Spurred on by the recent interview with Jordan Peterson on Dave Rubin’s podcast, Dr. Morse and Fr. Rob Jack discuss the inevitably tragic consequences that come from trying to separate children from their birth mothers via 3rd party surrogacy, and how those efforts to help people “self actualize” are a moral wrong against the children they engender.
Please note that transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.
Father Rob Jack:
With us now is Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, and she heads the Ruth Institute, which is an interfaith, nonprofit organization helping defend the family and repair the damage of the sexual revolution. Her most recent book is called The Sexual State, which is how elite ideologies are destroying lives. And they’re you’re having a field day with it right now. Dr. Morris That’s for sure.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Well, that’s for sure. And you’re talking about the renaming of things. I thought you were going to call instead of the uniform that we’re going to call the Who Dat stadium, the like like we would have in New Orleans. You know, that’s whatever is. Who dat? Who dat?
Fr. Jack:
Okay, well, but here are “who dey,” you know, it’s who dey delight I was that was exactly.
Dr. Morse:
Yeah.
Fr. Jack:
Yeah. But anything, anything is possible. But you know, one of the things is that in hostile times, we always look for allies. And people are thinking for a while that, for instance, Elon Musk was one because he was for the, you know, repopulation. He wasn’t in his Malthusian view of we have too many people in the world. Well, yeah, now he’s not working out so well.
He sees it only in business terms. And then we had Jordan Peterson as philosopher slash cultural anthropologist slash psychologist who seemed to be accepting certain things based on, again, basic anthropology. But he seems to have disappointed us as well, hasn’t he?
Dr. Morse:
Well, yes, I was really disappointed in the interview that he did with David Rubin, because he basically started off his interview that Dave Rubin, your listeners may not know. Dave Rubin is a conservative commentator, former comedian, so on. And so forth.
Fr. Jack: A political conservatives more than social conservative.
Dr. Morse: He is gay. He’s gay. Okay. And so he’s I think he’s more of a libertarian. He’s the libertarian end of things rather than the social conservatives. And I think that’s for sure. And he has talked himself into the idea that it’s very important and appropriate for him and his civilly married partner to become fathers, because, after all, that’s how you self-actualize yourself.
You know, that’s how you become a mature adult person is, you know, by becoming a parent and Jordan Peterson all yes, that’s exactly true. You know, that that yeah. That is how you mature, you know. And so it was it was a very disappointing interview because, you know, as you say, Peterson has a lot of good things to say and he has a lot of common sense.
But on this point, he just lost it, in my opinion. And I wrote a piece about it for the National Catholic Register. I think there’s over 100 comments on it now thread because a lot of people, you know, saw this same sort of thing in the show, which is a big disappointment.
Fr. Jack:
I think part of the issue, though, with with Dr. Peterson is the fact that he doesn’t have a solid ethical anchor on which to to delineate reality. He strikes me as more of a of a Hegelian dualist and is the you know one of the Hagel’s big ideas was the development of history the development of the Geist the spirit through history.
And we’re working towards perfect freedom according to the Hegelian model, which of course Marx perverted with thesis antithesis, antithesis synthesis. But this movement of the Geist, of the spirit of freedom and in many ways Dr. Peterson strikes me much more as an evolutionist that that now, of course, we accept the homosexual thing. Why? Because it’s seen as normal.
Now it’s another course in this very secular divide. Now, secular. Well, secular secularism is divinity. This secular divinity that is moving towards the, quote unquote, perfection of society. And of course, the whole notion of idea of perfection is not complexity. Evolution is simplicity.
Dr. Morse:
Well, Peterson is is a follower of Carl Jung. If there’s one guy that I’ve heard him talk about consistently, it’s Carl Jung and the whole idea of archetypes and so on. So right. And he has a realistic understanding that the human condition is troubled. You know, he seems to have some intuition. He wouldn’t call it original sin, I don’t think.
But, you know, he’s he’s sympathetic with it. But yeah, in this interview particularly, he’s he he he basically said, well, society seems to have accepted gay marriage. And that’s kind of a good thing because that’s what’s going to keep gay men from from being promiscuous and immature and it’s going to help them settle down.
Fr. Jack:
And it’s not going to do that. It has no.
Dr. Morse:
No, it hasn’t done that.
Fr. Jack:
You’re talking to a guy who lived with seminarians, many of whom were homosexual for nine years. And I can tell you in the seminary, that was not the case. Promiscuity for my direct experience of watching these men had. No, that wasn’t the case.
Dr. Morse:
Right. Right. And they don’t settle down. And honestly, if you look at the statistics now, I didn’t do this in this particular article, but it’s it’s worth an article at some point. You know, if you look at the number of partners, homosexuals since Obergefell in 2015, there’s no there’s been no big rush to the altar by gay men.
You know, the numbers are basically roughly the same. And what you might see in the statistics is, oh, there’s an increase in LGBT weddings. Well, they’re all bisexuals. There are all these people who identify themselves as bisexuals.
Fr. Jack:
There’s also a huge number of divorces as well.
Dr. Morse:
Well, there’s a lot of different kinds of instability in the gay community. That that that’s a different that’s a different point. What I just wanted to to stop and point out there. But they are not rushing to the altar. Gay men. There was no big pent-up demand for gay marriage. There was no big pent-up demand for lesbian marriage.
The people who are getting married are you know, if you look at the LGBT people who are married, more than half of them have an opposite sex partner. Okay. It’s it’s the bisexuals who are getting married and they’re checking off the LGBT box. Right. But gay men are not getting married. So, you know, it hasn’t changed a thing in a sense.
You see what I mean?
Fr. Jack:
Oh, yes, I do.
Dr. Morse:
It didn’t change. It didn’t change the incentives, you know, maybe to change some behavior somewhere along the line. But you know, the evidence is, is that what they wanted? What they said they wanted was monogamish. They didn’t want to be monogamous. They want to be monogamous.
Fr. Jack:
That’s right.
Dr. Morse:
I know that they literally use that term, but the point of my article was not about the conduct of the of the men. My point of my article was these poor kids, these poor babies, these poor women that they used and discarded in order to self-actualize themselves and become fathers. You know, that is what I’m upset about. And I think the normalization of artificial reproduction in this way is one of the fallouts of gay marriage.
You know, I mean, what gays always wanted to say is where I mean, literally, I remember them saying this in court. I remember them saying it in court. Father. And there’s a video of the lawyer just as jaw dropping that somebody in court said gay couples reproduce just like everyone else. And the lawyer sitting there going, what, you know, but this is what they want to believe.
Well, the only way that possible is if everyone else is reproducing, using artificial means. That’s the only way they can be doing it like everyone else. So you could sort of see in that exchange there the site that the psychology and the pressure is going to be to normalize things that should never be allowed in the first place, namely buying eggs and sperm and renting wombs.
That’s what’s now supposedly normal. Jordan Peterson didn’t really better over it, you know, so that that’s part of the fallout that we’re dealing with because that particular Supreme Court decision.
Fr. Jack:
Well, as much as we want to say human beings aren’t commodities to be trading, in fact, human beings are commodities now to be traded.
Dr. Morse:
Exactly. Exactly. You would you would think that our experience with buying and selling people would have persuaded us not to try that again. You know, am I old fashioned there?
Fr. Jack:
No, no, no. You’re just another fuddy duddy like me. And this is just nature. Dr. Morris, can you stay with this over the break and we’ll continue our discussion?
Dr. Morse:
Sure. Sounds good.
Fr. Jack:
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse heads up the Ruth Institute, and we’re talking today about an article, commentary she wrote in the National Catholic Register entitled Memo to Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin Mothers are irreplaceable. You know, it’s interesting, Dr. Morse:, that women, again, are getting the short end of the stick. There seems to be a cultural movement to erase women from the whole equation.
Dr. Morse:
Well, you know, that was one of the points I made in that article that the radical lesbian feminists who despise transgenderism. You and I have talked about this many times. This is exactly the phraseology they use. These men who say they’re women are erasing women. And, you know, we hate that as radical feminist. We hate it. And David Rubin and Jordan Peterson congratulate themselves over how tough minded they are about opposing transgenderism.
But what I point out in the article is that they’ve accepted the main premise or one of the main premises of transgenderism, which is that a man can do anything, a woman can do. If you give him enough technology and legal support, you can you can replace a woman. You can replace a woman. And so David Rubin’s same sex partner, whose name is also David, he’s going to play the maternal role.
You see, he’s. But they have they have a an egg donor, a woman. They have a gestational carrier, a woman.
Fr. Jack:
And those are two different people.
Dr. Morse:
Two different.
Fr. Jack:
People. True mothers involved with this.
Dr. Morse:
Two mothers. Then they’re going to have night nurses and they have a whole freezer. Literally, they said this a fruit, two industrial freezers full of breast milk.
Fr. Jack:
From whom? The mother who bore the child?
Dr. Morse:
God only knows. I it may be. It may be maybe, but maybe it’s commercial. I’m getting the vibe that there’s, like this, like a commercial service that you can go buy breast pump breast milk. I mean, so all of it. But the point is, none of these women have a permanent, legally recognized presence in a child’s life, whether.
Fr. Jack:
They’d be listed on the child’s birth certificate.
Dr. Morse:
Not at all. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I mean, you know, so this is this is female tradition. And even if they were I mean, there’s some states states that are that are surrogacy friendly. The intended parents are on the birth certificate. So if it’s two men, the two men are on the birth certificate or two women, they’re there on the birth certificate.
But in some states that are unfriendly to surrogacy, those poor dear parents, commissioning parents, intended parents, they have to go adopt their own baby back from that surrogate who gave birth to the baby. You know, because in some states it says family code child’s legal mother is a person who gave birth to the mother. That would be the surrogate.
Okay. So to establish parental rights, you would have to extinguish that. Right. And then go adopt the child. And of course, some people who want surrogacy. I think that’s a big in position and terrible, terrible. You know, and what I want to say is without the state changing the definition, changing the legal definition of parenthood, the whole surrogacy industry, the whole gamete sale industry, selling eggs, selling sperm, that industry would never get off the ground, Father.
You have to have the state saying you have undisputed parental rights to this child, even though and the person who donated the egg, the person who donated sperm, that person is a legal stranger to the child. The state has to define that. And if there were the slightest bit of doubt about whether that surrogate mother could keep the baby or not, I assure you Dave and Dave would not be going to going to all this trouble to try to have a baby.
Right. I mean, the assurance that they’re going to get to keep the baby that allows the whole process to go forward. So there’s a big element that the state is directly responsible for.
Fr. Jack:
And to me, the number one victim in all of this is the unborn child. Because a child has a as it’s not obligate. Yeah, he has innocent the right to have a mother and a father who had a role in his creation. And that’s a natural right? That’s an undeniable…there is, what Thomas Jefferson said, an inalienable right.
Dr. Morse:
Right. Self-evident. That is self-evident. Right. And you know, we use that language all the time, Father, to replace until we say that it’s the birthright of every child to come into existence through the loving embrace of their own mother and father married to each other. That is the birthright of every person. And the Catholic Church believes that. You know, I didn’t make that up myself.
I made up the wording. But, you know, I wouldn’t have figured that out on my own. You know, the fact is, people want to break down and break apart different parts of that equation. And now we’re at the end game of that, you know, with the end of that road so that now you completely break down parenthood. Motherhood is a series of functions performed by different people, but you never put her back together again.
You know, there’s no there’s no person who has that all unified the way a natural mother has. And That’s a loss for the child that’s lost for all those women.
Fr. Jack:
And the thing is, there’s going to be a loss for society because those children are going to grow up with a lot of psychological baggage they didn’t need to have.
Dr. Morse:
Right. Exactly.
Fr. Jack:
That’s how and how are they going to be able to seek a spouse? They’re not going to have a model of good male female relationships. Right. I mean, there is again, this is in ultimate form. They they talk about self-actualization. It’s not it’s not self-actualization. It’s an ultimate form of narcissism.
Dr. Morse:
Right. You know, I was talking to a demographer who was saying to me that there’s a kind of two different approaches to to fertility. You know, the old school approach, pre demographic transition, the old school approach was fertility is about the community and your fertility is about your marriage and about having more hands on the farm, maybe building the whole community.
And now after the second demographic transition, fertility is about self-actualization. It’s about I become I’m going to become more of an adult. I’m going to be fulfilled by having this child, you know, which you know, my grandparents. Your grandparents that never would enter their mind. They’re going to be wondering, how am I going to pay for another kid?
How am I going to get shoes on this kid’s feet all the time? You know? And can I get them baptized before they die? You know, oh, a completely different set of considerations. And, you know, I’m not saying that we want to abandon our technology because, of course, we don’t. The technology is life giving and all of that.
And that’s great.
Fr. Jack:
But it’s not an end in itself.
Dr. Morse:
It’s not an end in itself. That’s right. And the reproductive technology that we’re using is dehumanizing and shouldn’t be used. Right. Clean water, penicillin. I’m all for it. You know, I got a medical stuff. That’s great. But, you know, we get we get so full of ourselves and our power over nature, you know, that we that we lose sight of our humanity.
Fr. Rob Jack
But we never win. The war against nature will bite us back. Dr. Morris That’s for sure. We’ve been talking today with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse about the again, the issue of surrogacy and homosexuals producing children through surrogates. Dr. Said people want to find out more about the Ruth Institute and see your Dr. J show online. Where can we send them?
Dr. Morse:
Go to RuthInstitute,org, and that will direct you to our Facebook page and our YouTube channel and our podcast page and all the great material that we have every week.
Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Doctor.
It was a pleasure, as always.
About the Ruth Institute
The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
To schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.
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