When ‘Conservatives’ Sell Children Too

The betrayal of children in the name of compromise, normalization, and political convenience.

As stories of homosexual men purchasing children have reached the mainstream, we have at least some self-identified conservative figures lamenting the normalization thereof. This is reflective of a cultural shift in which the acceptability of surrogacy more broadly is declining.

In spite of media and entertainment industry efforts, average people are beginning to understand the depravity involved in surrogacy. Contrary to its varnish as an act of compassion or mercy, surrogacy is the evil of purchasing both a child and the womb of a woman (usually one in a dire financial situation). At the same time, the industry of surrogacy has become gradually worse—where at one time the woman's own egg was used, that is almost never done in modern incarnations, lest she be able to claim parental rights of the child she bore.

The newer method, using third-party eggs, has become the de facto standard, to ensure that the woman is legally deprived of all rights, and is seen as a mere host. It's a horrifying evisceration of her humanity.

A recent case in which a sex offender crowdfunded his purchase of a child has triggered outrage. The man’s status as a pedophile was only revealed later, shocking those on the internet who had financed his purchase. Brandon Keith Mitchell, a Tier 1 sex offender in Pennsylvania, was arrested in 2016 for attempting to solicit a 16-year-old boy for sex. At the time, Mitchell was a 30-year-old chemistry teacher at the boy’s own high school.

Tragically, it's not the first time that sex offenders have purchased their future victims. There is a growing list of horror stories in which people create children through surrogacy only to sexually exploit them. The majority of these cases involve homosexual men—a fact that should disturb us far more than it seems to. Yet rather than confronting this reality, many self-identified “conservative” commentators rush to offer a palatable compromise: that it would have been acceptable for homosexual men to adopt instead.

It’s a case study in the slippery slope of modern political theater, where compromise is treated as virtue and truth as extremism. While it is the case that surrogacy represents its own evil, for it reduces children (and women) to commodities to be bought and sold, it is not then to be surmised that a couple in a disordered relationship can adopt children with moral liceity. Surrogacy builds on an already immoral situation (same sex couples), compounding it.

The cliched argument that adoption by such couples is better than being “in the system” is without basis, for it universalizes what the system actually looks like and simultaneously projects utopian fantasies onto adoption by homosexual couples. It does so while denying the truth that healthy, married couples wait years jousting adoption paperwork and dealing with endless delays, sometimes to be denied if the couple refuses to subject their adoptive children to LGBT propaganda.

We used to know (and be willing to say) that same-sex attraction was inherently disordered and therefore that no child should be placed in such a home. The contemporary premise that homosexuality is a healthy attraction that parallels heterosexuality is false and forms the fraudulent basis for so many later conclusions. If we accept instead that it is disordered (it is literally ordered towards mutual exploitation, rather than the procreation of children), then we can see more clearly. Since these disordered attractions are indicative of ill-health, they tend to coexist together, which is why pederasty and homosexuality seem so inseparable in cultural memory and criminal data. We can easily conclude, therefore, that it is an inherently unhealthy place to place a child and inherently riskier.

Adoption by homosexual men permanently precludes the child from having access to a mother, instead condemning him to a state of enduring confusion about what normalcy is supposed to look like, and about his own privation. It deprives him not only of a healthy family, but even of the understanding of what he misses. He is shamed by society if he longs for something more than what he was condemned to.

This travesty represents an inversion of the truth. A child has a right to loving parents (mother and father), but people do not have a right to children, which is why they cannot engage in intrinsic evils like purchasing them. The modern desire is to force the child to forfeit his rights in order to give adults whatever they desire.

This is the slippery slope of contemporary politics, wherein those who believe themselves to be conservative are just a stone's throw behind the major players on the other side. Without grounding because they have separated themselves from the Christian faith that they were once trying to conserve, no ideal is properly defended. It’s a fight that is maintained almost by reflex, long after the foundations have been abandoned.

No society that permits the commodification of children, the erasure of motherhood, and the legitimization of disordered households as equivalent to the family can survive. A child is neither an object for adults to purchase, nor a prop in a political struggle. He is a human person, made in the image of God, with a natural right to the love of both his mother and father. When even self-described conservatives shrink from affirming this, there is trouble ahead. Until we reject the premises of the sexual revolution outright and recover the natural and ultimately Christian understanding of the family, we will continue down this path of sanctioned cruelty, dressed up in the language of progress and compassion. It is not compassion to lie to children. It is not justice to deprive them of what nature and God intended for their good. And no civilization that refuses to protect its most vulnerable is worthy of the name.