We live in very strange times. For all recorded history the peoples of the world, no matter what their view of the universe and religious outlook, from the most rank deranged heathens to the most pristine moralistic religious people, believed in the fundamental duality of biology. In other words, there is man and there is woman, nothing in between, two sexes. I used to wonder why certain conservative intellectuals warned us against using the term gender. I didn’t understand what they meant until the transgender insanity broke out of Western academia into wider Western culture. Since gender is a sociological construct and not tied to biological reality, it is ultimately malleable. The concept would have mystified anyone who lived before the current post-modern generation, as would a related concept unknown in all of human history until now, same-sex “marriage.” The two ideas are connected by the same moral framework, which does not, cannot, include our Creator God.
The inspiration for this post is a piece in Life Site News about popular conservative political and cultural commentator Dave Ruben, and the decision he made with his “husband” to have a baby. Thus, same-sex surrogacy, meaning a woman has agreed to have “their” baby. The title of the piece was click bait for me: Why is the Daily Wire promoting same-sex surrogacy? That is a very good question! The subtitle of the piece reflects my opinion as well: “Same-sex surrogacy is a grave distortion of the family, and intrinsically evil.” Surrogacy is morally problematic in general, but to put a child into a “marriage” without a mother and father is morally reprehensible. And in case you don’t know, The Daily Wire is a conservative website founded by Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing, and I wanted to know why they were promoting something that is clearly not conservative. I was surprised to find out this promoting came during an interview with none other than Jordan Peterson, who I gather is a new contributor to The Daily Wire. Before I address the moral framework, I stumbled upon this short video of Doug Wilson basically eviscerating the arguments of both Ruben and Peterson:
I’ve known since I first realized I was a conservative when Reagan was elected (just between you and me, I voted for Carter, but not a word to anyone) I was not a libertarian, but I’ve struggled ever since to explain exactly why. The debate between conservativism and libertarianism has existed since the dawn of the modern conservative movement with the founding of National Review by Bill Buckley (RIP to both). Out of that came something called fusionism whcih held traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism together for decades. It’s been a marriage of convenience, but something fundamental separates the two so the marriage could never be consummated. The author of the Life Site piece in critiquing the argument Ruben and Peterson make explains why fusionism ultimately doesn’t work. The justification they are making for same-sex surrogacy comes “from the faulty libertarian emphasis on choice over morality.”
The reason libertarians believe choice is more important than morality is because, they argue, without the choice to be moral or immoral, one’s action can’t have any moral meaning. This is of course true. If someone points a gun at my head and threatens to kill me if I don’t walk the little old lady across the street, my doing so has no moral value; I was coerced. We are, however, rarely confronted with any kind of coercion to be moral or immoral, but constantly confronted with choices whether to be moral or not, do right or wrong, be good or bad, tell the truth or lie. Putting my self-interests and self-fulfillment over the interests of children is deeply immoral, and that is exactly what Ruben and his “husband” are doing. Wilson’s assessment of their arguments demonstrates their weakness, and futility, but also why there is nothing conservative about them. As the author of the Life Site piece points out, “there is no conservatism when you eschew moral tradition and natural law,” and both come primarily from one source, The Bible. Without God there is nothing to conserve. Libertarianism, to the contrary, can do just fine without God because the liberty to choose is in effect their God, their highest good.
The founders of America were most definitely not libertarians. They fought a revolution, gave their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of liberty, but it had nothing to do with libertarianism. They knew without “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” there could be no liberty, and they held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Every person who read these words at the time had no doubt Jefferson, maybe the most Deist among the founders, meant the Creator God of the Bible. He knew without the moral compass of Christianity there could be no “nation conceived in liberty,” in the words of Lincoln. The supreme law of the land depended on Christianity as it’s moral North Star. As John Adams, the second President of the United States declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He too meant the religious people of the Old and New Testaments.
I’m grateful for the many liberals, like Ruben and Peterson, who have moved to the political and cultural right over the last five or ten years, and who believe in truth over “The Narrative.” I’m happy to be co-belligerents with them against the Marxist woke left and the globalist elites who despise our liberty, and hate America as founded. That, however, doesn’t mean we call evil good, and good evil, even if it comes from those who claim the mantel of “conservative.” The homosexual and transgender agenda come from the same evil source, the same (im)moral framework, and you can’t accept one and reject the other; they are a package deal. Conservatism without the package is not conservative.
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