Cross Politic Studios Podcast, April 4, 2022
here and here
This is perhaps the most important audio clip I’ve shared since I started writing and posting articles at Word Foundations over seven years ago.
Jeff Shafer: One of the developments that is associated with the legal description of same-sex and opposite-sex couples as being equal — no differences between them as far as the law is concerned — then that means whatever would be different about them cannot have legal consequence.
What’s the difference? One is a procreative union and one is not. So insofar as both are married and thus have access to children, what’s the new understanding of parenthood? It has to be some understanding that encompasses both of them, not just one of them. Because if you were to assign significance to the procreative power of a male and female coming together, you would be thereby diminishing the same-sex couple which is incapable of doing that. Which thus requires the removal of significance in the law of that natural filial relation between parent and child. Parents should now be understood as a custodial relationship by which adults of some kind of management competence are in possession of children.
Now we have the technological model of procreating, of reproduction, being ratified in law as a constitutional imperative, on the back side of — this was happening on the front side of Obergefell, as well, in certain state courts. But the Supreme Court itself, in 2017 essentially ratified the birth certificate claim of the same-sex spouse, essentially giving parenthood [to same-sex couples].
And what we see corresponding to this is courts that purport to be interpreting state laws that speak of paternity, of husbands and fathers, using, “gender-neutral interpretation methods,” converting sexed categories, like fatherhood, husband, and the like into androgynous terms altogether. So the physiological connection, the genetic profundity associated with father to child is converted into a manufacturing model [and thus sexless] understanding, and the law is updated to accommodate itself to the new parenthood model.
Chocolate Knox: Does that bring us up to Dave Rubin?
Jeff Shafer: It does. I suppose and this is why he’s getting the applause of conservatives. They’re accustomed to this frame of reference.
Toby Sumpter: It strikes me, too. You alluded to this earlier, Jeff, and we haven’t emphasized this so much — yet, but if personhood, human life, family — all these things — are a matter of selection, to create [or] make what you will, it seems to me that the other thing that people frequently miss is they’re doing it in the name of freedom, for the masses, pick what you will, choose your own adventure, human life. But the unstated thing is that the state is behind all this. The state is the one enforcing this on states and families and communities, which means ultimately what is being stated, though, is that the state is the one that has the right to define what a human being is, what a father, or mother, or family unit is. Correct?
Jeff Shafer: Correct! Yeah, very well put.
Toby Sumpter: I mean, so, it’s — how does this, how does this happen, where people [tout] freedom, freedom, freedom! Yea! Freedom! And the very thing that’s actually being taken away is freedom? Because the state is gathering it to itself the prerogative to define and proclaim reality, essentially.
Jeff Shafer: Yeah, we are living in an epoch of flamboyant madness. There’s a kind of thoughtlessness associated with that. But in another sense we [have to] say it’s very logical. Once you’ve committed yourself to particular ideas, you better be ready to live with everything that’s associated with it.
We are living in an epoch of flamboyant madness.
—Jeff Shafer—
But, yeah. Your point, I think, is an excellent one, which is that when individual rights — the right to define yourself implies the idea that there is nothing external to you, [that] there’s no reality beyond the borders of your cranium. And that means the repudiation of any kind of natural authority, outside of you. So if you find yourself in a family, for instance, the state is going to have to knock down the family in order to elevate your interests, and self-definition, and the like.
So this plays out very nicely in these cases in which parents are having the custody of their children taken away from them because they refuse to “trans” them, you see. So the child’s self-definition means, in fact, the repudiation of the family altogether. And this should not surprise us. If male and female have no objective meaning; mother and father, likewise, have no meaning. There is no authority in that relationship any longer. It could only exist if male meant something, if female meant something. If the material and paternal relationships meant something. But once we’ve determined that there is no authority in those relationships, because there is no such thing as male and female, the family is gone.
If male and female have no objective meaning; mother and father, likewise, have no meaning. There is no authority in that relationship any longer. It could only exist if male meant something, if female meant something. If the material and paternal relationships meant something. But once we’ve determined that there is no authority in those relationships, because there is no such thing as male and female, the family is gone.
—Jeff Shafer—
Chocolate Knox: This is why it’s so easy for school boards to make decisions about what your kids can and cannot learn because there is no category of your kids anymore.
Jeff Shafer: They don’t belong to you.
In Other Words…
In other words — and this is legal reality, not a conspiracy theory or an ungrounded fear — Obergefell is dictating that children — all children — are the property of the state! This should not surprise us, given the reality that in calling a same-sex relationship a marriage, Obergefell upended the natural order of things, a design many people would call the created order, an order initiated and established from the beginning of time by God.
More information is available at this Word Foundations post, and this one.