In this episode, I interview Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, an economist, a writer, and a Catholic social conservative. She is the president and founder of the Ruth Institute, a non-profit organization that defends the family and exposes the harms of the sexual revolution. We discuss her critique of the three main ideologies of the sexual revolution: the contraceptive ideology, the divorce ideology, and the gender ideology. We also explore the assumptions and contradictions of these ideologies, and how they affect society, marriage, and the human body. Tune in to hear Dr. Morse’s insights and arguments on these important topics.
TRANSCRIPT: Dr. Morse, welcome to Brave New Us. Thanks for having me on, Samantha. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yes, thank you for being here. Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to be doing the work that you're doing through your writing and at the Ruth Institute?
I'm a cradle Catholic who's been a lapsed Catholic for about 12 years. During that period of lapse, I was married, divorced, had an abortion was pretty much a full participant in the sexual revolution, you could say. And then I, then I remarried.
And along the way, what, you know, what people would normally say you were doing is I was going to college, got a PhD in economics, started teaching at the university level. My first, my first teaching job was at Yale University. Then I went on to teach at George Mason University. And by that time I was cohabiting.
You know, I cohabited with both my husbands. So I know from, I know from experience that the data on Cohabit, cohabitation not working. I know from experience that that data is true. So anyway I have a little air of authenticity about some of the things that are, you know, I've tried all these hair-brained things that I write about.
But anyway when, when it got to the point where I was ready to, to get tenure. I said, you know, it's time for us to start a family. And so, I had it all planned out that we were going to get pregnant in May, and I was going to have the baby right then in the spring, and I'd take care of the baby during the summer, and go back to work in the fall, and I would never miss a day of work.
Because that's what women did in the 80s and 90s. That was the, you know, I knew a lot of academic women, and that was pretty much what all of them did. They never missed a day of work, any of them. It was like a sign of like a badge of honor, you know. And so imagine my surprise when the baby did not arrive during the month that I had set aside for it, you know, in my, this great complicated plan that I had, you know and so that infertility experience is worth mentioning on this program in particular.
because you can't say to me that I don't know what I'm talking about. I've been through that experience and I know it to be a miserable experience, you know, and for me it was a whole spiritual crisis and brought me back to the practice of the faith. You know, so I like to say that I left the church over sexual issues, because I thought the church was out of touch, and yada yada yada.
But then, after living the world's way for a while, it became clear that the church was right, at least on one subject at a time. And by the time it was all over, I figured out that the church had been right all along, pretty much about everything, you know. And so the infertility experience was a big part of that.
How we resolved our infertility was in 1991. We adopted a little boy from a Romanian orphanage who was two and a half years old when he arrived. And then six months later we gave birth to a baby girl. And so we had, like, like I like to say because of who I because my PhD is in economics I don't think we mentioned that very nerdy sort of feel right.
Nothing sloppy like right very nerdy. Statistics oriented, very empirical kind of thing, and my husband's an engineer, you know, so we're both kind of, I have this kind of science, you know, scientific, nerdy, data driven kind of mindset, right, and so I like to say that what happened to us is that we had a controlled experiment in our house, you know, that, and, and the nature of the experiment is that, you know, if you were willing to see it, you could see that kids really need their parents.
You know, I mean, kids really need their parents, especially when they're little. And so, you know, there for, for quite a few years, we were completely preoccupied with taking care of the kids. And I eventually quit my job. That's a, that's a whole nother story. Ended up doing part time work. I was, I was a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford for a number of years.
And basically, I went in there, when I went in there for that job, I said, listen you know, I can't work a full time job anymore. I'm done with academic life, but I can do a research job, and I think I can work about a quarter time. I think that would be realistic for what my family's needs are and stuff like that.
And the guy said, Whoa, this is John Razium, who is also a labor economist and who knew me by reputation and everything. He said, Well, this is the easiest job interview I've ever had. I'm hiring you right now for a quarter, you know, a quarter of what I think your salary would be. And boom, you know, we were both happy, you know, and it was an exchange of brand names, basically between me and the Hoover Institution.
Yeah, and economists really talk like that, exchanging brand names. Anyway so those years, there were a period of some years, Samantha, where my primary focus was the children. And the writing that I did was on the, was secondary, you know whenever I had time, I did it, I did a few lectures, not a huge amount, you know, and it was always in consultation with the family and the family's needs.
And, you know, that was a period of time and what do we call it, like a season of your life, you know, that was a season where the kids came first and my husband came first. And the, the job was, you know, whatever, whatever, that would happen whenever. Sounds very similar to the season I'm in right now. And it's, it's perfectly, it's, it's it's a perfectly wonderful way to think about it.
And back in the early days of feminism, we were all being told, you know, you must compete with the men. You must be equal to the men, which means you must be equal to the men at every moment in your life cycle. You know, you're never going to have a baby because men don't have babies. I mean, the whole thing is set up for people who don't have babies, you know but, but.
As an economics person and a labor economics person, I figured out pretty quickly that that couldn't work, you know, that that wasn't right. Women really are authentically different. And back then, a lot of people were still willing to say that men and women were authentically different. It wasn't you weren't going to be happy, you know, I always knew that I wanted motherhood, you know, and I could, I could see you wouldn't be happy if you were trying to force yourself into that.
So anyway, just a little bit of a long winded. Sorry, but I think each of these little parts are, are, are relevant, you know. So, so yeah, I was taking care of the kids. That was primary focus. And I started writing about the family. I quit writing about labor economics. I quit writing about economic history.
That all just kind of went to the side because that's what, those were the fields I had been teaching in and stuff. But I came to see, it just became really clear that kids need their parents. And that society needs mothers to do what only mothers can do. And what only mothers can do is to, is to bond with the child.
And because, you know, our little boy had all of his attachments completely disrupted. Right? And, and that's completely pathological. You know, you can't just pop kids in daycare and expect them all to thrive. It's, that's just not, that's just not realistic. So I started writing on those kinds of themes and basically it got out of control and turned into the Ruth Institute.
A short version. Yeah. But, but, but structurally how it happened is that around the mid 2000s, you know, 2005, we, we were foster parents for about three years in there when our family outgrew doing foster care. And our kids were teenagers and, you know, starting to go off to college and that kind of thing.
Like, okay, I could be doing something more, you know, a little bit more structured and stuff. But I decided to, to start an institute that I could direct so that I could control what I got to talk about and how much I got to work and, you know, all those kinds of things. So that was the beginning of the Ruth Institute on my dining room table in San Diego in 2008.
Beautiful. Thank you for, for sharing your story and your journey with us. Really appreciate that. And I think we're going to draw on, you know, learn about how some of those things built into your really your expose of what you call the sexual state as we move forward here. So when, when you adopted. Did you anticipate you know, some of the trauma and the wounds or were you surprised or maybe a little bit of both by the depth at which your son needed, needed that attachment and that bonding, having not had it in his earlier years?
Oh, we, we were in no way, Samantha, I can tell you. And this was right, January of 1991 is when we did this. So if you think about what was going on then, we were among the first people to adopt from Eastern Europe after Eastern Europe opened up after the fall of communism and stuff. Right. So there were quite a number of professional class couples, you know, sort of middle aged couples who had postponed childbearing and stuff.
There were quite a number of us in the Washington, D. C. area. who were similarly situated, adopted Eastern European kids. And that, and when the kids arrived, they all had the same set of problems and none of us were ready for it. I mean, I can honestly tell you that none of us were really ready for it. And so we kind of banded together and then you're looking around and going, Oh my gosh, they're dealing with all the same, the same thing.
There's something structural here. It's not that my kid is freak. This is, this must be the norm of what happens, you know, when a child is left alone in the way that these kids were left alone. And so there were, there were some people who. Did some some serious study of it. You know, there were a number of professional, professionals in child development stuff who went over and looked at what was going on and so on.
And they actually came up with a new diagnosis, Samantha. They called it institutional autism. Wow. Yeah, because they saw so many kids who were, you know, who were like, you know, just Had these, this kind of isolation behavior and headbanging and all this type of stuff and they, and they hypothesized that those kids were, they had these autistic symptoms, but they weren't born autistic.
You know that, that the neglect, the negligence and there's a, there's a, there's a reason for that, but I wrote about in one of my books that That, that they're part of the brain is developed by being in relationship with your mother, you know, that you don't realize it and this is, this is an amazing miraculous kind of thing that we don't realize things we do naturally.
We rock the baby we hold the baby we look at the baby while we're nursing we're looking in the eyes and so on. In that, in those things that we do naturally as moms, we're helping the baby's brain to develop, and it's the part of the brain that governs your ability to be in relationship. It's the limbic brain.
It's, it's not, it's not the frontal cortex that, you know, balances checkbooks and plays chess and stuff. It's the part of the brain that can, that can look at a face and recognize whether the person's comfortable or not. Or, you know, those type of social things that we, that we do know how to do and that some people are impaired.
That's what develops. When you're, when, when we're here like this, you know, that's what we're, you know, just rocking that baby. That's, that's what we're helping them learn, helping them be. We're helping them develop that. So it's not even that you're teaching them. You're not teaching them to be attached.
You're not teaching them to have a conscience. You're, you're cultivating the very, I don't know what you'd call it, the hardware, you know, the, the, the ability. Yeah. To do that. And if you have a lot of people who don't have a conscience or who can't be social, you're going to have a problem in society. So my, my social science training, you know, kind of my antenna kind of went up on this, like, Oh my gosh, you know, we've got all these kids who will do anything they can get away with.
You're not going to be able to sustain any kind of society like that, because we're all counting on people to control themselves. Right. Well, I've been wondering about that in, in sort of maybe I diluted broader way, but how much of the way that we mother and, and are doing this a little bit less, or at least the eye contact and things less when we're more distracted in society and paying attention to screens, I have to think that that, that maybe has a little bit of an effect on it.
the way that we relate to each other. But it kind of goes into the questions that we want to talk about in this the loneliness of our society. If we want to start there, in your book, The Sexual State, you open by discussing the misery of modern life. And you begin with the words of Mother Teresa.
There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread. But there are many more dying for a little love. It really says something that the woman who ministered to the dying in Calcutta would look at us and feel pity for the poverty that we find ourselves in. Can you explain how you see this misery or this dying playing out in our society?
I gather now that there's a whole field called loneliness studies. You know, if you can imagine, you know, people studying the problem, you know, the problem of loneliness, and I can't say I know a whole lot about that field, but, but it is a sign of the times. You know, that by, by breaking down the family, we're breaking down the most primal bonds between people.
The bond between the mother and the child, the bond between the mother and the father, you know the bond between brothers and sisters. Well, people don't even have brothers and sisters, you know. The, the, the things that we've been doing in the name of freedom or fun and freedom, you know, that's the sexual revolution promises is fun and freedom.
It hasn't panned out, you know, it really hasn't panned out and it's left people alone, it's left people isolated, left people angry, it's left people cynical, unwilling, unable to trust, you know, and, and when you really think about those primal bonds that take place in infancy and, and how little regard we have for that, you know it's not surprising that we have a lot of kids that are coming unglued, you know And you go on to argue that the state needs the sexual revolution and vice versa.
Can you explain the relationship between the state and the sexual revolution and how they rely on each other? This is the thing. You know when I started the Ruth Institute, I thought I was going to young mothers, young women, about why it would be 20s and that they didn't have to wait until they had tenure.
Or made partner in the law firm. That's what I thought I was going to be talking about. But something happened on the way to that, and that something was Proposition 8. Which was the, the ballot initiative in California defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. And I got involved in that campaign and the Ruth Institute got involved in it, which was not what I intended but it was taking place like right on my doorstep and I didn't feel that I could sit it out because I could see that it was going to be damaging to children.
And it was going to end up having, you know, a whole cascade of consequences, you know, of the kind that nobody had been thinking about. I finally figured out what was going on, you know. And what I think was going on is that people wanted to redefine marriage because in their minds they had already redefined marriage.
And so I came up with the things that are in the book, The Sexual State. There's a sort of a three part. Description of what I mean when I say the sexual revolution, you know, this is what I mean I mean three things number one that a good society should do everything possible to separate sex and babies Okay, so you should be able to have all the sex you want without ever having to worry about having a baby sex is normally and normatively A sterile activity.
That's what we're all socialized to believe is true. And that, that's a good society. And if you have to worry about having babies all the time, that's somehow defective. You know what I mean? So, I refer to that as the contraceptive ideology. And it includes abortion. It includes contraception. It includes those kinds of things that are, that are And pornography grows out of it, because pornography wouldn't really be quite possible.
Unless, unless you had this idea that it was always sterile. So that, that's one part is the contraceptive ideology. The second part of the sexual revolution is that a good society should separate both sex and babies from marriage. So that there's no necessary connection between marriage, sex, and babies.
Right. And I refer to that as the divorce ideology. Because what it's saying basically is that You can switch your sex partners as often as you want. And nothing particularly consequential or bad is going to happen. The kids will be fine. The kids are resilient, see. That's the divorce ideology. And then the third part is, is what I call the gender ideology.
A lot of people call it the gender ideology. It's the idea that the, the sex, the sexual nature, the gendered nature of the body, the male, the sex of the body is not particularly substantial. And we can overwrite it if we want to. And in fact, we probably should overwrite it if we want something important like equality or personal autonomy or something like that.
And so the early phases of feminism had elements of that because they were telling us that we should live the way men live. That was the key to happiness. Now it's advanced even further to say that, you know, Your body is so insubstantial you can just erase your body and come up with a new body basically, you know, the sex nature of the body is not, is nothing important, you know, and so if you take those three things together, you really already radically redefined what marriage is, you know, so now it does, it's perfectly okay to say two men can marry each other because, you know, you've already eliminated all the things that were, were male and female actually still Substantially matter to something, you know, so, so the reason the state is so involved in that is because the ideology of the sexual revolution is utterly irrational and completely impossible.
You can't make a society where sex doesn't make babies unless it's totally totalitarian and you ripped everybody's, you know, bodies completely apart and everything else, you know, and, and, and kids actually do need their parents. Right. Shocker. Shocker. Yeah. And their own parents, right? Their own parents to be personally caring for them.
Body matters. The sex of the body matters. It matters in some very substantial ways, which is not to say that you have to be rigid about sex roles. You don't. There's a lot of ways to be a man. There are a lot of ways to be a woman, but that doesn't mean that the body is unimportant. You know, the sex of the body doesn't matter anymore.
But isn't that interesting, the way that. That's been taken apart, and it's almost like now, it's, there aren't a lot of ways to be a woman or a man, it's, you have to fit into these stereotypes, and if you don't, then you have to change your body to match whatever stereotype it is that you want to project.
In the world, which is another way of saying that the body itself is what matters, you know, very confusing, you know, and, and that was a hard one to figure out because the same people who say that the sex of the body is insubstantial are saying that, you know, that, that, that That to be gay is an immutable trait.
You can never change your sexual orientation, but you can change the sex of your body. Okay, think about that to figure out how that works in somebody's mind, you know, and because sexual orientation itself presupposes the sex of the body. Right. If I'm a lesbian, that means I strongly prefer a female partner.
That means the sex of both of our bodies is really relevant, you know. So, this, yeah, it's, it gets very confusing, but I think the way to make it make sense is, is to see that what's underlying both of those positions is the idea that the sex of the body can be somehow overwritten. So, there's nothing natural about.
A woman having sex with a man that's optional, you know, and there's nothing natural about you being a woman that requires you your essence. Samantha might be that you're really Sam and not Samantha. And therefore you can change, you know, but, but that's what that's what holds it all together. So the point is, the point that I'm getting at here and the point of the book the sexual state is that the ideology of the sexual revolution people are.
They're very, very attracted to it. They're very committed to it. They have convinced themselves and everybody around them that this is a good society. We absolutely have to have this justice, equality, yada, yada, yada. And yet it's impossible. It's completely impossible. So you have to keep propping it up, you know, and you have to keep pumping propaganda out at people.
So it requires a lot of power. It requires a lot of propaganda. And the people who are in the center of it and who are running it, they've empowered themselves in a certain way, right, because they get to, you know, kind of control all of that. But, but it's not really sustainable. Whereas the contrast set, and this is a good time to mention this, you know, that the contrast is Traditional Christian sexual ethics, which is Catholic sexual ethics, okay, because right now nobody else is holding the flag.
We're the last guy standing holding a flag, you know. At one time, it was the common heritage of everybody. And there's still plenty of people across the spectrum who, who believe at least in part of it, you know, and that's, then those people follow me all the, all day long, you know, I have a lot of non catholic followers.
But but, but, but the contrast said is that the traditional Christian sexual ethics is sustainable. It's a challenge because our impulses say I want to have sex with whoever I want and I don't want anything bad to happen. And so these people selling that. That's an easy sell, right? It's harder for us to say, no, you have to keep your flies in.
No, you can't do this. You can't do that. No, your kids actually need you. Right, I think it was Chesterton who said Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. Right, that's right. There's a lot. So, I mean, the sexual revolution is intrinsically what's the word I'm looking for?
Intrinsically seductive. It's telling people you get to do whatever you want, and nothing bad will happen. And if something bad happens, it's somebody else's fault. So, that's very appealing. But, but, after you've lived with it for a while, you go, wait a second. Wait a second. I, I know this isn't right. You know, I, I think a lot of people, a lot of people end up on my doorstep because they figure out some part of this isn't right.
You know, they're uncomfortable in some way. And you figure out this isn't working. I've been kidding myself and these other people, you know, they're not really there for me when the whole thing falls apart, you know, right? I mean, look at the detransitioners, you know, everybody loved them when they decided to change the sex of their body.
And when they go, Oh my gosh, what have I done? And they try to get away from it. It was all those friends, everybody, you know, that, that, that kind of a pattern. So that's what I mean when I say the sexual evolution needs the state. because the state props it up. And, and at this point, the, the people in power inside the state are counting on different parts of the sexual revolution to, to reinforce their ability to, to have power within society.
Right. Can we can we dive a little bit deeper into that? So is there one or the other of these ideologies that you think is more foundational to the others, or do they sort of exist in tandem with one another? Well, they're definitely interlinked and they definitely reinforce one another. You know, I think that's part of what's behind your question.
There's one way in which I think one of them is foundational though. And that is if you, if you look at things historically. A tremendous amount of the money and the influence to keep this whole ship afloat has come from the people who think there are too many people in the world, and who have spent billions of dollars, literally billions of dollars, convincing people that they're doing a good thing by not having any kids.
Mm hmm. Right? Right. You know, from the, what we would call the sociological side of things. I think that's actually the most of, I think the contraceptive ideology in its population control form is, is really, really important. I, I think you can't overstate it. And I think it's important to say that and for people to grasp that, that without, because there are a lot of people, a lot, there are a lot of Catholics, just a lot of people generally, who are like, this whole transgender thing is completely out of control.
Where did this all come from? You don't want to look back too far because they stumble over something they're attached to, right? But I would really encourage people to keep looking back, you know, to keep looking deeper into what's generating these things, you know. Well, yeah, because in some ways the idea that you can change your body and make it do things or not do things you don't want it to do, that that comes from the idea that we can, as women, turn off our fertility.
So if we can turn off our fertility and make our bodies mimic those of men, which do not bear children, well, what else can we do with medical technology to manipulate the way that our bodies function? Makes a lot of sense. That's right. That's right. And you know, we had a conference a couple years ago where there was a guy talking about transgenderism.
This is our friend Brandon Showalter, who's done some of the best investigative reporting on, you know, talking to the parents of trans kids. These parents are in agony. But anyway, Brandon's up there and he's saying, you know, This is the only branch of medicine where somebody walks in with a perfectly healthy functioning endocrine system, and the goal of the treatment is to disrupt a perfectly healthy endocrine system.
So I'm sitting there in the audience, and there's another lady in the audience who I know is an NFP instructor, a natural family planning instructor. And I looked at her, and she looked at me, and in the same moment, we both had the same thought. It's like, Whoa, Brandon, what do you mean? The fact is, women go in and get birth control all the time.
Right. They disrupt their healthy, functioning endocrine system. To achieve a social goal, you know, we have a social goal in mind and we're just gonna do whatever to our endocrine system to achieve that goal. And, and going back to when we're talking about following the money, my, my mother is not Catholic.
I was a convert in college. And my husband and I practice natural family planning. And so my. Knowing our family, she's sort of, in following my work, she's absorbed some of this Catholic wisdom about natural ways of family planning, and she asked me the other day, you know, why? Why is it that people don't know this stuff?
And I think we were talking about Napro technology as a natural alternative to IVF. why don't, why don't people know about this? Like, this is amazing. She's, she's all excited about it. Like, this is so cool. How am I just hearing about this now? And and That is very interesting that you're identifying the money that comes from these pharmaceutical companies.
And now I'm thinking big fertility. It's I mean, it's so interesting to think about that as being the source of, of these things. Yeah, I don't think I, let's put it this way. If you are unwilling to think about that, you're not going to see the whole picture. You know, it's not, it may not be the whole picture, but it's a big picture.
It's a big part of the picture, for sure. You know, nobody, when, when, when mom and dad get married and stay married. Nobody makes any special money off of that. You know when mom and dad get divorced and all the assets of the family have to be split up, oh my gosh, there are, there are vultures hovering around the family making all kinds of money, you know.
If mom and dad are committed to to creating it, creating and planning their family using natural methods. Nobody makes very much money off of that, you know, you have a, you have an instructor who, who helps you learn about it, but that's nothing like, that doesn't compare with the money that the medical clinics make and the, and the you know, the, the gamete donors, the sperm and the egg donors where it's, it's actually.
Yeah, yeah. Or, or not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars when a teen goes on so called puberty blockers that are not approved for blocking puberty. I know, it's horrible. That's beyond belief. It's really, and you know, I am so glad that there are people, some of the detransitioners are bringing lawsuits.
Right. That that's happening. And I imagine you've talked to other guests about this, but The idea that we have authentically informed consent in this area is laughable. It's laughable. I mean, it's a direct violation of the Nuremberg Code. Right? Right. Right. On human subjects without their, you know, without They're full autonomy, right?
Exactly. Thirteen year old? Yeah, that's the idea of autonomy. And they're doing everything possible to cut parents out of the decision making. That's the part that's really dark. Right, because who, who is going to safeguard that child's autonomy? Or eventual Ability to eventually develop autonomy better the state or the parents who have nurtured and loved that child from the beginning.
It's crazy to think about, and especially in a society that puts so much emphasis. It's almost like our society defines the human person as the autonomous will, instead of. Beings who are in relational relationship of reciprocal love with one another. And it's about our relationships that make us human.
It's our autonomy that makes us human. And yet we're going to say that these children who don't have the full capacity for decision making somehow have. That autonomous will, that they can make those decisions? I don't, I don't think that's really what's going on there. Yeah, well, it's not a very realistic view of childhood.
No, it's not. I mean, this is something that spooked me way, way early on, Samantha, I'll just tell you because I taught, I taught economics. So we were always teaching about rational economic man, you know, and, and our whole you know, the whole, what do you call it, the whole paradigm, you know, was about people making independent autonomous decisions.
And we never really asked the question, well, where do these autonomous decision makers come from? Right, how do you get from being a helpless baby to being an autonomous decision maker who makes promises, keeps promises, has a checking account, knows how to vote, all that stuff. Where does that even come from, you know?
That, that's what my, my observations of the, of the badly neglected orphans, that's what spooked me. You know, when I looked at these kids and, and And how damaged they were, how harmed they were by that radical autonomy. Right. You know, I mean, they are autonomous, all right. You know, they're left alone in a crib as infants, you know.
Mm hmm. That the modern world is not able to really process the fact that we come into the world as infants. And this is another area where the Catholic tradition has something to offer that is badly needed in today's society, and that literally we have no competitors in this area. Because the whole modern world is based on mutual consent, consent of the governed.
Political science is all about contract theory, you know, the whole modern political project is about, you know, contracting consent, you know, traditions out the window, you know, the idea that you're born into a set of structures that are legitimate. And that, and that you want to hand down, you know, because you, you're a newcomer to this, that the story's already going on, you didn't choose it.
We don't, we don't, we can't even process the idea, you know, that, that it's legitimate if, if we didn't choose it, you know what I mean? So I, I think what you said is 100 percent correct, that we, we've, we've created an idol. Mm hmm. Yeah. And that's so interesting that question that you ask, you know, when do we develop that autonomous will because we don't have it as infants and some people will say, well, my, my three year old is asserting.
A different gender identity because my three year old wants to wear a dress and I mean, my three year old thinks that he's a frog and a dinosaur and Spider Man in a span of 10 minutes. So it's there, but, but, but we're not going to empower him to become. The spider man that he thinks he is. I'm not going to let him jump off the roof to try to exercise those powers that he doesn't have.
I'm going to help him to see and recognize that that is not reality. That's just your desire to do that. Let's emphasize that's come in right on this point. Your desire is his mommy to do that for him is not you oppressing him. That's you acting in love in an appropriate manner towards somebody who's legitimately dependent on you.
Okay, well, can someone tell him that? Because it makes him really angry. Well, he's only three for a year. He'll get over it. Let's hope so. And then you'll have another kid who's three or two or something and you start all over again. They do outgrow that stuff, you know, but, but, but the point is, the point is that your authority over him is legitimate, even though he didn't choose it.
And that's what we have trouble with. I, I think, you know, and there are a couple of guys who are really good on this. My, my friend Scott Yer, you should, you should get acquainted with him. He wrote this book called Family and Politics. He's a poli-sci guy. So he knows all of the the modern political philosophers you know, Cobb and Locke and Con and you know, all these people.
And he, and, and in his work, he goes through and analyzes what do these people have to say about the family? And the answer is they don't have a clue. They literally, they don't have a clue. They have to explain it away, or they turn it into some special case of government, you know. But to understand the family on its own terms, there aren't, you know, that's not something modern thinkers really, really do, right?
They kind of avoid doing it. They don't have the mental equipment to deal with it. Right, because if we are just in an autonomous world, then our relationship with other autonomous wills is governed by. Will and contract rather than love and reciprocal relationship and dependence. Right, and there's no place for love in that model.
There's really no place for love. No, because it's a, it's a contract and you can dissolve it at, at will. That's right. That's right. So you, I think you I don't think we've really diagnosed these problems underlying really well, but what's the alternative? What does a healthy society look like and do you think that we have a chance of getting there?
Well, there's always a chance, but you have to know what you're aiming for. You know, you have to have a clue what you're aiming for. So I think right now I'm not prepared to say we need these laws, this law, that law, that law. I'm not prepared to say that because that part of the road path. I can't, I can't see exactly clearly and and, and that's a very special kind of skill set to make policy.
Right. But I think we can see that there are certain laws that we have in place that have been destructive. So no full divorce is certainly destructive because it's, it's, it's unilateral divorce. It is the ultimate. It is the ultimate assertion of the autonomous will, that one person can dissolve the marriage, which means dissolve the whole family.
One person can do that. And, let us make no mistake, the state always takes sides with that person. The state always takes sides with the person who wants the marriage the least. That's bad public policy. I don't care what you, I don't, you know, you're just never going to talk me out of that. That's bad public policy.
But how do we get from where we are now with this whole divorce industrial complex that we have propping that all up with the fears that young people have? People have been through divorce, their parents divorces. When they approach getting married themselves, they have a lot of Barriers, I guess you could say, you know, there's a lot that's more difficult for them and no law is going to take that all the way, you know, that those those fears and those anxieties and those habits of thought and stuff like that, you know, so, you know, exactly how we get to where we're going.
I, I'm not prepared to say that, but I do think it's very important that we say, and, and it's also important that we not glamorize the past and say, well, everything was fine in the fifties, because that's not true. You can't fall this far that fast if everything was really great. Of course there were problems, you know, of course there were problems.
And so I think one thing is to say, when we encounter problems, are we really going to blow up the whole society, or are we going to try to modify, are we going to do something, are we going to reform, or are we going to demand revolution, every time we see a problem, you know, and so for quite a few years.
We've been a revolutionary society, you know, with one kind of rolling revolution after another. Right, you know, in, in an analogous way, I, I, Once upon a time was a high school teacher and we had a fabulous principal and whenever we had to, there's this certain, it was a Catholic school and there'd be certain changes mandated by the diocese.
We're going to all change this way. We're going to all do this. One example is we're going to all bring technology and devices and put devices in every, in the hands of every student in the classroom. And we're going to do this all at once by this time. And my principal was very wise and he always made sure that, well, Yes.
Okay. You mandate this change, but we're going to do this by degrees. We're going to do this gradually, and it, it was always a slow pace and a small change one year at a time. Thanks. Some people got frustrated with how slowly those changes happen, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in making slow changes and changing by those small degrees and If you if you're steering a ship and you want to change direction, if you change just just a little bit, you can change the direction or the trajectory quite a lot by just shifting that by a few degrees.
So I think there's a lot of wisdom there. Yeah, but, but you have to be careful, because there are some things out there that are fundamentally just and that should go away, right? You know what I mean? And so, I mean, I think the pro life movement has dealt with this and wrestled with this a lot. Right.
Because you have to have in your mind that there's a, there's a deep injustice that's out there, and we can never lose sight of that. And whether you are an absolutist or a gradualist or whatever, you never want to lose sight of, of, of where you're headed. And so, the way we view it at the Ruth Institute is that We, we view that, we think about that end game quite a bit, you know, that, that every child has a right to a relationship with their own mother and father, unless some unavoidable tragedy takes place.
I'm fed up with your father is not an unavoidable tragedy. Right. Every child is entitled to that relationship, and you're entitled to know who your parents are, which means absolutely none of this anonymous sperm donor business, where the state is deliberately cutting you off from knowing your origins, you know, that needs to stop.
So we, so we, we try to put it that way, you know, this is what we're about, you know, that, that children, that these needs of children really are hardwired. And a decent society should be honoring that. We should not be putting the burden on kids to put up with whatever we feel like we want to do. You know, as adults.
So that's the approach that we take. And we have no illusion that society is going to change the day after tomorrow. You know, no matter what we do, that's not going to happen. But if we at least have a picture of what the goal is supposed to be, that can guide us. In, you know, what we consider important to talk about, and what kind of behavior we want to engage in ourselves personally, and then large, you know, also what public policies we think should be enacted or, or retracted, you know, what public policy should be reversed.
Right, absolutely. I think that that's that fits really well into that metaphor of, you know, knowing where your destination is knowing where you need to be headed and having those. Really clearly identified. And we do have that. The church does say that a child has the right to be raised by both his mother and father.
And then we have the science now that you're mentioning that's backing up the church. It says, yeah, kid, this is what kids need. And if we want to have a better society, we need to start paying attention to our children as they're growing and giving them the things that they really need, which is not always what they think they need at the time, but having that, that goal in mind, we allows us to adjust that trajectory and to get there.
But these days, a lot of people are afraid of speaking up about. Moral beliefs. They're afraid of sounding judgemental or alienating their loved ones. Some cases they're afraid of losing their livelihoods for espousing unpopular beliefs. In your book, you say that the church's teaching is so good that we have no right to keep it to ourselves.
Can you unpack that for us? Sure, sure, because, you know, it's very tempting. When you're part of a worldwide organization of over a billion people, you could spend your whole life and never talk to anyone outside the church. You know, you can focus all of your energy on, you know, on things that are inside the church.
But the fact is That there are millions of people who are dying to hear what we have to say. It's a little bit like what your mom said about, Why am I only now hearing this? Why didn't I hear this years before? You know, that's, that's really how I feel about it. You know, that, that I learned a lot of things the hard way.
I did a lot of stupid stuff. I paid a price for it. My husband and I paid a price for it. And the stupid stuff the kids are being induced to do today is much worse. You know, I mean, the mistakes kids are being, you know, sort of lured towards are much more catastrophic and more difficult to recover from, right?
So, yeah, I feel like we need to be as truthful as we can. And we need to, you know, put ourselves in a position where it's safe to speak. Right. So we don't live in California anymore. We moved out of California. We live in Louisiana now, and part of the reason we moved out of California was because the environment was so hostile to, you know, to me, you know, to just who we are, but also we love to yeah, yeah, we lived in San Diego most recently, Orange County.
Yeah, yeah. And there are many wonderful people there, many wonderful things there, but we can think of it this way. The truth is important. And we need to put ourselves in a position where we can tell the truth. So, if we're in a hostile environment, we need to do things to make it so we can tell the truth.
And I, I can tell you from experience, that the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Yeah, I think that, and I think the more you do it too when you speak up and you do As lovingly as you can share the truth because you love people. It's so ironic to get labeled a hate group because you love people and you're trying to tell them the truth.
Some propaganda right there, but when you share those things, yeah, there are some people who are going to get their backs up who might be offended and who might walk away, but there are also those people who otherwise wouldn't have heard it from anybody else. And, and those are the people. That that make it, you know, this is the reason why we're doing this.
This is the reason why we're sharing this because a lot of people a lot I think people are in general, a lot more open minded and willing to listen to both sides of the story, then social media and the media would have us believe and so when we when we open those doors and those conversations think that's where change and conversion can happen.
Also think that people are fed up. You know, the vibe that I get right now, we're recording this in June of 2023 in case people watch it 10 years from now. The vibe I'm getting now is that a lot of people are fed up. A lot of people are like, this has just gone on long enough. And, and, and so when they, when they find somebody, find us, you know, saying what we say, it's like, oh, wow, a breath of fresh air.
Like, okay, great, you know. So the book that we're discussing, it's, it came out recently, but it's been a few years. Has anything changed in that time in your thinking or in what you're seeing in the culture? I knew that when I was writing it, that it, it had to be more of crazy stuff going on because. If that's what it was, it was out of date the minute it was printed, you know what I mean, because the craziness just keeps coming.
But I think the structure has held up very well, you know, the analysis of the structure has held up very well. And I think it continues to be helpful to people in understanding what we're dealing with, you know. So in other words, some piece of craziness comes at you out of left field. There are really only three things you have to master, you know, it's one of these three things.
Okay, I get it. Again, I know what to do with it, you know, so so in that sense, it's, it's stood the test of time, I think very well, and people can still profit from reading it. Right, absolutely. Yeah, I don't think we could have the, the reproductive revolution that we're having without these ideologies that you've identified, you know, the idea that it doesn't matter which body a baby gestates in and that it doesn't matter if the baby has a mother or a father or two mothers or a surrogate mother and a biological mother in a child.
and a social mother and those are all different mothers and you know that these things are irrelevant somehow even though we don't have the data or the understanding to know if it if it will be irrelevant and the data that we have doesn't suggest that it will be let's just go ahead and make babies because the people who are here already that's what they want that's right that's right yeah the adults get to do what they want and the kids have to put up with whatever we decide to give them that's the basic you know so but actually that brings me to one thing that I think I have learned in the five years since this book was published.
And that is, I have learned that the sexual revolution really required people to redefine childhood. I had never put it in quite those terms before, but just, you know how you keep talking about it and you figure out what it was really all about? Yeah. Because you have a book yourself, right? Yes! Yeah, I do.
We talked about your book on my show. And my experience has always been, Samantha, after I write a book, and I think I know what I'm talking about, well, I talk about the book for five years, and then and only then do I figure out what the book was really all about in the first place. But, but, but no, I think, I think in, in order to believe that the body doesn't matter in the ways that you've just mentioned and that kids don't really need their parents and all that, we get to do whatever we want sexually.
Nothing bad is going to happen to anyone. In order to, for that to even be remotely plausible, people had to redefine what it means to be a child. And so we redefined childhood so that children are autonomous beings, right, and they can make decisions. They don't really need their parents for protection.
They need their parents to get out of the way so that they can be their true selves and stop abusing them by putting limits on them. You know, we redefined childhood. And in doing that, we have set the stage for pedophilia. Right. And I've been saying, I have a version of a talk I came up with a couple of years ago, this came into my mind, you know that pedophilia is baked into the sexual revolution.
You know, that sexual abuse and the sexual misuse of children has been built into it from the beginning. Not that all the founders of the sexual revolution Were themselves pedophiles. That's not what I mean. What I mean is that they created a vision of society and a vision of a social system that radically redefined childhood and made children vulnerable to people who actually are pedophiles.
No, absolutely right. I mean, even if you look at way back in the 30s, Huxley wrote Brave New World, which is. the inspiration for the name of this podcast, Brave New Us. It's happening right now. That was one of the conditions of this dystopia that he envisioned is that children would be these. Sexual beings and they would engage in all kinds of sexual free play and not have any parents and it's, it's kind of eerie.
Some of the predictions that he made. And I think you mentioned earlier, when prop eight came out, I think opponents were, were saying that they were arguing, you know, if you, if you Change things in this way. If you redefine marriage in this way, then what you are doing is allowing the conditions for something like pedophilia, you know, any, you're legitimizing any sort of sexual use of the body and this will happen.
And people said, no, no, no, no, that's a slippery slope. That will never happen. And lo and behold, that is what some social scientists are proposing now, to call pedophilia just a, a different orientation, rather than something that needs to be denounced and that children need to be protected from. Probably, I can, I can honestly say because I was there through that, you know, a lot of those discussions, it is shocking to me looking back on it.
How shallow the arguments really were. Right. You know, the, the defense of the redefinition of marriage, that it was always, you're only allowed to talk about one thing and that is how will this affect gay people? Is this gonna hurt gay people? Is this gonna make people gay? You know, is this fair to gay people?
Is this good for gay people? That is the only thing you're allowed to talk about. And if you broaden the discussion and said, Well, if you make this change over here, you're gonna have ripple effects over there, there, and there. You know, nobody, I can tell you honestly, nobody wanted to talk about that. You know, the way it would redefine parenthood.
See, if you redefine marriage, you're gonna end up redefining parenthood. I tried, I tried to get people interested in that. And I'll tell you, Samantha, it wasn't just and it was not just the people in favor of marriage redefinition. It was also some of the people on our side who didn't really want to go there because they knew that I was implicating divorce.
Right. You know, and so, you know, if you're big donors on his third marriage. Oh, you don't want to talk about that. Right. You know, Right that follow the many thing goes on both sides. It goes on all sides. Very true. So here we are holding the flag, but I appreciate you, Samantha. I appreciate your podcast. I appreciate what you're doing here.
Because whenever we can find allies, you know, who are, who are working on. I don't know if there's any aspect of this big blob, you know, I find it well, it's just important that we know each other and lock arms and do what we can. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and now California's big legislation, I think they, they just recently introduced so I don't think it's been passed yet, to my knowledge, but it is the gay surrogacy bill so this is signing and some funding for, you know, to say that.
Homosexual people, couples single people have this right to surrogacy, so they have a right to rent the wombs of women to ensure their own infertility, which I'd say in quotes, because it's not really infertility if you have a healthy body and you're just not, choosing, choosing not to reproduce in the normal way, that's very different than the infertility that You, for example, have had to struggle with and, and that cross that women have had to bear in couples.
So it just, you know, keeps going and building. Right, right. And, and that idea that you're entitled to a child, that right there, everybody should denounce that. I mean, absolutely, absolutely incorrect. No one is entitled to a child. When we talk about parental rights, what we mean is that you and your husband have, are the sole legally and socially recognized parents of that child.
That doesn't mean you had a right to have a child in the first place, right? Right, it's a gift. The child is a gift, and the state recognizes that you are the sole. Have the sole custodial rights and all the rights and responsibilities that come from parenthood. You and only you, you know, have those entitlements.
That's what we mean when we talk about a right to children. Right. It's not the same thing as saying, I am in time. I want a baby. So I have the right to go buy one or deal one or trick somebody into giving me one or, you know, you don't, you have the right to try. Everybody has the right to try, find an opposite sex partner and try.
Nobody has a right to succeed. Nobody has a right to succeed. Right. It's, it's not, you can't have a right to something that's not necessarily a logical possibility. Yeah, and also, and also, it's a person. No one has a right to a person. No, no, we don't want to go there. No, well, we tried that with slavery. It didn't work out well.
Mm mm, mm mm, mm mm, doesn't end well, right. So, thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom with us today. Is there anything else that we haven't discussed already that you think that listeners should know? Well since this is a bioethics podcast, a Catholic bioethics podcast, I would say hang in there people because the world needs you guys to get it done and get it right, you know and this is an area I'm completely self taught in this area and I rely on people like y'all to, you know, to figure this stuff out and give us the proper language, proper terminology that has the right precision to it, you know, so that we don't say stupid stuff by accident.
Well, we're always going to say stupid stuff, but I think that's part of the human condition. The point of developing expertise is to avoid that. You know, you know what I'm saying. You know, that your vocation, your calling, those of you who are called to study and develop Catholic bioethics, it's a very important calling and a lot of people are counting on you to get it right.
So no pressure, but, but you know, we're more I would say at the Ruth Institute, we're, we're, we're more the we, we retail your stuff, you know, we're the purveyors of the truth that you guys figured out, you're the research, you're, you're the R& D team over there, you know and we do our best to, to get it out to the public so that people realize that this is the life giving path and the other stuff we're making up is just, you Yeah, for sure.
We should be able to see that it's not going to work. It's wishful thinking. It's a lot of wishful thinking. You know, there's even all the new technologies and the research and everything that they're doing. It's it could be a little overwhelming just to see. And it's, but I think it's also ultimately exciting because there are a lot of areas where, for example, reproductive technologies bring up.
Yes, they're new technologies, but they bring up old questions and like you said, you know, the Catholic Church has been dealing with these questions. It's timeless. The, the thought of 2000 years of this intellectual tradition and the technologies might be new, but the answers about who we are, why we remain where we're going, those things remain constant.
So it is nice to be able to have. These ways to have discussions about these things in ways that maybe people are a little bit more open to hearing the tradition of the church and the wisdom. Well, thank you for your work, Samantha. Yeah, thank you. It's great to talk to you today. I really appreciate you being here.
Thank you so much.