NC Family Staff | June 1, 2024 | SHARE: 
Children get hurt every time a society moves away from Biblical morality. We’ve seen this with abortion, the transgender movement, and even the expansion of gambling. That is why it is critical for Christians to care for children who are being harmed by society and take steps to prevent further harm.
This week on Family Policy Matters, hear Part 1 of Katy Faust’s keynote address at NC Family’s 2024 Raleigh Dinner. Katy Faust is the founder and president of Them Before Us, and speaks on the critical responsibility that Christians have to protect children.
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KATY FAUST: So I am the founder and the president of Them Before Us. It is a children’s rights movement that seeks to prioritize children and all matters of marriage and family. We don’t look at marriage as primarily a matter of religious liberty or primarily a vehicle of adult fulfillment. We look at marriage and family as what it truly is: a matter of justice for children. We see it honestly as an area where we must protect kids. And we do that by abiding by God’s design for sex and marriage, because that’s how it works. Right? God says something and he says it for a reason. So we are, I like to say, the most influential nonprofit you’ve never heard of. We do a lot of work with the Colson Center, Heritage Foundation. I’m on global organizations working to shut down big fertility and the way that buys and sells and commodifies children. I’ve got my third book coming out in September called Pro-Child Politics, where I’ve conscripted national leaders who are going to take our child-centric message of put children before adults and apply it to every major political issue.
And 12 years ago, I wasn’t doing any of this. I was not unaware of politics, but I was unengaged in politics. My husband had just moved to Seattle to be the senior pastor of our church. We had just gotten home from China after adopting our youngest child, and I was tired and busy. And I really thought, well, politics, running for office, political engagement, that’s for somebody else to do. That’s not my job. But it was very soon after President Obama evolved on the topic of gay marriage, because you may remember when he ran for office in 2008 and 2012, he was pro traditional marriage. But after he got his second term secured, he evolved on marriage and decided, actually, now I’m for gay marriage.
And I noticed a sea change in all of media and even among my friend groups that now that the President was on board, we can now cast anybody who rejects gay marriage as ignorant, hateful, religious nut, bigoted homophobes. And that is a problem because I am a supporter of traditional marriage. Why? Because my husband and I had been working with kids at that point for about 15 years. And I understood that marriage was actually the building block of society. And it was really, really important. And further, I have LGBT family and friends who I love. I don’t hate them. I’m not afraid of them. I don’t reject them. And my personal story is my parents were married until I was 10. And then they divorced. And then my father dated and remarried and my mom re-partnered with another woman. So my mom has been in a same sex relationship since I was in elementary school. And I’ve grown up with both of them. And I love them both.
You can both love people that disagree with you and hold fast to what the Bible says about sex and marriage. In fact, I would say if you’re a biblical Christian, you don’t get to choose, you have to do both. So I was a little incensed by this accusation that it was only bigotry that could be driving people to support traditional marriage. But the real thing that got me was the promotion of same sex households in service of gay marriage, saying, Look, these kids love it. There’s no difference between kids who have two moms and two dads versus kids who are raised by their mom and dad. And that’s where I said, now you’ve crossed the line. Because what they’re really saying is, if a child has two moms, they have lost their dad. And if you see a picture of a child with two dads, what that means is they have lost their mom. So here’s the thing about kids, they care about whether or not their mother and their father loves them, knows them, and is in their life.
And they actually care about whether or not their mother loves their father and their father loves their mother. It is so ingrained, it is so absolutely fundamental to the human experience that that’s naturally what children want. Sometimes they don’t get it because of tragedy, right? We as a species have had a lot of experience with mother and father loss due to tragedy, but that’s not what the gay lobby was pushing. They were not pushing restoration after a tragic loss. They were pushing optional and intentionally absent mothers and fathers in the name of progress, and they were lying about kids to do it.
So that is when I said, “Get behind me Satan. Now we roll.” Right, that was enough to get me off the bench. It wasn’t necessarily that there were threats to religious liberty , which there are. You know, it wasn’t necessarily that there was accusations and name calling, which there was. It was because they came for the kids. It is because they said, We’re going to victimize kids to advance our political agenda.
So that is what finally got me engaged, and – at first -onto my keyboard because I started an anonymous blog. And why was it anonymous you ask? Because I am a chicken. Because I know what these people will do to you. Right? I know how they will try to ruin your life and find your family and get you fired and all of that. And so I wasn’t ready to be like public out there. But I was ready to be a little keyboard warrior behind my anonymous persona. And so I did that for a couple of years.
And it was actually a mercy because I was writing about why marriage is a matter of justice for children. Why is it? It’s because it’s the only relationship that unites the two people to whom children have a natural right. That’s why and if you can give children and defend that fundamental natural right you know what else you get? You get social justice. If you can protect that individual justice for children, their right to life, and then their right to their mother and father, you actually decimate every other social ill that we’re facing today. You nearly wipe out child poverty, teen homelessness, teen suicides, high school dropout rates, teen pregnancies, and high incarceration rates. Why is that if you can defend children’s rights to their mother and father that you actually nearly wipe out all those other social ills that one political party is seeking to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a years to fund, why? It’s because all of those issues are overpopulated with fatherless children, right. 90% of teens on the street had no father in their home. Children are four times more likely to grow up in poverty, when they don’t have a dad. 63% of teen pregnancies are from fatherless homes. 71% of teen suicides are kids that didn’t have a dad growing up. And that’s not to say that if you don’t have a dad, you’re doomed. But you are fooled to think that there are not more stumbling blocks and roadblocks to success when he’s gone.
So that’s why marriage is a matter of justice for children, because it brings the two people into their life, who are statistically the most connected to, invested in, and protective of them. So I got to work all that out, figure it out, do some research, understand where the holes were in my argument, as an anonymous blogger.
And then a very powerful gay blogger with a huge following back searched one of my pictures and found the IP address that I was blogging from, which was connected to my husband’s church. And he published all the names and addresses of all the home community leaders at our church to try to get me to stop.
And I’ll tell you what, there’s two kinds of Christians. So one kind of Christian is the truth teller Christian, right? Where you hear something you’re like, that is not right. And I’m gonna say something I know all the Bible verses and the reasons why. And I’m just gonna speak up and say it. The other kind of Christian is the grace-giving Christian, right. The one that says, Well, I just want to take care of people and have them in my home, I want to welcome them, and if there’s a problem, I’m just gonna love them right into the kingdom, right? I’m the grace giver. I don’t like conflict, and I don’t like confrontation. So God had to do a big work in me just to, like, keyboard warrior under a pseudonym.
But when they came for the people of my church, I will tell you, I just said, alright, I’ll stop. Because that’s what he said, I’ll take the names down, if you stop blogging, and so he almost got me, because I’m like, I mean, you can sometimes handle people saying mean things to you. But when they come for your family, or your kids, or your friends, it kind of gets you by the throat, and you go, alright, I’ll stop. But the good men, the elders of my church, one of which is incredibly good looking. They, all these good men in my church said, No, I don’t think so. I don’t think you stop at all. I think you go big. I was like, All right.
So it was very much a What the enemy means for evil kind of situation. Right? He intended to silence me. But what he did by removing my anonymity was I’m like, Well, now I write it under my own name. Now, I can submit amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. Now I can travel to Australia, and Thailand and South Korea, and I can defend children there. Now I can run workshops at the United Nations. Now I can start a nonprofit. You know, now I can actually formally advocate for children in the cultural space and in the courtroom.
So that’s how this got started. A woman who just got angry. People are like, how did you get into this? And I’m like, I snapped one day, I just totally snapped. You know, because they came for the kids.
So what I want to talk with you about tonight is that ultimately, every major culture war issue that we’re facing today, all of the issues that John just talked about, all the different policy issues that they’re dealing with have something in common. And it is that when you get those questions wrong, children are the victims. That is what all these different issues today have in common. We are either in all of these questions going to protect children, or we are going to victimize children. And as I’ve gone around the country around the internet publishing, speaking, interviewing, creating content, I think that it’s the most accurate to talk about children being victimized in four distinct ways. We need to protect children’s life, family, mind, and body because these critical child rights can all be boiled down to needing to protect their life, family, mind, and body.
So where’s their life at risk? Well, obviously, right, abortion has been one of the greatest destroyers and threats to children’s rights for nearly 50 years. And I think we’ve made some incredible gains on the right to life issue because we have focused on the humanity of the child, we have cared for the mother and the community and the person that’s struggling with the unplanned pregnancy or the difficult diagnosis. But we’ve said regardless of how the women are feeling or afraid or your plans, you cannot victimize a child by sacrificing their right to life, and that’s good.
But there’s another front on the battle to defend children’s right to life. And it’s not the baby taking industry of abortion. It’s the baby making industry of big fertility. Now, this has been in the headlines a lot. And unfortunately, there is a bit of a confusion even, among the right, when it comes to big fertility, specifically IVF. IVF just means making babies in a petri dish. Now, the problem with this, I would say is not primarily the technical process. The problem is that big fertility, specifically IVF, destroys more embryonic life every year than Planned Parenthood. If you want to defend children’s right to life, you must recognize that when it comes to the destroying of embryos, the victimization of children, big fertility does that in numbers that far outpace abortion.
When you talk about little lives created in petri dishes, when you look at the numbers that we are able to get from big fertility, which doesn’t like to track or share what they’re doing behind their clinic doors, what you see is only about 2-7% of lab created babies will be born alive. The vast majority are going to be donated to research, discarded because they were not the right fitness, discarded because they were the wrong sex had the wrong hair color the wrong eye color, because they perhaps had the disability. I saw on one of your newsletters over there that you talk about the false positives of the widely used genetic screening in IVF. And regular pregnancies, but also IVF pregnancies, before the baby even makes it into the womb. Some of these kids won’t survive the thaw or the transfer, some of them will be selectively reduced, especially if they’re in a surrogate pregnancy. And selective reduction is just sanitized speak for targeted abortions between 12 and 20 months.
So when it comes to children’s life, we must continue to fight for children’s life. But we have to recognize that both the baby making and baby taking industry need our scrutiny. What about children’s family, we need to protect their life and their family. Well, that is sort of the Them Before Us lane, where children have a right to be known and loved by both their mother and father. And that matters when you’re talking about divorce, when you’re talking about critiquing modern families, when you’re talking about reproductive technologies, which not only victimizes children’s right to life, but also commercially separate them from one or both parents very often at the moment of conception. And these kids struggle. Like if you grew up without your mother or father, you’re not only susceptible to all those social ills that I mentioned before. But many of these kids struggle with deep identity questions and identity issues. It’s very hard for these kids to answer the question who am I? If they can’t answer the question whose am I? And that’s what’s happening in culture, law, and technology right now. We’re, in essence, saying children don’t have a right to their own mother and father.
We’ve functionally reduced children to the status of accessories. Now children can be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship whether or not that person is related to them. And these days, with big fertility, whether or not that person has gone through any kind of background check. But there’s been a couple of viral stories recently of people who have acquired children through reproductive technologies that very clearly have cut the child off from their mother or their father, through surrogacy or sperm donation. We’ve had a couple stories recently of pedophiles who have acquired children through surrogacy. Now, these are men that never would have passed an adoption background check, right adoptive parents like me and like many of you understand that just because you want a baby, doesn’t mean that you get a baby placed with you. But adoption, before I was a mom I was the assistant director at the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world. Adoption, when it’s properly understood, is a critical institution that society uses to mend the wounds of children who have lost their parents. Big fertility functions as a marketplace for adults to deliver customized child products to them without any kind of screening or vetting or background checks. So there’s all kinds of areas where we need to defend children’s family, their right to their mother and father.
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