An episode of Fellow Travelers, foreshadows the current breakdown of the 60s/70s sexual revolution, where straight women, gays, and lesbians often all saw themselves fighting for the same goals of liberation and equality. In this new Paramount+ series about McCarthy era persecution of gays in the federal government, handsome State Department officer Hawkins Fuller - athlete, war hero, dating a Senator’s daughter, and a closeted homosexual - discovers who has reported him to McCarthy’s committee for being gay. It’s the frumpier of his two secretaries, a Miss Addison. She read the inscription his new young male conquest had written in a book he dropped off as a gift: “Mr. Fuller - Thank you for everything. You’re wonderful!” In a very chilling moment at a large office Christmas party Fuller whispers to her: “You’re right Miss Addison. I am wonderful. So why don’t you just suffer.” Some exquisite male bodies, beautiful men, and men with promising careers, can never belong to her, or to any woman.
Our contemporary culture wars often revolve around what belongs to men and what belongs to women. Progressives seem to be willing to erase women in language - “birthing person,” “chest feeding,” “front hole” - and also take away their female only locker rooms and bathrooms and the trophies and scholarships for women’s athletics.
Aside from a small group of radical, often lesbian, feminists, mainly conservatives seem to be protesting this. Conservative groups like the Independent Women’s Forum and the female writers at the conservative The Federalist are leading this charge. (And an occasional males conservative weighs in, like Matt Walsh with his documentary, What is a woman?.)
So it is not surprising that some of these same people would be critical of reproducing children without a mother, removing the actual institution of motherhood from the territory owned by women. But it’s ironic, since the main group trying to reproduce humans without mothers so far are not transhumanist corporations or governments making cyborgs, but a small number of gay male couples making fairly regular human babies, not with the intent of replacing mothers generally, but only with the aim of creating their own families. And in so doing these gays are addressing another concern of conservatives, the birth dearth.
The birth dearth has been primarily a concern of conservative thinkers, the subject of a book in the 1980s by neoconservatish Ben Wattenberg. This December conservatives (and others) are holding a natalist conference in Austin, Texas (pricey! $500 a ticket) on declining birth rates. One speaker, Federalist editor Peachy Keenan, describes the conference’s aims: “My fellow pro-natalists and I share the same goal—to prevent Western civilization from committing suicide.”
Ironically, gay fathers being fruitful and multiplying now include not just liberal gays like Bravo’s Andy Cohen, but conservative gay pundits like Dave Rubin and Guy Benson. And Mrs. Keenan doesn’t approve of them.
There are many questions about the birth dearth. Do economic stagnation, declining education systems, and altered gender relations, even rising crime rates, lead people to think raising children too burdensome? Do these same problems along with fears about climate change and news reports about homicidal youth lead prospective parents to think offspring will either be substandard and not worth the effort or will face dystopian futures to which no one should commit a child?
Gays seem to be a rare group having more children than they did only a few years ago. Everyone agrees it is happening, from Tel Aviv to London to San Francisco. But the data is a little hard to get at, since one needs to find births (and adoptions) to both single parents and couples, and then to look at both unmarried couples and married couples - and of course only a few years ago there were no gay married couples. It looks like there may be more “gaybies” not necessarily because gays are producing more children per household than the previously did, but only because there are now more gay coupled households.
According to Census data, the United States in 2020 had 1.2 million same-sex households, with over 700,000 being legally married; before same-sex marriage the Census Bureau thinks there were 600,000 same sex couples. So the number of gay couple households doubled. According to the data, the percentage of heterosexual couples with children under 18 in the home has dropped from around 45% (for both married and unmarried couples) in 2008 to around 35% today. (Of course this could be in part due to longer lifespans, making the average couple older, so that fewer of them had children still under 18.) For gay couples the opposite occurred coincident with legalizing gay marriage and the expansion of other “civil rights” for gays. In 2008 about 20% of (unmarried) same-sex couples had children under 18, and after gay marriage this number dropped below 10% - for unmarried couples. But the newly married couples approached a percentage of 20% with children. What actually grew was the total number of gay couples, which allowed for the increase in the number of children in same-sex couple households, probably because people both felt more comfortable raising children as openly gay parents AND because they were now coupled with a “helpmate” to help them raise those children.
Of course, this is just the data for children in (gay) coupled households. The number of children being raised in single parent households is increasing, and the data on how many of those parents are straight or gay may be harder to find - the Census doesn’t ask if you are gay or straight, just if you are in a couple with a same- or opposite-sex partner.
What I find of particular interest is the response to this of people on the right, who otherwise are often in favor of people having larger families, and worried about the implications of declining birth rates.
First, not actually a conservative, but a free market economist, Bryan Caplan has hypothesized that the same liberal/libertarian policies that allow gays to be open and to marry will result in the Darwinian extinction of gay people. Professor Caplan himself is a (heterosexual) father of four, and the author of several lively and respected books on education and children, with titles like Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Caplan is also a prolific blogger and substacker, and produced a recent argument that “The far future will be very straight, but don't feel too bad about it.” Caplan argues that the reason any genetic component that leads to homosexuality was transmitted in the past is because society forced gay men and lesbians (and bisexuals) to form opposite-sex marriages and have children. Caplan provides some regression analysis on a period that ends in 2021. But the open question is: are gays beginning to form child-producing and raising gay households at a much higher rate than in earlier decades? (And will the percentage of children in the future be more likely to be biological offspring (not adopted), currently 92% for heterosexual couples compared to 64% for male-male and 65% for female-female couples.) As Caplan points out he is only the messenger, but I think he should perhaps “feel bad about it.” One might try to imagine what a society with no gay people (Plato, Wittgenstein, Alan Turing, maybe John Locke, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, etc. etc.) - like a society with no Jews - would be like. (If that’s hard for you to do watch an episode of the resurrected Frasier and the original Frasier - the current sitcom is missing gay writer/producer Joe Keenan, one of the most brilliant contemporary comic novelists.)
Another witty Keenan, the aforementioned pundit, (pseudonymous) Peachy Keenan, openly a “tradmom of five,” didn’t read Caplan’s argument, and doesn’t know nature is solving the problem. She worries about gay reproduction, arguing that at least gay male reproduction is morally wrong, because everyone should have a mother:
“Despite this, my red line against men creating children doomed to a life without a mother is not about the gay part. It’s about the creating children without a mother part.
That gets a hard no from me.
Reader: do you have a mother? Are you glad you had a mother? Are you happy you know who your mother is? Was your life better for having been raised by your mother?
If you were adopted by a woman and you call her Mom, are you glad you had her in your life?
If you could be a baby again, would you prefer to be nursed, cuddled, and held by your own loving biological mother—or a man you may or may not be related to?
We are being asked to answer a question that no one in human history has ever had to debate: Is a mother optional?”
(Interestingly, conservative idol Tucker Carlson had no mother after the age of 6, and Carlson’s father lived in an orphanage until he was two years old.)
As someone who had a mother (but until I was 4 only a grandfather and not a stepfather) I feel the weight of Mrs. Keenan’s question. She’s likely right. Though we don’t know. Do children who never had a mother feel a void? Is it bigger than the one we think kids feel if they never had a father? Do you still feel it if the male-male couple involve grandmothers, aunts, etc. more than they otherwise would? One can find children of same-sex couples who stridently answer that they had great childhoods. We are reduced to claiming that these children are suffering from delusions and false consciousness. Tosca Langbert, raised by two dads, offers an activism-laden response to critics like Mrs. Keenan:
“What was it like being raised by gay parents?” … such a question demands one answer: ‘Amazing!’ Any other response, even if simply accounting for a family’s nuanced experience, might as well be an outright admission of failure on behalf of the entire LGBTQ community.” (emphasis added)
But the real question for Mrs. Keenan is: is it better never to have existed at all, than to have existed with two loving fathers and no mother? (For what it’s worth, and I’d agree it’s pretty minor, male-male couples with children are less likely to use Food Stamps or be below the poverty level than both heterosexual and female-female couples with children.)
The Federalist, where Mrs. Keenan is now a senior editor, is replete with critiques of same-sex parenting (at least deliberate creation of biological offspring), as well as gay marriage and surrogacy generally. Most of these articles, by a variety of authors, make good points and are at least cautionary tales. But a few have a theological tinge, almost suggesting that there is a well of souls from which people are born, so that when gays (especially gay men) reproduce, they create a fetus that “captures” one of these souls, which otherwise would have gone into another fetus gestated in a married heterosexual lady to be born into a heterosexual family.
But is there any science to that? Are the children born to lesbians, or to gay fathers hiring surrogates (leaving aside those having babies with a heterosexual or lesbian friend), babies that would have otherwise existed? The question remains: is it better never to have existed at all, than to have existed with two loving same-sex parents and no parent of the opposite sex?
A version of this ran a month ago at SpliceToday.
"There are many questions about the birth dearth. Do economic stagnation, declining education systems, and altered gender relations, even rising crime rates, lead people to think raising children too burdensome?"
Here's a theory:
For many decades leftist groups in the US and the world, including the UN and communist China, have promoted gigantic depopulation efforts aimed at preventing human babies from being born. Maybe those efforts worked?