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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 Foust.
- [00:21]
B
Welcome to Them Before Us Radio. I'm your host, Katie Foust, founder and president of Them Before Us here with my executive director, Josh Wood. Joe, to hit some highlights in the marriage and family space that have caught our eye in the last week, but as always, we start out with a little bit of Bible time. And this time I wanted to talk about Esther chapter four, because Josh brought it up in a staff meeting yesterday and, you know, he pointed out that a lot of people know this chapter because of what Mordecai said to Esther after it was revealed that genocide had been planned for their entire people group. Mordecai went about the city mourning, wailing, tearing his garments, unable to be consoled. He goes to Esther, he says, girl, you gotta do something here. And she's like, me? Who's me? I can't do anything. I'll die. And of course, everybody remembers when he says, but how do you know that you were not put in this very position for such a time as this? And Josh, I wanted you to talk a little bit about the reflections that you had on that passage and the part of it that you feel like a lot of people miss.
- [01:26]
C
The part that stuck out to me. I don't know how many times we've read that verse. Right. In your whole life. It's like, for such a time as this, I got stuck on the part that says, but basically, if not, you help will come from somewhere else, but it might not come for you, but essentially your family may be in danger. Like, the Jews will be fine, but man, your house may not survive this. So there's like a couple of layers here. Number one, that we're not some irreplaceable part in God's plan, that we are active participants, we get called into it, and what a blessing that is to get to play a part in the redemption of the world. In this case, Esther getting to save her people. What a blessing. But Mordecai is like, yes, this is why God put you here. But he is God and he will come through another way if you don't. That's. There's almost like, I love that. I mean, that's the Bible in a nutshell. It's like this. You matter so deeply, and God will Also do it without you. Like, you are so capable and he will empower you to do great things. And also, I will make this donkey talk and these rocks worship if I have to. Like this. It's a dichotomy that both humiliates us and empowers us all at the same time.
- [02:47]
B
Yeah, great way to think about that. And truly, like, the question of, like, what's God's lane and what's my lane? Because we get into trouble when we confuse the two. When we think, I can step into God's role as savior, for example, or as the one that's going to control every aspect of certain situation or challenge that I'm in. You will err, you will slip into idolatry, you will destroy relationships if you move into God's lane, which is sovereign overall. But don't God to then do everything for you too? You know, there is a responsibility, there's a human aspect of working out our salvation, of like, enacting the plans that God has laid for us since the beginning of time, since, you know, he was knitting us together in our mother's womb. You know, whether you're sitting around, not sitting around, but when maybe you want to get married someday, well, there's a balance there. Like a God is sovereign. He is going to control things that he. That only he can control. But girl, you also need to, like, get out of your house, you need to tidy up, you need to go meet some guys. You know, there's like this aspect of any challenge that we have before us. There is sort of God's lane, his role, the things that only he can do, and then the things that he expects us to do as well. And we can step into that, right to his glory and for our good, or we can step out of it. And like Mordecai said, don't think that you're going to escape, you know, if you choose not to participate in what God has going on. So it was like, great for our mission at them before us, but also just a great reminder in general that God is sovereign, his plans are good, he would like to include us. But if, for whatever reason, we are too lazy, we are unaware, we're not biblically informed, or we're cowards, he'll still do it anyway.
- [04:32]
C
Yeah, that's the last part of that, is it is good for us to do it. Why is he calling us into it? Well, in this case, for Esther, he's not calling her into it because the fate of millions of Jews or thousands of Jews depend on her. As Mordecai said, God will find a way. It's his people. But God's inviting her in because this is going to be best for her. Her obedience is a means of saving her too. And how true is that? I think so much of the work that we do here at them before us, we can sometimes get your chest puffed out to say, I'm helping, I'm changing the world. I'm advocating for kids. We are a blessing to God's work. Instead of recognizing that this is all God's work and it's a blessing to us to get to be a part of it.
- [05:22]
B
Yep. Yeah, agree. Well, we're going to turn our attention away from 1000 BC or whatever this was written in towards 2026 Seattle, because I'll tell you, my city, we can't stop making headlines.
- [05:37]
C
It might be 1000 BC. I mean, this is about building walls and keeping the attackers out. I mean, that's old.
- [05:44]
B
I will say that we are so progressive, we are regressive up here. That is 100% true. And so this story, you know, that I saw, you know, kind of on snapshots on my sort of local news sources being played was, you know, there's some. There's an area, Seattle's Aurora Avenue. So this is the place where all the prostitutes hang out. And I don't go up there very much. I'm just. I don't have to leave my little part of Seattle very often. But when I do, I'm like, ah, these, these broken, broken people. Broken people everywhere. They, these women that just, just make my heart bleed. The kind of lives they must have lived to get them to that point. But the residents in that area decided to build a wall. They built a wall at the end of their street. And I'll tell you what, in Seattle, we have to get very, very creative about all kinds of things. How can you be creative if, since the city will not enforce the ban on having a giant broken down RV right outside of a park where lots of kids are playing and who knows what's happening behind the doors of that. And they're leaving garbage spewing everywhere. Garbage and who knows what other kind of substances we. Everyone gets really creative. They're like, oh, let's put giant iron potted crates that we can plant flowers in all along the parking strip so that nobody can get here. Oh, there's a homeless in camping outside of this store because we've got a flat. Let's instead put giant rocks there instead of grass. I mean, like, we're doing all kinds of creative things to solve the problems that the city refuses to solve in the name of compassion. So that's what happened at this neighborhood in Seattle. They built a wall. They built a wall because there were so many shootings on their street that they're like, look, you guys aren't going to take care of this. We're going to solve it on our own. And we're going to barricade our street in like, you just cannot drive up our street. And you know what? It worked.
- [07:30]
C
Well, you know what? There's always a calculation, right? That there is some political official, take the park, for example, who has looked at this problem and has had to make a calculation between what will it cost me to confront these misbehaving adults and if I don't, what will be the cost to the kid who just wants to play in the park? And all too often, we choose to prioritize the adult and what it will mean for us to tell them, you're a bad person, you are doing bad things, and we won't let you be out in public anymore doing this bad thing. So you're either going to go to jail or we're going to take you far away from here. But what you will not do is continue to ruin our. I've been to Seattle multiple times. It's very nice. It's a super pretty city. And to think we, because a couple of adults just want to do what they want to do, we're going to allow them to take. Think how. I mean, this isn't a nice neighborhood for sure, but there are children around that neighborhood. Think of how many of them now do not get to use that park because of a couple of adults. Why do we care more about what these people think? What they. How will they be offended by being told that they need to be removed? Why do we let that win over a kid getting to play in the park that we all paid for?
- [08:57]
B
It's a classic example of misidentifying the victim. And we talk about this a lot in our work at them before us. How is it that we've gotten to the place where we are buying and selling children in the open reproductive technology market? Why is we at the place where we are now legalizing gay marriage, even though it's a total departure from pretty much every culture, every religion, every country, all throughout history? Why are we at the place where we are seeing a subpar fertility rate and yet still promoting abortion? Like, how can all of those things go together? And the answer is, we're misidentifying the victim. Right. In all of these different cases, the victims are children. Children are paying the price. But who is the victim in all these conversations? Oh, it's the gay adult that can't have what they want. Oh, it's people that are single or same sex couples or people struggling with infertility that need to be able to buy sperm or egg on the open market. Oh, it's women whose career aspirations are going to be interrupted with an unplanned pregnancy. When you misidentify the. You get the wrong policy. And I'll tell you what, if Seattle is good at anything, it is misidentifying the victim. And so in all of these different scenarios, you know, these people had to shut their street off because there were daily shootings, shootings that were going through people's walls into the rooms where babies were sleeping. But obviously the baby's not the victim and the parents were trying to keep them safe isn't the victim. It is the brown criminal who's the victim. Right. So it is really important for us to properly identify the victims because then we can have the proper policies. And unfortunately, Seattle famously is incapable of doing that.
- [10:27]
C
Well, I think we saw that as a big inflection point with the immigration debate this past year that you had. Again, we can all debate how many people need to come into this country, and we can all agree they should do it legally. And I think we can all agree that immigrants have made incredible contributions to this country. But when we have an unbelievable number of unaccompanied teenage or young 20s males coming to this country, and you see those heartbreaking stories of them committing a crime and who pays, because we wouldn't step up to the plate and say, look, I don't hate immigrants at all. I think we should absolutely be pro immigrant, getting great families here who share our values, on and on it goes. But anyone who comes illegally, that's a crime. Anyone who commits violence, we're not going to apologize for being swift in justice. And actually, if you have come across the border illegally, that's enough for us to get you out of here before you do something like what we saw on the television all last year, which was young, innocent people losing their life. I mean, of course the media was quick to highlight every single one of those cases, but I mean, there was still a mother who lost a child because someone was here illegally. That's horrible. And the total reason we didn't address that was the optics. The politics of having to make one group of people Mad who are very pro unlimited immigration and one group that you know, want none of it to occur.
- [12:00]
B
So I guess the question is, you know, where are we going to build the walls? Because if the government won't do it for us, the people will do it on their own. You know, I have noticed in Seattle, just in my neighborhood, which is not this neighborhood, but we did have our precinct shut down, our police preaching shut down in the name of defund the police. When I got here, most people didn't have like giant six foot fen in their front yard. Those things go up all the time now. Like if the government is not willing to put up barriers to keep out criminals, whether that's a national border or whether that is putting people in prisons behind a barrier, people will have to erect their own barriers. People will have to protect themselves. So it's like do you want one macro barrier or do you want a million micro barriers that people are going to have to put up themselves? And so that's the thing. It's like there is a self interest here. People are going to protect themselves, they're going to protect their kids. And it's too bad because you want to talk about staying in your lane. Like we are supposed to be able to trust the government. We're supposed to be able to trust the police to keep us safe. Like I know a lot of people that when they were here, when we got here in Seattle 15 years ago, they weren't gun owners. The vast majority of my friends are now gun owners because we don't know if we can rely on the police to bring their guns. If somebody comes to our church or if somebody comes to our house or if somebody just pulls out a gun and starts shooting somewhere else in our world. So somebody has to do the policing. I really just think it should be the people that have trained and prepared for it and who have facilities to back it up.
- [13:31]
C
Well, I think I'm really grateful to live in a city in North Carolina where we do not have this problem. We did not see this come to our shores through Covid and through 2020. But what does, you know, frustrate us when we see out of state license plates trying to escape these places and then coming here and continuing to practice this type of misguided compassion that doesn't prioritize the truly vulnerable in our cities. The truly vulnerable being those people who can't vote, don't have a voice and want to use the playground and come here to continue to change our laws and change our policies. And again, like you said classic case of misidentifying the victim. Don't ever in these policy debates allow the adults to steal the spotlight. I mean, I think our work is so much a constant shift of reframing who is actually the one being victimized and where are the adults to defend them.
- [14:28]
B
Yep. This is what Rob Henderson calls a luxury belief, a belief that you're going to say with your lips because it sounds good and it earns you a bit of like moral credibility, but you yourself would never live by them. Right. You want other people to have to deal with the definition, the police or the breakdown of the American family, not you and your gated communities with your intact home so your kids can go to Harvard or Yale. We're going to talk about another luxury belief coming up in the next segment. Stay with us.
- [15:02]
A
Welcome back to Them Before Us on American Family Radio.
- [15:06]
B
Welcome back to Them Before Us Radio. I'm Katie Foust, founder and president of Them Before Us. Here with Josh Wood, executive executive director of Them Before Us, we're going to talk about a few more items in the marriage and family realm. We wrapped up the last segment talking about luxury beliefs. This idea of elites, typically progressive elites who like to promote ideas that sound good but do not do good, policies that they would never want to live by themselves, policies like defund the police. You know, people that say we don't need the police, we need social workers. But when it's their house that is under threat, they've got armed guards. They live in a gated community. You know, similarly, you have a lot of people, people like Gavin Newsom and his wife, for example, who are like the creme de la creme of progressive politicians. They have an intact marriage. Their children are never going to know divorce. They're going to make sure that their kids have every advantage. But you know what? They're going to preach, you know, sexual liberation to everybody else so that a lot of other kids have to grow up without fathers in the home. So I want to turn our attention to a story that came out this week that is another example of luxury beliefs. And it is this host, Alex Cooper, a girl, Alex Cooper, who hosts a podcast called Call Her Daddy. Now, I've never watched this, but I think it's just a lot about free sex. I think this podcast is all about just sleeping around what the kids call high body counts, girls that just have lots and lots and lots of one night stands or casual sex with whatever guy they're currently with. And that's what the whole podcast is about. Like Making yourself a sexual object for men to use. And of course, her audience is overwhelming young women. And so she is promoting what is arguably a luxury belief of, like, hey, go be free with your body. You can live just like a man. You need to be able to walk away from sex as easily as he can. You know, like, sexual desirability. That's the most important. Throw off all of the patriarchal ideas of saving sex for marriage. Nobody wants that kind of thing. Babies, they're just going to get in the way. Girl, you got to get. You got to fit into those new Lululemon leggings. And I mean, come on, you got to tour the world and find yourself and you'll sleep with whatever. Okay, that's. That is the luxury belief, right? That's the thing that she's promoting. Well, Alex Cooper, the host of Call Her Daddy, announced last week that she's pregnant with, I think, her husband. I think, is she married? Okay, so she's married and she's having a baby while messaging to her entire audience, don't get married. Don't have babies. Josh, your thoughts?
- [17:43]
C
Well, my thought is that she's worth tens of millions of dollars, has, I mean, plenty of money to. We all know money plays a huge part in making you look young and attractive. And so you've got a very wealthy, powerful, influential woman. Those are all high status markers. So she has the luxury of living a certain way, having a high body count. Because I do think, Katie, she does live some of the beliefs that she talks about. She does believe in free sex. She believes in hooking up with people with no commitment. I believe she's doing those things and has done those things. What is significant is she has the luxury of, at any given point, jumping off that train and finding a man who wants to settle down with her because she has all these other factors that a male will find attractive. And honestly, I'm so grateful that she was able to have a child like she was, that she didn't wait too long and have to go through ivf. Like so many people that are pushed on whether it's contraceptive or pushed just to get married later that they end up having trouble getting pregnant. So that's a blessing for her and how great that is. But it just struck me, I'm like, how many people are following you all the way down this trail who have normal jobs, have acquired a huge body count, have burned relational bridges, have caused themselves emotional trauma to make them less of a good partner to someone who, when they go out on a date, and they begin to share what their values are, which is no commitment, no attachment, have sex whenever I want, leave whenever I want, not share our finances. On and on it goes. The male goes, yeah, so what's my end of the bargain here? I don't like any of those things. And leaves them.
- [19:36]
B
And generally men aren't necessarily attracted to women with high body counts. They're fine with that as it relates to having a one night stand, as for having a hookup. But when it comes to actually wanting to marry somebody, women that have slept with a lot of guys often is not attractive to men. Here's another thing, like if you're sleeping around, much higher rates, especially for women of sexually transmitted infections, which make it, some of those make it harder to get pregnant. Some of that can actually impact your fertility. So she's preaching a lifestyle that is going to make it hard for her audience to have the kind of life that she's now celebrating, that she's now Instagramming about.
- [20:19]
D
Right.
- [20:20]
B
That she's now posting about. A lot of women Will Squander actually did an interview this week about a New York Times article about a woman who's 47 and pregnant, but it was because she desperately wanted a baby. She didn't really start trying until she was 35 because she was told, have sex, prioritize your career. You don't need to get married right now. And by the time she was 35, she herself said all the market advantage for getting married and having children takes place in your 20s. Once you get to be 30, you no longer have the corner. As it relates to the marriage market, it is very hard to find a man to get you pregnant or get married to you. And so Alex Cooper is actually living right on the edge of probability. She's living right on the edge of the thing that actually is possible for women. And like you said, Josh, probably due to her higher status, her wealth, her notoriety that allowed her to pull a guy when there's very few marriageable men in their 30s who are willing to settle down with somebody that has probably slept with dozens and dozens of guys.
- [21:27]
C
Yep, I think that's spot on. And it's unfortunate that she's not going to be there for all of those women to console them when they can't follow the path that she's followed.
- [21:42]
B
She's probably going to have a challenging marriage. We already have stats that show that if you have cohabited, if you've had sex before marriage, that increases the likelihood of divorce and it decreases the likelihood that you are going to have a happy marriage. We're not saying that it's not possible. You absolutely can have a wonderful marriage after you have cohabited or had previous sexual relationships. But by the numbers, it is going to be more challenging for those relationships to flourish in the way that both spouses probably want it, too. So we're going to turn to another story here. You know, we were just talking a little bit about this fabrication of being able to sleep around, prioritize career girl, boss it up, and then immediately turn around, get married and have babies. We're getting things wrong in the marriage and family space. You know, especially with messaging to young women that they're. They can put off marriage, they can put off children, they can use their body as a plaything and have it be completely unrelated to what happens in the future, especially if they want to get married and have children. That's one huge falsehood that we are selling people. But here's story number two. Simulated soulmates. How common are AI companions? Now, this blew me away. So what they found is that of these 2,000 young adults, one in seven people currently in a committed relationship. So these are people that are dating, right? This is somebody that would say, I'm in a dating relationship. So one in seven of the people who are in a dating relationships are also in a relationship with AI. They're also in essence, like having a digital affair with. With an AI quote unquote companion. So I just want to say, like, think about how horrifying this is it. First of all, that AI companions are a thing at all, that people are forming romantic relationships with artificial intel. They are forming relationships with an algorithm. That's really what they're doing. Some of them might have visual representations, maybe not. Maybe some of these are just people that are talking to an AI chatbot. But this is some kind of artificial intelligence, right? So, Josh, tell me your thoughts about this. You've got one in seven people that are in a dating relationship who have an AI side chick. So what's going on here?
- [24:17]
C
It depresses me. Like, this is a really sad thing. I guess we shouldn't be surprised. I actually did. Not to take a completely different or completely side trail here, but there's a researcher named Deborah so. And she wrote a book called Sextinction that talked a lot about just the. The entrance of everything from robots to AI into this sphere. Some physical tools and toys, some things that are just living on your phone as like a companion, and some integrated now where they can kind of do both. And I Mean, it was dark. She went, she went into chat rooms and talked to manufacturers and she even went behind the curtain a little bit to some of the people who've developed it and said, how do you feel about creating these things? And you know, they're all kind of ambivalent. Ah, it doesn't really matter. Adults are going to do what they want. I just disagree. I think we don't know the kind of harm we're doing to these individuals as they develop these deep relationships with these, what are, you know, just computers to get addicted and to get connected. I don't know if we can tell what that's going to do to someone socially long term. It's just such a new environment. I don't know if we have ever encountered anything like it. But I cannot imagine any of this is good.
- [25:43]
B
There was a chart that was shared over the past few weeks about the drastic drop in the number of 30 year olds who were married. So like in the 1970s it was like 80, 89% of 30 year olds were married. And in like our current day it was like 20, 25%. So we're already seeing people that are failing to form relationships in the window where it used to be the norm to get married, to be married, to not just get to the point where you're dating, but actually have dated enough to say, I now have found the one person that I'm going to settle down with long term. So add to that now that you have options where you never have to interact with human at all. You can have your sexual needs met online through porn. You can have your relationship needs met through AI companions. You can have your consumerism needs met by having things delivered right to your house. You don't have to go to a department store, you don't have to go to a grocery store. We can absolutely isolate ourselves from all human contact. And I think what horrifies me about this is even though they have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, they still want additional interaction from this AI chatbot or an AI robot or something like that. And then it shows this finding what happens when you're in an AI relationship in addition to your in person relationship? Well, it says it's associated with a 46% decrease in relationship stability. So you're more likely to break up and it's 40% decrease in the quality of your communication. And I'm like, I get that because I've been in a marriage for 28 years and I know that one of the big priorities for my husband and I, it's something that we actually have to, like, put on a list, talk to each other out the things that matter to you. We try to prioritize. Like, I share emotional information with him first. I'll tell my friends about it, I'll tell my family about it. But if I'm excited about it or worried about it, I want to tell it to my husband first. I want to prioritize him because that knits us together emotionally. When you're sharing that information with somebody else, you're losing an opportunity to build an emotional connection. And here's this robot interloper in the middle of your dating relationship. Of course it's going to decrease your relationship stability and quality.
- [28:02]
C
Yep. I think that adding that to our kind of culture and community has been one of the reasons. Not just easily accessible porn, having these terrible things in our phones and in our pockets and altogether free now, but now also making it somewhat lifelike through AI and then the combination of those two things where now AI is getting married up with some of these porn companies to make it more lifelike. I just think what we've done is make it so cheap, pervasive and lifelike that I don't think men are going in search of this as an alternative to a relationship. I just think disaffected men who don't believe in their chances out in the real world or lack ambition or have deadened their senses through addictions, through depression or through, you name the thing, they're just now making it a little bit better and they're just maintaining some of this, or pushing down some of this desire and ambition to go be, do, to try to go meet people. They're able to just suppress it enough that they feel comfortable right where they are not happy. But maybe they're just not as depressed as they used to be. Well, what that creates is a generation of unambitious, addicted, isolated men who are going to miss out on what is the most formative institution. The thing that gets you to sacrifice, to try harder, to do better, to be more disciplined, but also delivers you some of the greatest joys in your entire life. The reason you want to get up in the morning, which is family, children, kids, and finding a great woman. So that's what concerns me about this, is putting this into the marriage and dating and sex market, this accessibility. It just throws off the whole economy to where we're going to lose a whole section of young men to it, and they're going to miss that age where it was easy or easier to go get married or to Strive and try and fail and grow. And once you miss that window, I mean, it's going to be hard to get them back in the game.
- [30:14]
B
I want to hear your solution to this, Josh. What is the solution? I look at this and I say, okay, people don't know how to have stable marriages. We've got parenting failures, entire philosophies failing people as parents, either the hypercontrol or the gentle parenting where there's no correction and there's no guidance. We've got euthanizing our elderly or disabled. We've got manufacturing children into existence through reproductive technologies. We have failing to reproduce. And now we've got AI companions that are wrecking the few relationships that are actually forming. I mean, my answer is Christians have to show the world how to do this everything as it relates to relationships. Josh, send us out with some kind of like word of encouragement or word of hope.
- [31:03]
C
Well, I think that we gave up, it seems like a long time ago as a culture in calling bad things bad. It's like we gave in to this. Well, out in the real world though, outside of our churches, we just have to call everything kind of libertarian. Let them live, let them do what they want. And what that's led to is porn everywhere, gambling in our pockets, weed accessible. How are we better as a society for any of this? And it's all come back around to where now our culture and our communities too are paying the price. We're paying for the fatherless children. We're paying for the addiction. We're paying in crime. We're paying for all of these things downstream. So why aren't we allowed to go back upstream and say, actually as a society, we don't want these things anymore.
- [32:01]
A
If you'd like to comment on the show, email commentsembeforeus.com hey everyone.
- [32:08]
D
Welcome to Here for the Comments. A Them Before Us series where we dive into the comments and questions, we get online and we unpack the children rights perspective that we use to answer the questions. I'm your host, Sam, and I'm joined by Jen and we're here for the comments. All right, Jen, let's go. I figured we would dive into your post that went viral here for them before us, you were responding to somebody. I'll read their original tweet and then you can read what you said. Ronald Agaba Jr. He said same sex marriage is not a gay privilege. It's equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes like churches don't. And what did you say back?
- [32:53]
E
So I was telling Sam this a little bit before we started recording. I remember a video from a guy named Ryan T. Anderson, who I believe used to work at Heritage, the Heritage Foundation. I don't know if he still does or he does his own thing now. He has a bunch of kids, he's written a bunch of books, and he was doing a Q and A. And there was a gentleman who identified as gay, super polite guy, was basically saying, why do I not have the right to get married and not get the benefits that come with that, get the tax benefits and all these things. And Ryan answered him by saying, in essence, what I'm going to say in this tweet. But he basically said, you do have the right to get married. You do have the right to get married. You don't want to get married. And then Ryan defines it. And so I wrote it out this way on our them before us Twitter, I said, everyone has the exact same right to marriage. It's where one unmarried of age consenting male makes a covenant and contract with one unmarried of age consenting female. So you don't want to participate in marriage, so you had to use a special pleading, which is a fallacy, special pleading to redefine it to include your personal preference. And as of right now, that tweet has 24,000 views, a bunch of saves and likes, and a bunch of comments which were great. It wasn't like overwhelmingly hate or anything, but a lot of people disagreed. But that was kind of our working definition of marriage. I think it's pretty comprehensive. I think it's pretty good.
- [34:20]
D
Yeah, it is. I feel like that is marriage. I don't anything outside of that. I'm sorry, but it's not marriage. And I'm glad that you worded it that way. I think that was fantastic. I think a lot of people like, a lot of people liked it. Like, there is some comments, but I felt like I only read so far one of your responses to one of the comments. And it made me laugh so hard. So I'm really excited to dive into these and like, see what you were saying back to people.
- [34:47]
E
Yeah, one guy, the guy I said something to, he rewrote it and the only thing he changed is it's a person to a person. And I just kind of wrote a snarky reply fast. But I was like, good to know your mother meant nothing to you. Because the reality is, it's like when people talk about same sex marriage, they still want to keep it one and one. They're still saying it's only Two people. That doesn't make sense really. And they're still keeping that it has to be an unmarried person. Why. But they are changing it, that the gender is totally interchangeable. So it doesn't matter if a kid has a mom. It doesn't matter if a kid has a dad. So that was my response to him that, okay, so your mom means nothing. Like your dad means nothing to you if you don't care how marriage is defined, that's what you're in essence saying to children.
- [35:35]
D
Yeah, they're saying it like you said, it doesn't matter if it's a mom and a dad. It's just as long as it's two people. As long as the two people take care of the kid, the kid's fine. And that's just not true. We know that that's not true. Every kid inherently has a mom and has a dad. Okay? There's not any man on this planet that made a baby with another man. That hasn't happened ever, will never happen. So yeah, it's just not true. I see this Jellicoe Brig. They said, why explain it without referencing God or the Bible? Which fair. There is explanations without God in the Bible. But also it's just like, it's so funny how their worldview they just assume is the default where it's like, well, you're not allowed to mention God in the Bible. And it's like, well, I mean, we are because it's real, but okay, we'll play your game. And you said because men and women are different and because every child has one mother and one father. And that's what I was talking about before. So yeah, it's like that's where children come from, guys, a mom and a dad.
- [36:40]
E
Right. And this was from the them before us account. So I'm intentionally trying to leave God in the Bible out of it in, in sort of if I'm just presenting something, but I would get a lot of replies about this person said, marriage was invented before your Christianity. You don't get to own it. And so the reply was, sure, it was invented by biology. So if you don't care about Christianity, and that would have, wouldn't have happened until Jesus came anyway. So even for a Christian, there's a lot of time where God was intersecting with people before Christianity. And it's like, okay, yeah, marriage existed before, quote, Christianity, God instituted when he created human beings, made a male and a female. But if you're arguing from an evolutionary perspective, you still can't get to same sex marriage it doesn't continue the gene pool. It doesn't do anything for human flourishing or for society. So if you're just arguing that people can do whatever they want sexually, it's like, okay, but that's not the best for humans. It's not the best for civilization. So really, no matter what argument we look at it from, add God, add a different religion, it doesn't matter. It still never leads to human flourishing.
- [37:51]
D
Especially for children. They are always the. They get the butt end of everything. Like, they're the ones who are the main victims of what happens when you pretend that marriage is something different than it is. You know, another person, they put, gosh, they just love their memes, don't they? They had like this, like, I don't know, diagram of marriage equals. And then basically what they did is in the Bible, it describes a lot of different types of relationships. And so they put all of the relationships, like polygamy and, you know, different things like that. And so they're saying like, hey, because the Bible has these other relationships in here, that means that it's good or moral or okay, and that your Bible prescribes it. And that's what we would say is like, there's a difference between prescription versus description. So the Bible is also just like a history book as well, where it's telling you what's happening. It's not saying everything that we're describing is what God has planned for us. And they specifically go into detail about the differences in what God specifically has planned and the design that he has. So, like, it's just funny. Like, it's like, okay, tell me you didn't read the book assignment without telling me to read the book assignment. Like, you're trying so hard, but.
- [39:02]
E
And this.
- [39:03]
D
Yeah.
- [39:03]
E
This graphic has been around for over a decade because I remember seeing it ten years ago, and I had a link at the time that was the perfect it. Someone had already gone through every single one and rebutted it perfectly. That I could just always link whenever I saw the graphic and someone commented on this. It. Because it has examples. Man plus wives and concubines, man plus woman plus woman plus woman, rapist plus his victim. Okay? And these are all described in the Bible. And this person is saying, oh, see, that's how marriage is. You want biblical marriage. It's this. And it's like two things. When a Christian says biblical, they don't mean occurs in the Bible. That would be, like, historical or it's a matter of record. When a Christian says biblical, we're Indicating there's been a command for it or God's approval for it. Not like when Moses. Jesus says, Moses was allowed to divorce. You guys were allowed to divorce because of the hardness of your hearts. And Jesus was kind of saying, and I'm here now, and there's a new. A new way we're going about it now that is hearkening back to the original design of it. I talked to high school kids last night and I said, how was marriage defined in the Bible? And they talked about, you know, in Genesis. And I was like, well, I'm not Jewish and I don't. If I don't care about the Old Testament, do I have to worry? Does it matter what the Bible says about marriage? And someone was like, wait, didn't Jesus talk about it? It's like, yeah, Jesus defined marriage. And people say, Jesus never said anything about same sex marriage. He didn't say anything about homosexuality. And you're like, you're right. When he defined marriage, he didn't mention same sex relationships. You're totally right. He left it out.
- [40:46]
D
Yeah, well, and it's funny, I get that a lot with, like, when I debate about abortion, they'll say like, oh, the word abortion was never in the Bible, or Jesus never talked about abortion. And it just makes me want to say like, okay, so is it okay if I hit you with my car? That was never discussed. Pretty sure. The Bible never says you can't run over anyone with a car. But you know what the Bible says? The Bible says you can't murder people. So it's really just about like, it doesn't matter what method you choose to do that.
- [41:10]
B
You're.
- [41:10]
D
That's banned.
- [41:11]
B
That's not allowed.
- [41:12]
D
That's not acceptable. This other person, Sean Wilkinson. Sean Wilkinson, did it stop? I can't hear you.
- [41:22]
E
Sorry, I'm muted.
- [41:25]
B
Oh, okay.
- [41:26]
E
I'll edit that part out. I was just gonna say we have to take the logic from one thing to the next. You know, don't murder people would mean don't hurt them with your car. Even though God didn't mention cars. When I was just gonna mention this one about someone said, is that what happened with Jacob and Leah? And then my response was, you mean where her father punks Jacob into 14 years of labor to get his harder to marry off daughter married? We wouldn't say that's ideal marriage policy. No. You know, it's like, we agree that is not a good representation of what we want.
- [41:58]
D
Yes, yes. And then this Sean Wilkinson, he said, yeah, you guys lost this argument. In the 90s, the world has moved on. And he said, I think you guys were saying that about Roe v. Wade too, weren't you? Or something like that. I think that's so funny. I always. When people say, like, oh, you'll never overturn gay marriage. And it's like, that's what you said about Roe v. Wade, and look at us now.
- [42:20]
E
So, no, it's my. It's one of my favorite mic drops. There were a few people who claimed you guys are just like the racists in the 60s, which I was. Again, I'm like, you mean the democrats in the 60s? The government? Jim, I didn't know this as a teenager. I assumed Jim Crow was people being evil toward each other, which is, in a sense. But Jim Crow meant the state was forcing you to have separate spaces. You weren't allowed to marry someone of a different ethnicity. You weren't allowed to serve. So you, as a person could say, their money is as good as anybody's. I want everybody's money. The money's green. I want it. But you were being forced by the government not to serve people, which is interesting. That happened with COVID You had to have vaccine or the papers or whatever. You were commanded by the government not to serve people based on different status or ethnicity. That's what Jim Crow was. It wasn't just people deciding they wanted to be racist, which of course there were, but it was the government forcing you with the sword to be racist.
- [43:24]
D
I was like, which is crazy because, like, it's funny that the same side that, like, that's. The Democrats were the ones doing that kind of stuff, but it's also the same side that's saying we should give them more power.
- [43:37]
E
Right?
- [43:37]
D
I'm like, actually, we learned this lesson, you know, back when we were trying to overturn you guys. Like, we need less power in the government's hand, not more power. No, thanks. I don't trust him for a minute.
- [43:48]
E
And I mean, I learned this line, the accusations of racism, that being against same sex marriage is the same thing as being against an interracial marriage. I remember Dennis Prager said this to Perez Hilton on, I think CNN or something again, a decade ago. He just said, a black man and a white man are really fundamentally not different at all. The amount of melanin in your skin is the only real, like, biological difference. And. But a man and a woman are different, are so different from each other. It goes all the way down to cells at the cellular level. A man and woman are different. And then a California Law will pass that a board has to be 50% men and 50% women, acknowledging somehow they're different. But then when it comes to marriage, Katie says, this was the one institution that gets it right. It's 50. 50. You have one of each. It's. It's gender balance. And now you guys want to redefine that one and say it doesn't matter.
- [44:48]
D
What happened to equal representation? We just demand equal representation in marriages.
- [44:53]
E
All right?
- [44:53]
D
That's all we do here.
- [44:57]
E
What's another good one here? A gay person shouldn't be forced to marry a straight person. And I said, what's your definition of marriage? And this guy said, it's between two consenting adults. And I said, you just said two, and now you're saying who can and can't marry? So are you a bigot? And the person was like, oh, you're right. No, it can be any number.
- [45:17]
D
And then I said, are you serious or being sarcastic?
- [45:20]
E
Oh, I think he was like. He recognized his logical flaw is, you're right. If I'm restricting it to two people, I am being a bigot against poly. And then I said, would you cap it at 10, 20? How many people can get married? And he said, he wouldn't cap it. The government has no right to dictate who can and can't get married. And then I said, well, you're describing an orgy, not marriage. You're not defining any sort of significant relationship. You're just saying a bunch of adults who want to sleep with each other. Why should the government approve it? Like, what's the benefit there?
- [45:52]
D
Yep, yep. Yeah. Someone said, you sure enraged the rainbow with people with this one. Then you said, we love the engagement. You put John Cena eating Fruity Pebbles. It's fantastic.
- [46:06]
E
I always think about, like, eating it for breakfast. This is another thing that's, like, a little off topic, but so many people will bring up Trump or Epstein. And I love using Grok as an instant fact check. And this person said, y' all changed the meaning of rapist and pedophile to President of the United States. So I don't know what the problem is here. And I just asked Grok, which is the fact, you know, the search engine, is it accurate to refer to President Trump as a pedophile and a rapist, or are these Democrat talking points with no proof? And it said, yeah, there's no criminal convictions for either of those things. These terms are partisan rhetoric, not settled legal fact. And it's like, bye, Mic drop. Moving on.
- [46:47]
D
I love it, too. That happens a lot with the pro abortion conversation, where it's like anytime you're like, is a fetus a human being or is it a random clump of cells? Or when does life begin? Or like, again, it's like these people, Grok is left leaning. ChatGPT is left leaning. So if even it can, like, admit these facts, like, it's crazy to me that they'll still just ignore reality and say no.
- [47:14]
E
Totally. Well, we have a few minutes left. You know, if you want to get the resources, like the longer form resources. These are short form resources. If you go online, you look at the comment section, you get little bites of what we talk about. But if you go to Substack, you're getting the full picture. You're getting up, you know, five ways to talk to a loved one who identifies as lgbt. We just wrote one about why poly relationships are not good for kids and we have to write one about cohabitation because I was arguing with someone in the comments about they thought everyone should go sleep together and live together before marriage. That is bad for you, it's bad for your marriage, it'll be bad for kids. But if you want all the resources, go to thembeforeus.substack.com and for myself and Sam, thanks so much for joining us on here for the comments.
- [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.