and Reactions (15:05–28:03)

• Description of the Viral Video:

  • Jen details a viral clip where a gay couple—country songwriter Shane McAnally and his partner—hold their surrogacy-born baby. The baby says “mama,” and the men laugh, telling the baby she has “dad or pop” instead:

    "They start laughing, okay? … For whatever reason, that video with this baby whimpering 'mama' ... went very viral." (C, 16:26)

  • In another video, the couple jokes about their baby's “homophobia” when he frowns upon hearing “two dads.”

• Why the Outrage?

  • The hosts attribute the unique backlash to the “stark” removal of a mother—biological, gestational, and social:

    "This is the face of the child that is going to eradicate gay surrogacy." (B, 17:56)

  • Uniquely attention-grabbing because the child will never know his mother in any capacity, which exposes "manufacturing motherless children."

• Children’s Rights Argument:

  • Jen: “Surrogacy is wrong regardless of who the adults are, because that baby lost his mom at birth.” (C, 16:55)
  • Katy underscores that linguistic universality of “mama” signals a deep, cross-cultural child need for mothers (B, 19:35).

• Community Reaction:

  • The episode notes a shift: even centrist or moderate online voices are joining in criticism, and grassroots "children’s rights" rhetoric is spreading fast.

Notable Quotes

• “It always denies children that primal bond. But there is something that is especially attention getting when the child doesn’t just lose their birth mother. They also are raised in a motherless house.” (B, 18:13)

• “When you hear it, it's so clear that it's worth speaking up and not backing down from.” (B, 18:55)

4. Gender Dynamics, Household Tone, and Children’s Experiences (21:07–28:03)

• Moderating Influence of Mothers:

  • Jen and Katy examine other videos from the same family, noting that joking and behavior become less appropriate without a female moderating presence:

    "Women moderate. If you take mom out of the equation, what is filtered out for Children becomes normalized around them..." (C, 23:07)

• Examples of Inappropriate Content:

  • Video where children are asked to point to the “horniest” parent; men laugh but still post it online.
  • Katy: “Men’s behavior change when they are around any woman, but especially their wives. And here we go, the situation where there is no female presence at all.” (B, 25:01)

• Surrogacy as “Contracted Loss”:

  • Jen: “The son lost one [mother] on purpose. It was written into the contract before anything even happened.” (C, 27:14)

• Policy Implications:

  • Katy states: “Child loss makes the family. And it's time for those of us to say it's inappropriate for kids to lose that.” (B, 27:51)

5. Overturning Obergefell and Existing Families (28:03–31:32)

• Key Q&A:

  • If Obergefell is overturned, do existing two-father families lose their children?
    • Katy: “No, that if there are families that are formed between the time that gay marriage was legal and the time we overturn Obergefell, which we will, the answer is not to go in and then destabilize those homes unless there's abuse taking place.” (B, 28:24)
    • The goal: Restore marriage policy to reflect reality (“mom and dad”), not disrupt existing stable households.

• Resource Promotion:

  • Listeners are directed to GreaterThanCampaign.com and Them Before Us Substack for resources and answers (B, 30:32–31:33).

6. Online Backlash and Child-Centric Advocacy (32:09–47:43)

• Criticism on Qualification:

  • Listener challenges Katy’s authority to speak on these issues given her background.
    • Katy responds:

      “I wish that somebody in the world of psychology, medical ethics, or with the background in sociology would have risen up to defend the non negotiable fundamental rights of children in the family. But they didn't.” (C quoting B, 33:51)

    • Sam emphasizes common sense and lived experience over academic credentials.

• Debunking the “Experts Only” Argument:

  • Jen and Sam explain that children’s loss of parents is observable without a doctorate (D, 35:41).
  • Cites academic fraud and peer review scandals as reasons not to idolize “expert” opinions.

• Importance of Lived Experience and Research:

  • Them Before Us says they aggregate both: they rely on peer-reviewed studies, but also lived testimonies of donor-conceived and adopted children who often report distress and loss.

• Conservative Backlash and Name-Calling:

  • The episode addresses claims that opposition to surrogacy (especially by gay men) is equivalent to “Westboro Baptist”–level bigotry (C, 44:21).
    • Katy/Team: “We’re not attacking them [adults], we’re attacking ideas. And we’re saying surrogacy is bad because it always harms children. It doesn’t matter if it’s mom and dad using a surrogate.” (C, 45:47)

• Advocacy Strategy:

  • Rejects ad hominem attacks and emphasizes focus on harm to children, not demonizing adults.
    • “We're not going to be calling people names. We're not going to be saying they need to be murdered... We're attacking ideas.” (C, 45:47)

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• "I'm tired of apologizing for having like healthy reactions to things just because there are people who are so unhealthy and so unhinged in their brains that they can come across something so awful and think like, oh, that's normal, that's healthy. Like, no, it's not." (D, 43:12)

• “We do enjoy hanging out in the comments with you guys and reacting from a children's rights perspective.” (D, 47:43)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Biblical Reflection on David & Jonathan: 00:20–05:31
• Friendship Crisis and Gen Z Trends: 05:31–15:01
• Viral Surrogacy Video—Incident & Response: 15:05–22:19
• Gender Dynamics in Parenting Households: 22:19–27:13
• Policy Discussion: Obergefell & Existing Families: 28:03–31:33
• Qualifications, Expertise, and Common Sense: 32:09–40:43
• Online Discourse & Advocacy Strategy: 40:43–47:43

---

Conclusion

This episode of “Them Before Us” blends cultural critique, biblical commentary, generational insights, and pointed reaction to a viral controversy about gay men using surrogacy. The hosts argue that surrogacy intentionally severs children from their mothers, fundamentally harming their rights and well-being. Viral outrage is analyzed as a turning point, and the episode advocates for returning marriage and family policy to a child-centric model—regardless of sexual orientation or adult desires. Challenges to the hosts’ expertise are rebuffed, with an emphasis on common sense, lived experience, and the weight of peer-reviewed research.

---

Resources Mentioned

• GreaterThanCampaign.com: Resources for overturning Obergefell and Q&A on policy changes
• Them Before Us Substack: Weekly resources and child rights advocacy materials

---

Transcript

[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 Foust.

[B]

Welcome to Them Before Us Radio. I'm your host, Katie Foust, founder and president of Them Before Us. And I'm here with our training director, Jen Friesen. We're gonna hit some of the trending news, some of the headlines as it relates to marriage, family and children that have caught our eye over the last week. But we always begin with a little bit of Bible time. And I am going through the Bible chronologically with my 18 year old son. So it's great, like I'm hitting different books that I haven't spent a lot of time in recently. It's always amazing to get a bit of a refresher on some of these stories that have drifted away from the front of my mind. And this week we were talking, we're in 1st Samuel and we got to the chapter on David And Jonathan, now 18 year old guy reading this passage where it talks about their soul being knit together and that they love each other above the love of women. And of course this passage has been popularized by a lot of kind of side beat Christianity where they're like, well, gay love is okay and because God approves, you know, disapproves of exploitive same sex relationships, but not, you know, consensual same sex romance. And look at David and Jonathan. And I mean, obviously it's ridiculous. There is nobody anywhere. You know, maybe in the last 50 or 100 years did people start to sexualize the relationship between David and Jonathan? And so of course it produces some giggles in the what, what's going on there from the 18 year old. But I will also say, like, what this is, it's actually, I think a beautiful example of true, genuine Christian friendship. Christian friendship in the sense of like, what did it, why were they so knit together? Why did they love each other so much? It was because they had a common mission. And then they end up kind of having a common enemy, which is Jonathan's father. And there is a bonding experience that takes place with anybody where you're running on mission together. But I will say that's especially true for men. Men form relationships side by side and if you talk to a man and you ask him who are your closest friends and how did you find them? Where did you get them? They will Say things like, well, I served with them in Iraq. Or they're going to say, well, we were on the wrestling team together. Or they're going to say, he was my. He and I, you know, created that startup in 2003. And nobody thought that it was going to work, but we were able to pull it out. But I mean, it was. We were grinding. We're like, we were in our garage, you know, until like 2am in the middle of the night. And there really is something about that bond, I think, especially among men, where you're forged through trial. But I will say that's actually how it works for all of us that, you know, my son and I were talking about how you can live without sexual love. Like, there's people that have really fruitful, beautiful, productive, godly lives that are virgins, never get married. You can't live without friendship, love. And it really is a beautiful picture, something that all of us should strive for, to be in that kind of a friendship where your souls feel knit together. It is really like the engine, I would say, of, of health, but especially of like Christian productivity to have those, those kinds of relationships. Jen, feel free to jump in here.

[C]

Wouldn't you say too, that the love you get from a man or a male friend is very different than the love you get from a female friend? And I mean, that goes back to God's design that we were designed to have masculine love and feminine love. And there's ways that that's different, you know, from your father, it's a certain way, from your mother, it's a certain way from your romantic partner, it's a certain way from your friend, it's a certain way. So it's different. It's not saying, you know, it's all sexual or it's all asexual, but we were designed to have love and relationship with both, I guess, aspects or, you know, genders within humanity. Both genders, you know, male and female. And to your point, some people have used Ruth and Naomi's story, I've heard that as an example of that same sex. That's romanticism or whatever in the Bible that's proof that God's okay with homosexuality. And I was like, they're married to men who die. The entire story is a love story about Boaz and Ruth and Naomi facilitating that love story. And it's this larger picture of Jesus as the, the lover and the, the husband who's going to come and redeem and save. So it's just funny, you know, people can only throw that out There because it's two individuals of the same gender that express some sort of care and loyalty for each other. But I just agree with you so much. It's so important to have good friendships, friendships that encourage each other, are loyal. Like you said, he's protecting his friend from his own father, someone that's going to take the throne. Jonathan's knows that David is going to have the throne. So Jonathan could have been jealous, could have joined in with his dad in hurting David, but instead swears his whole life to protect and elevate him because like you said, he knows it's God's will.

[B]

It's interesting because we do have. We've got a bunch of crises happening in our world today. We talk a lot about the birth crisis. You know, that's fueled by the marriage crisis. People aren't getting married and when they do, they're getting married later. That is prompted by what I believe is to be a dating crisis where people are struggling to just pair off. And I think even below that is a friendship crisis. We have an epidemic of loneliness and people are struggling to even feel like they have people in real life that they can be transparent with, who can bear their burden. And so it's. This is actually a bit of a recipe. Do you want friendship? Well, what do you need to do? You need to pursue a shared goal. You need to have something that you're working on together. And they were going to battle. They didn't just have sort of a

[C]

political,

[B]

the ruling monarch. They literally were going into battle side by side. Their lives depended on one another. And that's going to knit you together. And so if you're thinking, well, I could use some more friendships, you need to purposefully put yourself in situations where you have a shared goal, whether that is a service project, whether that is a intramural sports team. You know, Jen, you just started playing pickleball and it's like it sounds like, oh, this is just a way for me to burn some time and, you know, get in some extra steps. But actually like partnership towards a goal, even if it's something like pickleball, you are going to form a bond. Like, you will not not bond when you are running side by side with somebody else. Like those that shared goal is going to create a shared connection.

[C]

I think too, so many people express feeling lonely and feeling like they don't have friends. And an encouragement my mom gave me growing up was that if you feel lonely and want friends, look for someone else who also looks lonely. Because I think so many people feel that it takes someone making the effort. It takes someone looking around the room and seeing the person who's standing by themselves or who's new to the group. And I just think look for friendships in unexpected places. I met an elderly lady once at an event at the she came in at the tail end of a fundraiser because she couldn't find parking. She was dressed. She looked kind of like Nancy Reagan the way she was dressed. And she was like, well, can I still sit and eat because, you know, I'm hungry. I was stuck in the parking lot and we just chatted for a while and struck up this little friendship. I would go over to her house occasionally and chat with her. And it was a friendship that was maybe sort of unexpected because I'm not looking. She wasn't looking for a friend in her 20s and I wasn't looking for a friend in her 80s. But it was just kind of a perfect moment and we both had our eyes open to look for someone who needed a friend.

[B]

I love it. Let's transition. And there was a story, Jen, that you found called the Beauty of the Flaw why Gen Z is Reclaiming Family and Faith. And it's this idea that Gen Z, you know, who is kind of 25 and younger, I'd say they have grown up in the digital era. There is no time where they remember the Internet not being a thing. Like they have watched movies on YouTube, they have never touched a VHS tape. And most of their communications are going to be online and digital. They're not talking on the phone. Very few of them are meeting in person. And so what you found is this article kind of talking about how a lot of kids in the Gen Z era are actually saying, wait a second, I don't know if I want this completely online, digitized self. So Jen, what was it that this article was really pointing out that might surprise some people?

[C]

Yeah, the author was talking about how in so many ways millennials wanted an aesthetic. They wanted glossiness, they wanted everything to look crisp and clean. That's probably in contrast to some of the Gen X and the boomer decor. If you think about going to your grandparents house, maybe it was kind of cluttered or it was all over the, you know, all over the place. And so millennials flipped the other direction. And plus everything was about posting it. It's like I'm posting my dinner so it has to look a certain way. I'm posting my bedroom after I remodeled, it has to look a certain way. But the author is talking about his granddaughter is now flipping or kind of swinging back the other direction, obsessed with antique stores. Young people love the 80s and 90s nostalgia, that feeling of going back to a simpler time, to more analog technology. The advent of the. Or not the advent, but you know, the newer tech at the time is now analog and simple and they're just not as online. They don't want to post every minute. Instagram saw a huge decline in young people that were posting their stories and posts all the time. There's still influencer culture, you know, where people are making money off of it and there's TikTok dancing and things like that, but they're not putting their moments permanently on the feed as much. I noticed that even when I was working with young people and a few of the other points in the article, Gen Z craves authenticity more than perfection. So whereas a millennial is like, I need everything to look right and I'm going to post, what's more important to young people is the feeling of like, are you being really who you are? That's probably where a lot of the identity struggle stuff, you know, the. The popularity of the LGBT movement could kind of grab people because it was saying, well, who am I truly? What's my identity? But even that is swinging back because they want to be something true. They don't just want to be, well, what's popular or what do I see on tv.

[B]

It's so funny because I can see that in my kids, especially my adult daughters. I'll text them and sometimes they won't read it for eight hours. Like, I never leave a text under for eight hours. I am like writing you back, like immediately, usually. And so I think that they are like, this is not going to run my life. I will decide when I check back in with. I'll get to them. But I'm. It's not going to be the thing that pulls my attention away. I think that they've just decided, like, here's the time when it's on do not Disturb and I'm just not even going to look. And then it's funny because I know that there's been a bit of a resurgence in interested in vinyl records. So for the same reason, like, oh, it's something I can touch. And then I listen to the whole album together, not just a song here and a song there. Little side note, I have a classic car. I have a 1971 Volvo 1800 E. It is beautiful. It is wonderful. But it also has a. A fuel adaptation that allows me to tune the fuel to tune the engine in Some ways on a computer. So I was taking my car to the gas station, gassing up. I was checking the air, tires, the pressure. I had just tuned it a little bit. So computer was open. I was trying to figure out the air to fuel ratio and all of that. And these two boys pull up, boys that had been in the youth group when I was running the youth group. And they're like, what is that? And I'm like, this is my car. And they're like, wait a second, are you kidding me? I'm like, park, get out, let's talk about it. So like we're walking around the whole thing. They're looking at the engine, they're like peeking inside and they're going to look at the sound system like, oh, what? Look at those seat belts as I get in. And they were like, are you kidding me? And like, get in, hold the computer. Like, let's take this out and let's see, you know, like what the. How it's doing at idle and where, you know, how things go when it's in third and all of that. So like I get this kid, 18 year old at this point, and we're driving around and he said, I have watched so many videos of people tune their old cars or use these kinds of like, adaptations to adjust to tune, you know, their engine. I've never seen it happen. And like the whole time he was filming it, he's like, oh my gosh, look at the dash. Oh my gosh. Like, look at, look at the. We can see the gauges going up and down based on whether or not we calibrated the fuel correctly. And then I would, you know, the car would die when, when I was in first I would have to pull over and we'd adjust together. And he just was like glowing. It was so interesting because he was like, it was real, it was real. It wasn't watching somebody do this. It wasn't just admiring a classic car. He was in the car, you know, he was like, look at the way that the car locks and unlocks. Oh, I have to roll down the windows. Oh, here's this like thin like fan tail window that I, that I can open and adjust. And it was really, that it, it was like analog life. They wanted a little bit of analog life.

[C]

Yeah, there's been an more guys, young guys on TikTok or Instagram posting themselves reading and reacting to classic literature. And you know, it's like one black guy rapper started doing it and then a bunch of boys started copying him. And so they want marriage. They want family, but they don't know how to get there. Like you talk about, we're in a crisis in these other ways. But they want it.

[B]

It's a really amazing opportunity because they've got the whole world at their fingertips in terms of information. They want people that love them. They want people that know them. They want older people who will bring them in, invite them in to their embodied world. This is a chance especially for Christians. This is a whole new level of Titus Chapter two. You know, it's a whole nother level of sowing and planting and watering. We get to do it not just through sharing the gospel, but sharing ourselves, sharing our lives, sharing relationship offering, tailored precision wisdom after. We spend a lot of time knowing them, loving them and listening to them. This is an opportunity for a brand new kind of harvest and the next generation is hungry for it. Stay with us. We're going to be back with a few more headlines in the Meriden family world.

[A]

Welcome back to Them Before US on American Family Radio.

[B]

Welcome back to them before U.S. radio. I'm your host Katie Foust. Here with Them before us training director Jenn Friesen hitting what has been kind of a viral story over the last week. So, Jen, tell us what it is that I feel like every single conservative has talked about at least once this week.

[C]

This was a pretty crazy viral, I don't know, series of moments for our Them Before Us team. I think we had a lot of influence on how this conversation went on X at least. I do wonder sometimes when I think about what's happening in the world and what I see on Twitter and I'll bring it up to a friend and they'll have no clue what I'm talking about. I'm like, are we just really online and is this really the pulse of things or is it the people that only, you know, see CNN in the evenings that know what's going on? I don't know. But there is a gay couple. The one of the guys names is Shane McAnaly, who's a country singer or writer. So that's kind of how he was famous. He has a big following on Instagram online and he posted a video holding a baby and or it was his partner, I think, holding the baby. And they're goo goo gaga at the baby. Oh, do you want dad or pop, you know, two different names for the two men in this baby's life. They used a surrogate to get the baby that they share in the caption and the baby is kind of crying or Kind of whimpering and making sounds and says mama at some point, which people are like, oh, the baby doesn't understand words. They didn't really say mama. Okay, whatever. The dads laugh about it and they're like, no, you don't have a mama. It's dad or pop. And then the baby starts crying and they start laughing, okay? And these are the same guys that posted a video talking to the same baby when he was much younger, saying, oh, you have a brother, he smiles. You have sister, he smiles. You have puppies, he smiles. You have two dads. And he does a sad face, like kind of a whimper, cry face. And then they titled it Homophobic Baby. Ha ha, ha. Big laugh lines. Okay, within the community that they're appealing to this. These things are hilarious, apparently. But for whatever reason, that video with this baby whimpering mama. And just, you see, it's two men that are laughing it off. And you just recognize the baby doesn't have a mom. It went very viral. We just pointed out in our language the things we always do. Surrogacy is wrong regardless of who the adults are, because that baby lost his mom at birth. But in this case with two men, he doesn't get to know his genetic mom, his identity. He got separated from his birth mom at birth, and he'll never know his mom's touch, love, care, cuddling, breastfeeding. And so there is just something about that that feels so stark and dystopian. And I think it really took off online for that reason.

[B]

There were a few people that clipped a picture of the baby on the verge of tears and said, this is the face of the child that is going to eradicate gay surrogacy. And I think, you know, we at them before us have talked over and over and over about the harms to children when they are purchased on the open market and commercially severed from their mother. And you, like you said, Jen, we condemn surrogacy in all of its forms because it always denies children that primal bond. But there is something that is especially attention getting when the child doesn't just lose their birth mother. They also are raised in a motherless house. And so enough people have said, it seems to me that more than previous examples of people being concerned or outraged about motherless kids, this was the time where I feel like everybody had permission to say, I don't like this, I don't like it. And if that means my gay friends get angry at me for saying it, that's okay. It's not good for children to be Raised without a mother. And these men are mocking the baby for verbalizing what is one of the most primal needs that children have, a connection with their mother. So I, you know, had so many people, we, we both did. Our whole team had people messaging us like, how can we put a stop to this? You know, we saw a different lawmaker say, if I get elected, the first thing I'm going to do is make sure that gay people cannot acquire children through surrogacy. So I feel like the tides are really turning. You know, there's been popular kind of center right voices that are like, gosh, why are you guys losing your minds about this? Like it's no big deal. And they get ratioed in the comments, like, you must not understand. This actually is a big deal. So even though I think that the pro child voices are smaller in terms of some of the platform sizes, the arguments go far because truth has a ring to it. And when you hear it, it's so clear that it's worth speaking up and not backing down from. So I saw so many people covering this video and a lot of different comments on the, you know, like you said, the, the dad came out and they're like, gosh, you guys are blowing this out of proportion. The baby doesn't even understand English. I'm like, yep, the baby doesn't understand English. He is a five month old. But the baby understands that that first noise that children tend to make around the world is associated with the first person that children tend to be connect, are connected to throughout the world. I mean, linguistically, it's kind of bizarre that Chinese and Spanish and Arabic all have mama or some iteration of it as the word for mother, even though they're completely different linguistic famil. Because there is something so unalterable about a child's primary needs and the people that are there, there to meet their needs. So it was just, it was a triumph of the natural reality of the family captured on film.

[C]

I often tweet from our them before us account on Twitter. And so we were getting tagged in different things or we were posting and we were getting a lot of responses. And what is so phenomenal is, you know, some of the bigger accounts would reply to us or disagree with us. And then, you know, I'm prepared, you know, cracking my knuckles, ready to go in here into the comments to drop some truth and seeing other accounts, people, I don't know, maybe they follow us using our language. No, it's not wrong because it's that they're gay men. The child doesn't have his mother, or they're just correcting them. Was your mother important to you? Why would you say it's not important to this baby? And it was over and over again. So many children's rights. Basically advocates raising up in the comments, tweeting, retweeting, and making it go viral. I thought that was so phenomenal. Another video that someone brought up related to this couple was they're playing sort of a TikTok game where you kind of ask them questions. Who gets angry more often? Who does this, who does that? And the kids are pointing at the parents, and it's a woman who's asking the questions. So I don't. We don't know who this woman is. Maybe she's the nanny, a friend, whatever. But she asks, you know, a sexualized question. Who's hornier?

[B]

To be clear, it is the same gay couple that had the homophobic baby that was laughing at the baby for saying, mama. This is like children who either are the product.

[C]

They're older siblings.

[B]

Yeah, older siblings. Product of a previous heterosexual relationship, maybe, but they're behind the two, quote, unquote, dads pointing to, like, whose farts are louder and who sleeps in the most? And then the question is asked, who's hornier? And the kids are kind of looking around like. And the men are laughing. And so it's like, here you've got, like, the trifecta of how. How, like, obsessed can the adults get with their own desire to build up a life around their sexual attractions irregardless of the rights of the children? Go ahead. I just want to clarify. This is the same couple, right?

[C]

Yeah. A video posted, I think, a few years earlier or in 2020, even so, quite a few years earlier. And I was thinking people in the comments were saying, well, the guys didn't ask the question, and they didn't answer the question. They just laughed about it and moved on quickly. But I was thinking, well, they still thought it was appropriate to post. So we're not even talking about. Families might have an uncomfortable conversation where you're equipping your kids with stuff that you wouldn't put online. Okay, it's not about that. It's never appropriate to have certain conversations. This isn't an appropriate joke for children. And the reality is they still thought it was okay to post it publicly, that they're talking about that sort of thing around their children. And you made a really good point on your Twitter. You said, women moderate. If you take mom out of the equation, what is filtered out for Children becomes normalized around them because this is typical guy locker room joking, but it's not typical mom, dad, with small kids joking. And you, you kind of point out the differences. Women are the ones that help moderate that sort of conversation around kids.

[B]

And you know, there were some people taking offense in the comments. I'm like, ask a man in your life, ask if they talk different when their wives aren't around. And I'm not saying that every man is a sexual pig. And no, they're just coarser. No, they do make off colored jokes or they do degrade one another because it's kind of the way that a lot of men say I love you is by saying, how could you have gotten uglier overnight, man? Or how you could. Did you fail again at your bench press? You know?

[C]

Yeah, pr. Pr.

[B]

I mean, like, that's kind of. They don't necessarily talk that way when women enter the chat. And so when you have a family that is only male dominated, again, you know, I think about the, the video where they're laughing at the baby. Like, dads do joke. Dads will kind of like push back on kids. But when there's a mother in the home and the baby goes, mama, she doesn't go, she doesn't laugh at them. She goes, yeah, mama, mama, mama. That's right. Women respond differently to children. And so even if there's no like sexual abuse, which I'm not saying that there is in this home, I'm just saying that the tone of two fathers is altogether different than when there is a moderating female presence. Like the wife might say, honey, too much. Or the reality is he probably wouldn't do it if his wife was there. Men's behavior change when they are around any woman, but especially their wives. And here we go. The situation where there is no female presence at all. And unfortunately, this isn't the first video I've seen of a child being raised by 2Dads. Whether it wasn't a hyper sexualized environment. You know, right after that post, I shared this one of a boy going to a hockey game with his two gay fathers. The whole time he's. The boy is filming it and the whole time he's filming his father's making sexual remarks about the men at the hockey game. And I'm like, welcome to the non female infused home life.

[C]

Yeah. Another comment pointed out that she, she messaged us, I think, and she said about this country singer and his partner that she had liked following them at some point. She was a fan of the guy's music. And then she said she was watching them do prank videos on their kids quite often, and she made that same kind of connection. She said there's something about it that just felt kind of cruel and wrong. And yes, dads joke around and play pranks and do that sort of thing. And they're supposed to. That's a good thing. But it's also supposed to be tempered by the mom. Again, that's enough. Or a sense of whether or not it's sort of age appropriate to, you know, hurl a pillow across the room and knock your kid clean over. Maybe that's good when they're 7 years old, but we're not doing that when they're 1 years old and learning how to walk. Again, we're not indicating that there's been abuse, but it's very clear that it's just. There's not that male, female balance. And the child has one of each of those people, but they lost one.

[B]

This.

[C]

The son lost one on purpose. It was written into the contract before anything even happened.

[B]

Yep. Awful for this kid. But I'm glad people are finally waking up to the fact that we have an industry built around manufacturing motherless children. And we have a legal system that was mandated through Obergefell and gay marriage that requires that we easily detach children from their mother through surrogacy and reattach them to unrelated men through surrogacy. So, like, it's. It's time to have your eyes open. This is not just a way of helping more people have families. And love does not make a family in the gay world. Child loss makes the family. And it's time for those of us to say it's inappropriate for kids to lose that.

[C]

Can I ask you a question? So, you know, we've, as everybody knows, we're doing the Greater Than campaign. It's a coalition to overturn Obergefell. And this is a question that we get, you know, if. If Obergefell gets overturned, are we saying police should go into that house and rip that baby out of the home? You know, take all those kids out of the home? What's our stance on what we think should happen sort of with the families that already exist?

[B]

We've got an answer coming to our website about this shortly by a legal expert who's going to answer that question on behalf of the campaign? And the answer is no, that if there are families that are formed between the time that gay marriage was legal and the time we overturn Obergefell, which we will, the answer is not to go in and then destabilize those homes unless there's abuse taking place. We do have an interest in stability. But what the deacons construction of gay marriage is going to do is send a message to those children that they are right for wanting a mother and a father. I mean, we've done enough interviews with, we've had enough conversations with children with same sex parents to know that even if they were well loved when there was a roof over the head and there was food in their stomachs and they had somebody taking them to their activities, they want their father, they want their missing mother. And right now we have a legal regime. Right now we have a national narrative that says you haven't lost anything. And if you do long for your missing father, maybe you're homophobic. I mean obviously you're anti gay if you're saying that you want a mother. And so no longer is the our law, no longer will our national law participate in the gaslighting of these children. We are going to say, okay, nobody needs to go in and remove children from the home of two men or two women unless there's abuse. But the law is going to acknowledge that the children did not arrive into those homes without something being intentionally broken so that they could be there.

[C]

Yeah, well, and the same as when Roe got overturned, all that's really going to do is allow states to make the proper legislation. That's what we want, is state by state, put it back into your law to restore marriage to the institution it's supposed to be to protect children. Remove the uniform parentage sort of language that just says intended parent one and two and three and so on. And instead it needs to be mom and dad. Like have the language reflect reality. But like you're saying, we're not saying stormtroopers go in and grab kids out of homes and then what? Put them in the foster care system. It's an important distinction.

[B]

Yeah. And I know this is new information for some of you guys. You haven't thought much about it. Good news. We have everything that you need to know. You can go to GreaterThancampaign.com you can look at some of the difficult Q and A. Like we know some of the questions. But what about this? But what about that? Go to the Q and A section. We have worked to answer it. We've got videos from different influencers, from Megan Basham to Lila Rose to Abby Johnson to Virgil Walker to Andrew Walker. Different members of our coalition that are answering some of these difficult questions because we understand that there's a social cost to saying, I don't believe in gay marriage. We want want to make sure that you have the answers to back up if people do bring honest questions to you. So go to GreaterThancampaign.com and sign up. We'll just keep you posted about once a month of what's happening with the coalition. Jen, you want to wrap up by talking about our substack and how that is a resource, too. If you're having these challenging conversations, yes,

[C]

everyone go to them before us.substack.com, become a subscriber. We put out weekly resources. And then if you become a paid subscriber, you get additional benefits and access to everything we've ever posted. So definitely join us over there. Stay tuned because you're going to hear from Sam and I as we delve some more into the comments and stick around for the next segment.

[A]

If you'd like to comment on the show, email [e-mail] Once again, here's Katie Faust.

[C]

Hey everyone. Welcome to Here for the a Them Before Us podcast series where we dive into the comments and questions we get online and unpack the children's rights perspective we use to answer them. I'm your host, Jen, and I'm joined by Sam, and we are here for the comments. All right, Sam, so the big viral thing this week so far was as Katie and Josh talked about some viral videos of two dads who have used surrogates to get babies. And so many things popped off with that that we're going to talk about so many different comments and tweets. But I wanted to start with a message we just got that was directed to Katie's Instagram account and I will read it here. This woman said to Katie, you have a degree in Asian studies and Political science. What qualifications do you have to speak on the topics you do. I'm just curious as to why you choose to build a platform informing people on the dangers of children being raised in, quote, improper, unquote, households when your education is nothing relating to such. It seems counterproductive to have you as the spokesperson for the movement you're attempting to create when even your staff's highest qualifications in children's education is working with special needs children. That's a reference to me. That's so funny. I actually didn't see that the first time around. It seems irresponsible to build an entire platform that gives opinions of scientific issues such as IVF when not a single person in your program has in depth knowledge of the issue. I would accept you have. Sorry. I would accept you have child life specialists or at least someone with a background in psychology assisting you. I would expect you to, I think is what she meant to say. And I'll do Katie's response and then get your thoughts on it. And Katie was like, you're right. I don't have an educational background that would lead me to be recognized as any kind of expert in this field. I wish that somebody in the world of psychology, medical ethics, or with the background in sociology would have risen up to defend the non negotiable fundamental rights of children in the family. But they didn't. So it's left to a pastor's wife, stay at home, mom, former adoption worker and ordinary woman to study and read, research and write, to offer the kind of child defense that the professional world would not. Boom. Mic drop. I just sent that to her and then I just put her back on restricted. Because it's like that way their comments, their comments don't show up unless we want them to. I do that for trolls, you know. So what are your thoughts, Sam? I mean, none of us have any qualifications to do anything. So why are we doing this? What do we, you know, what do we answer? And someone's like, how dare you? Why are you talking about this?

[D]

They're right. What are we doing? What are we doing here? I guess we should just pack up, go home, huh? No, it's funny because it reminds me of like the whole debate of what is a woman? Where if you ask a liberal now, what is a woman? And they say, I don't have a biology degree, I'm not a biologist. And it's like, okay, but sometimes you can just see things with your own eyes. You know, sometimes like the human experience is enough to, to make declarations that like you don't have to have a four year degree in. And I would say that, like it's on, you know, it's common sense that like children have a mother and they have a father, no matter how you create them, whether it's ivf, whether it's surrogacy, whether it's whatever you want to do. They have a mother and a father. And we have seen over and over again through all of history that whenever you separate a child from their mother or their father, it's traumatic, it's sad, it's heartbreaking, and it affects them for their life. And it doesn't take a four year degree or an eight year degree to see that, to acknowledge it and to stand up for children having the right to their mom and dad. So that's what I would say. I just hate that they take everything and they. They try to make it sound like it's so complicated. It's not. It's not complicated. I'm a mom of two. My kids need me, and I'm. I'm not replaceable to them by another. A man, you know, or another person. I'm their mom.

[C]

What if it just a random woman walked in off the street, but she loved the kids. Quote, love is love. All they need is love. But rational people know that's not true. If your kids just got taken from you one day and handed to a random stranger who was perfectly nice, warm and safe, it would not be the same as having you there. And rational people can understand that without needing a PhD. But what I think so interesting about a comment like this is. We're living. This is 2026. We probably have historic low trust in all of the institutions. And I don't know if you've seen any of these sort of hilarious. Some of the intellectuals I follow. So what's his name? James. He does the new. Oh, gosh, I'm totally blanking. I'll have to add it in the notes later. But there's this guy who. He and this woman submitted a bunch of fake PhD, like, research papers to see if they could get them passed. And it was like homophobia in dog parks, like between dog breeds. And I'm not. I'm not joking. They did a series of these and they got them published. And this is like, close.

[D]

I didn't see this. I didn't. So funny.

[C]

His name is like, right on the edge of my mind. What is it? I keep wanting to say James Comey, but yes, I'm super blinking but no. So the point is, they got these peer reviewed, quote, unquote, PhD, like, oh, or PhD level or graduate level papers that we got peer reviewed and published. And you're telling me that unless I've also done that, I'm not trustworthy? And that's the difference is we're saying, anyone. Anyone listening to this, you can become an expert. Read the studies. Josh Wood, who's our executive director, does such a good job of reading and digging through these big studies. I'm not a stats person person. I'm not like a numbers person. Boring as heck to me. I can't make sense of it. Josh does such a good job of reading these studies, really breaking it down into an accessible way where you can read it and see the numbers Broken down and help tell that story. With the statistics and the studies, anybody can read these, though, and understand, wait, how did they come. You know, people say, same sex parenting, it's just as good. It's like, okay, well, where's the study you're using? And then they send you the study and you go to the part that says methods, and you see, oh, they recruited, you know, 10 lesbian couples from a gay pride event. And then they asked them with a survey, how's your parenting? And that's where the study came from. So anyone who can read that can

[D]

push back and jet like, we know, I'm sorry, but we've been doing long enough doing this long enough to know that they don't care about the studies. They don't care about the facts, they don't care about the stats. They literally are just mad that you don't agree with them and that you won't say what they want you to say. Because we have the studies, we have the facts, and anytime you give it to them, we have, we have written about, if anyone wants to go to our sub stack, we have everything just right there for you to check out, for you to see. These are the same people who won't even read an article about the topic they're passionate about, and they only read the title. And then that's what they base their views on. They won't even open up the article and read it and they'll send it to you and say, see, this is happening. But if you read past the title, it completely contradicts what, what's happening. So if they can't read past the headline, they're not going to be reading these studies. But that's the thing about our side is we do, we do read these studies, you know, and so I'm sorry, but like, to me, it's common sense. But even past that, we have the stats on our side, we have truth on our side, and we aren't shy about sharing it. And so if they wanted to take the time to learn, they could, but I just have a feeling they're not gonna.

[C]

Well, and additionally, lived experience became such a big thing from 2020 on. That's a big part of the critical theories is, you know, if someone's lived it, then they, their truth is like the supreme truth. And we're like, okay, we have the best data and we have the studies. Also, we have a bunch of folks with lived experience and people with a bunch of these different lived experiences as part of our staff and our volunteers and our fellow Advocates, kids and people who've shared their story with us and said, I was donor conceived. Here's all the ways that hurt me, here's the identity issues I had. This is why it's bad for kids. And we're like, okay, so now we have your lived experience and we read the peer reviewed studies. These things that you're, that folks are saying these are the highest forms of truth. Okay, we have both and they also, they agree with us. So we're just people who are helping put the things together, making a platform for it. We're not saying we're experts, we're saying I know how to read and I'm going to put it in a platform so you can read it too.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Okay. But let's transition a little bit to some of the commentary about the conservative backlash to these two guys that were showing this video laughing about the baby, calling for his mom, calling the baby homophobic. This guy, Brandon Stracha, did the hashtag walk away movement. So he was a Democrat. And I don't know if this was around 2020. He was like, things are getting crazy. I'm out of here. Okay, great, you're welcome. But I love Matt Walsh's take. He said, you know, these people have been conservative, quote unquote, for like 10 minutes. We're, we're not accepting lectures from you today. Like you've been wrong about everything and then you realize you're wrong and you start coming back and then you want to lecture us that we're wrong about stuff. He's like, maybe just sit down and listen for a while and learn that you're actually probably wrong about that too. But Brandon said about once a year or so, like Groundhog Day, the right has to go full retard for a couple days and do a factory reset back to 1992. Within about seven days, the systems reboot and we enjoy many uninterrupted months of normalcy until the next retard reset. It's a beautiful and natural part of our fragile ecosystem. Using the word retard is something they'll try to cancel you on unless they want to do it. And again, as someone who work with people with special needs, I don't go around calling people special needs retards. And I don't use the word myself either. But of course, you know, if you're calling the right people mean words, it's totally fine. But he's saying this because people on the right are against buying babies. That's us freaking out from, from them before us I wrote, believing a child has a right to both a mother and father that he and she came from is not an example of right wing extremism. It's just biology.

[D]

I just, I, I wasn't able to watch that video. I know what you're talking about and I've seen it everywhere on Twitter and I've seen everyone talking about it, reacting about it. So I know exactly what happens in the video. But emotionally I literally, I just can't handle it because to me it's just way too sad. And I'm sorry, but like it's, this is what I mean by you don't need a four year degree to just know things. I think just as a human being with the human experience, someone who had a mom, someone who had a dad, and I know that, that their unique value to me as a person. And then I see something stolen from a baby that was so important to me. And you know, again, as a mom, I picture those moments with my kids and you know, them saying mama and dada for the first time and it's so heartbreaking. And so it's just this idea that like the average person, not even a crazy right extremist, an average person will see the family broken up and see this kid crying for his mom and then a guy laughing in the kid's face saying, hahaha, you can't have your mom. And like, I'm sorry, but that's just the normal human reaction is, that's heartbreaking, that's sad. Something wrong is happening here. Something evil is happening here. Who is this man? Give this baby back to his mom. That's the normal person reaction. So again, I'm, I'm tired of apologizing for having like healthy reactions to things just because there are people who are so unhealthy and so unhinged in their brains that they can come across something so awful and think like, oh, that's normal, that's healthy. Like, no, it's not. We're not gonna pretend it is because it's wrong to like, you know, mention that it's not okay and say that it's not okay. So yeah, it's funny to hear.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. This guy called gay penguins responded to Matt Walsh talking about how it's bad to buy babies and bad to do surgery. And this guy said, yes, we know you in particular really hate the gays. No one's been, no one who's been paying attention is disputing your honorary Westboro Baptist adjacency. So again, they're trying to tie. You disagree with surrogacy and you don't want babies to be bought and sold. That means you're Westboro Baptist. You know, the people who have the signs that say horrific things and want people murdered and all that stuff. And I wrote this from the Venmo for us Twitter. I said, be very ready for the pre Obergefell Playbird playbook to make its cultural resurgence. Right. It's about to come back. Because if we really start pushing and making headway with being against surrogacy, they're going to pull out all the stops. I have to sneeze. LGBT ideologues will portray any resistance to what we've been seeing as bigotry and homophobia. But over and over again, we're going to bring it back to the real point, the natural rights of the child to his mother and father. And if you're one of us and you're them a forest advocate, we're not going to be calling people names. We're not going to be saying they need to be murdered and all those things because. And Katie talks about this, our goal is not to make the adults look like the victim that other people need to save them from us. Right? Don't make them the victim. I personally don't think we should necessarily do man on the street interviews where we're like kind of accosting them and calling them pedophiles. I. I just don't think it's helpful when that person then pops off and punches you in the face. Maybe you look better at the end of the day, but I think people who are more on their side look at that video and see. Oh, see, look. Cis white hetero guy is attacking gay people and he's make. He's. So they're the victims. See, I need to defend them. Even though I don't like surrogacy, I'm going to defend them now. We don't want that. They're not the victims. We're not attacking them. We're attacking ideas. And we're saying surrogacy is bad because it always harms children. It doesn't matter if it's mom and dad using a surrogate. It's always wrong, regardless of the adults involved. So final thoughts, and before we wrap it up.

[D]

I'm still stuck on gay penguins. I still picture this guy who works like a 9 to 5 and then he's on Twitter in his free time as gay penguins. I don't know why you'd name yourself that. Anyways. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I just, I think it all boils down to putting children's rights before the desires of adults and we're going to get a lot of pushback because the desires of adults are very strong. People want what they want. They think they deserve it. They think they're entitled to it. And there has to be somebody who points out the fact that like nope, rights come before your desires and that's us. And so we are going to get pushed back but we're, we're ready for it. So that's all my, my final thought. So basically that's all that we have for today. Thanks for joining us. We really do enjoy hanging out in the comments with you guys and reacting from a children's rights perspective. So that's pretty much it for today and we'll catch you next time.

[C]

Sam.

[B]

The views and opinions expressed in this broadcast do not necessarily reflect those of the American Family association or American Family Radio.