It’s strange what we remember from childhood. Like going to Uncle Tom’s Toys, seeing a less-than-stellar plaything for sale, and derisively declaring, “That’s gay.” I suppose it was my mom’s response that turned this otherwise mundane event into a memory. Taken aback by my comment, she asked what I meant. This was before I had any real knowledge of homosexuality, but I did know that in the vernacular, “gay” meant lame, or stupid. It was an insult. And so I casually applied it to a toy that was—well—lame. I don’t remember my mom’s exact response or even the toy in question, but she rightly pointed out the impolitic of my assertion. That, after all, has been the official position of polite society for my whole life. Don’t call something gay; it’s offensive. But if we fast forward four decades—to June of 2021—we find the NFL doing precisely that. They released a video, in fact, brazenly declaring that “Football is Gay”—which strikes me as an incredibly gay thing to do. Did you see what I did there?!

Since it’s safe to assume that the NFL is rather fond of the game that nets it 11 figures per annum, I don’t think their calling football gay can be interpreted as an insult. We might call it reckless, in light of Bud Light’s recent carnage, but in the summer of 2021, corporations were more willing to make a spectacle of their “gay pride” than they are today. They didn’t realize perhaps the threat it could pose to their bottom line, nor had the mutilation of minors become such a central part of the package. But two years ago, the NFL rolled out gay logos for all 32 teams (which haven’t come back since) and tried to turn “gay” from a term of derision into a term of celebration. Did they succeed? I suppose that depends on how you responded to the title of this piece.

Abortion is gay. Is that an insult or an endorsement? Same goes for my calling the NFL’s gay video “gay.” Am I being offensive or affirming? Or merely restating the obvious? It is what it is. The problem with redefining words—particularly when you give them the exact opposite connotation—is that those words eventually become meaningless. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that gay didn’t mean gay. Dictionaries began recognizing its emerging usage in the 1950’s, but when The Flinstones theme song landed in 1961, having “a gay old time” still predominantly meant being happy and carefree. Did people put up a fuss when its definition started to change the first time around? Or consider it offensive to call a homosexual man “gay”? I have no idea. But somewhere along the line, it took on a whole new meaning. And now, apparently, gay can mean whatever you want it to mean. 

The bastardization of language is a useful tool for those who want to dismantle standards in other contexts as well. The NFL’s gay video is a case in point since its assertion that football is gay was only the tip of the iceberg. The full transcript is even more impressive—in a Kamala Harris, word-salad-of-nonsense sort of way. According to the NFL, these are the other things that football is: Lesbian, Beautiful, Queer, Life, Exciting, Culture, Transgender, Heart, Power, Tough, Bisexual, Strong, Freedom, American, Accepting, Everything. The video ends with the claim that if parents don’t affirm their children in whatever deviant sexuality they embrace, those children are likely to kill themselves. Subtle, right? For those keeping track at home, football is gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, and bisexual—but not heterosexual. And football is beautiful but not violent (sorry, Mean Joe). It’s almost as if the producers of this video wanted to see how many woke buzzwords they could stuff into a list of football descriptors without anyone noticing. Because if you were to survey the nation in search of the most common gridiron adjectives, I’m not sure this is the list you’d get. Of course, there is that brilliant qualifier at the end—in case they missed something (or didn’t want to list it). Football is everything! But wait a minute. If football is everything, doesn’t that mean it’s also the opposite of everything they’ve just listed?! Doesn’t that mean football is—I don’t know—ugly, intolerant, bigoted, weak, and captured? Or how about greedy, duplicitous, and immoral? Oh dear. Can’t we just be left alone to say meaningless things without having to give account for them? 

Ironically, “abortion is gay” could almost be a mantra for either side of the abortion debate. If you saw it on a T-shirt, you’d be hard-pressed to know whether the wearer was for or against abortion. And would anyone be surprised if Planned Parenthood launched a marketing campaign bearing this exact same moniker? When Roe v. Wade was struck down last year, the Human Rights Campaign condemned the verdict on the assertion that “data shows that lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer cisgender women, and transgender men and non-binary people assigned female at birth are just as – and sometimes more – likely to need abortion services.” Did you get all that? A month later, GLAAD made the same basic claim. “Abortion is an LGBTQ issue,” their media guide declares, “(because) LGBTQ women statistically seek abortion at rates higher than their heterosexual peers.” Isn’t that interesting? GLAAD also tells us that women are “not the only people who can become pregnant” and we should “never assume that someone does not need access to abortion just because they are a lesbian.” The cover photo for this sagacious media guide depicts a hairy young man on an examination table, ostensibly contemplating his pending abortion. It’s such a perfect storm of subversion that my only question is whether the production team was laughing maniacally as they put it together or if they actually believe their own fabrications. In truth, I’m not sure which scenario is worse. 

Were Planned Parenthood to call abortion gay, they would doubtless mean that abortion is beautiful and worth celebrating—or that gay people need abortion just as much as straight people. None of that is true, but Planned Parenthood cares about as much for truth as that other notorious PP (Pontius Pilate). When I say that abortion is gay, I don’t mean it as mere clickbait nor as an empty insult. I mean that abortion is deviant and defiant—and poses a literal threat to human survival. But first, a disclaimer. I have joked that the reason pride month takes place in the summer is because pride always comes before the fall. As you may imagine, not everyone was particularly fond of this gay dad joke. And whenever someone is critical of the LGBTQ+ agenda or questions the rectitude of homosexual behavior in any way, they are invariably accused of the same thing. You hate gays! It’s a lazy retort, and completely false. The suggestion that you can only love someone whose behavior you agree with is self-evidently flawed. Every parent knows this, but that perhaps is part of the problem. Abortion and homosexuality both actively work against parenthood. And when people don’t become parents, they don’t know what it is to love someone unconditionally. When childlessness becomes a cultural norm, as it’s fast becoming, you wind up with a populace that is more immature and self-absorbed than it otherwise would have been. And such societies have little capacity to recognize or even care about the long-term consequences that their narcissism is likely to wreak upon future generations.

I have never been a fan of intersectionality. I don’t think issues should be lumped together and embraced or rejected en masse—based on mere group affiliation. Better to examine each one on the merits. And so, for the whole of my 25 years as a professional abortion opponent, I have consciously sought to disentangle abortion from the issues it’s so frequently shackled with—like homosexuality. I’ve done this for two reasons. First, they are separate issues. There are people across the globe who oppose abortion but see nothing wrong with same-sex sex. Second, abortion is qualitatively worse than homosexuality. It does immediate fatal harm. The harm done by homosexuality is less obvious and objective. But now the LGBTQ+ lobby is doing its damnedest to close that gap. No longer content with just destroying young minds, they’ve set their sights on destroying young bodies as well—via surgery and pharmaceuticals. The threat of suicide is perversely wielded against parents reticent to “transition” their children, but suicide may be precisely what is waiting for these families on the other side—as it gradually sinks in that gender reassignment surgery has no capacity to deliver on its promises. It cannot turn a man into a woman, or a woman into a man. All it can do is emasculate men, sterilize women, and strip both of the capacity to ever attract a spouse. Women and men do at least have this in common: they neither one have any interest in a transgender partner.

It’s fairly easy to chronicle the harm caused by transgenderism. Demonstrating the harm of homosexuality is admittedly harder. It starts with a simple but exceedingly difficult question. What’s wrong with being gay? For most 21st century Americans, the answer is “nothing.” We’ve put that issue to bed; time to move on. Even asking the question is now beyond the pale. But I’m doing it anyway, and it necessitates another question. What is it that makes something wrong in the first place? So far as I can tell, there are only two possibilities. Something that is wrong either violates a religious tenet, or it violates a philosophical tenet. I’m not going to bother much with the first category, since religious convictions hold such little sway these days, but I do want to examine the second. Even those who count themselves atheists or agnostics still believe—almost inexplicably—in right and wrong. And it generally comes down to this. Does the thing in question cause unjustified harm to someone or something else?

In a strictly material sense, it’s fair to ask whether the practice of homosexuality between consenting adults that doesn’t involve marriage or children harms anyone. This, after all, is the least socially subversive means of being gay. But even here, there’s a problem. It starts with the fact that an inordinate percentage of gay men and lesbian women experienced sexual abuse as children. So at some level, the harm of children is baked into the system. It’s also fair to say that every homosexual relationship does involve marriage and children, by default. Because when men forsake women for other men, that means there are fewer men available for women to marry and fewer children being born as a result. Why is this a problem? It’s not, unless you believe that each of us has a responsibility to society and a responsibility to future generations. You may think it inconsequential, or even noble, to forsake the bearing of children, but here’s something to think about. Not a single one of your ancestors, going all the way back to the beginning of human history, failed to have a child. That’s the only reason you’re here. And now you feel yourself sufficiently evolved or enlightened to break that chain? There are legitimate reasons, to be sure, but what if everyone acted as such? What if everyone was too… something to bother with the bearing of children? If that were the case, there would be no future generation, let alone generations.

Homosexuality, at its essence, is against nature. It is deviant in the technical sense of the word. It is nature (far more than the Bible) that proclaims men and men to be sexually incompatible. Functionally, the sex relationship cannot work. Men and women fit together; men and men do not. Nor is there any evolutionary justification for homosexual behavior. Homosexuality—for its inability to reproduce—is genetically unsustainable. Homosexual desires can be biblically explained by the fall of man and the resulting brokenness of creation, but evolution can neither explain nor justify a gay lifestyle—except to call it an aberration. And were everyone to embrace this aberration, everyone would cease to exist. That’s worth thinking about too because if something is only defensible so long as not too many people do it, maybe that something isn’t defensible at all.

Many will complain of my earlier inference that homosexual behavior is a choice. Men don’t decide to forsake women. They’re born that way! I’m not claiming that same-sex attraction is something that is consciously chosen, but neither do I accept the “born like this” argument. One need only examine the preponderance of homosexual behavior in prisons to understand that environmental factors play a huge role in determining sexual behavior. Reuters reported in 2019—based on the largest scientific study to date—that genetic factors account for “considerably less than 1% [of] same-sex sexual behavior.” The rest owes to “non-genetic factors such as environment, upbringing, personality, (and) nurture.” It’s also never been more fashionable for both men and women to be “sexually fluid”—making it much harder to argue that sexual orientation is fixed. It’s not “being” gay that subverts the natural order; it’s acting gay. Once again, I can already hear the anger and outrage. 

Your assertion that gay people should repress their desires is despicable! You are asking them to live a lie! To which I would simply respond, yes. I’m asking them to live a lie. But that’s only because I’m asking all of us to live a lie, if that’s what you want to call it. Because we are all plagued by deviant desires that if acted upon would bring us massive shame and guilt. The ability and expectation to subdue elicit sexual desire is at the heart of being human. It’s one of the primary things that separates us from the beasts. What other species actively denies their animal instincts? And if you think such repression is a bad thing, I would humbly suggest that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Lack of consent is not a deterrent in the animal kingdom. Neither is incest or pedophilia. But amongst humans, nobody—no matter how wealthy, famous, and attractive—gets to have sex with whoever they want. All manner of legal, moral, and social barriers stand in the way. The one man in history who came closest to achieving this “ideal” may well have been the most miserable and tormented soul to ever live. King Solomon could have any man or woman he wanted. And he had them. Male and female slaves, male and female singers, plus a thousand wives and concubines, and yet he wished in the end that he’d never never been born. The abandonment of sexual restraint doesn’t make you happy. It makes you something less than human, a mere slave to your lusts.

Virtually everyone is agreed that certain sexual unions are out of bounds. It’s just a question of where society draws the line. “Love is love” may sound noble, but it’s as empty and insidious a maxim as you’ll find anywhere. In referring exclusively to erotic love, it could just as easily be applied to adultery, bigamy, bestiality, incest, necrophilia, or pedophilia. If there’s anything on that list you oppose, then perhaps you should hold off on the sanctimonious lecturing. When you reduce “love” to raw sexual desire rather than service, sacrifice, and sanctification, this is what you get. A pride which literally knows no bounds and will attempt to justify any act of sexual deviance. Don’t judge; love is love—and pride is pride. We could almost throw the ethics of homosexuality out the window and condemn it on this basis alone. The primary problem with pride month is pride—but it’s inextricably linked. We could ignore the flamboyant pride parades and school drag queen shows, and homosexual behavior would still be intrinsically prideful. It smugly asserts that even though God and nature both declare that men and men should not be together, we know better. Is that not the essence of pride?

Pride says, I am better than you—more important than you, and you must succumb to my will whether you want to or not. It is ugly in any context. Gay pride. Straight pride. Black pride. White pride. It’s all wicked and divisive. And totally without basis. If you’re going to be proud of something, it should be something noble—not something intrinsic. I always love my children; I am not always proud of them. Only President Biden is explicitly proud of bad behavior in his son (except of course, when it results in the birth of a daughter that Grandpa Joe won’t meet or even acknowledge, until it serves his political interests). You can be proud of your country when it behaves nobly, proud of your children when their behavior is honorable, and proud of your work when it’s done well. But why should anyone be proud of being gay? Is that an achievement? It is, some will argue, it’s bravery in the face of bigotry and scorn. I’m not sure that’s true anymore, but even if it is, it’s immaterial. Every sex offender in the world is brave by that definition, but being proud of shameful behavior is demonic. Not acting upon deviant sexual impulses is something to be proud of—not capitulating to them. At best, being gay is amoral. At worst, it’s immoral. But there’s no reason to be proud of amoral characteristics—like skin color, hair color, height, or sex—and there’s certainly no reason to be proud of characteristics that are immoral. Of all the things someone can be legitimately proud of, sexual orientation is not one of them.

Perhaps the most dangerous manifestation of gay pride is the assertion that society’s central institution can be redefined without implication. Joe Rogan frequently asserts that people should be free to marry whoever they want and casts dispersion on anyone who thinks otherwise. I generally love his podcast but grimace whenever he makes such a claim. Should another man or woman be free to marry his wife—if they really wanted to? Should he be free to marry his sister or daughter? Of course not. Incest, bigamy, and polygamy are still out of bounds. The point is, people are not and should not be free to marry whoever they want. So why is this considered a sufficient argument when it comes to gay marriage? The whole assertion is premised on the assumption that the primary function of marriage—or primary benefit—is to meet the romantic needs and desires of the partners involved. But this is a hard premise to support in the context of history. The primary function of marriage is to provide a stable context in which to raise children, and in a broader sense, to establish family units upon which society can be reliably anchored.

So here’s the problem. If the primary function of marriage is to provide a stable environment for procreation, then gay marriage is a complete nonstarter—an absurdity on its face—because two men or two women cannot procreate. It’s not physically possible. And that’s a real problem, though it’s not the only problem. Because a gay couple—if they’re wealthy enough—can adopt a child or employ artificial means of conception to procure a child, but the bigger issue remains. Men and women are physically and relationally compatible because they are opposites. Together, they make up a single functioning whole. A lock and key. A deadbolt and strike box. A Plug and outlet. Incredibly useful when paired with the appropriate counterpart, but functionally worthless when paired with a duplicate. And this isn’t just true in the physical realm. Men and women have profound emotional differences as well.

It’s no secret that children who grow up in single-parent households perform worse in virtually every metric compared to kids who grow up with a mom and dad. There are ways to mitigate these disadvantages, but there’s no debate which children fare worse in general. And it’s not just a numbers problem, as in two bodies are better than one. It’s a lack-of-perspective problem. Joe Rogan recognizes that men and women are by no means interchangeable, but he seems to lose sight of this in the context of marriage—believing that mom and dad can be substituted for dad and dad without any impact to the child. To me, the essential question is this. Is it more advantageous for a child to be raised by a man and a woman, or by two men or two women? Said differently, is something of intrinsic value lost in the absence of a mother, or the absence of a father? I think we all know the answer to this, even if we won’t admit it. But this, apparently, is just the price some kids will have to pay to accommodate the desires of men and women who want to be parents but won’t deign to marry someone of the opposite sex. Collateral damage, we might call them, and since kids are so remarkably resilient, the longterm fallout can be difficult to see.

So what am I saying? That gays and lesbians should be denied marriage and parenthood?! No, of course not. But marriage, intrinsically, is the union of a man and woman, and the terms are immutable. Gay marriage—like a round square—is a structural impossibility, and nothing the Supreme Court says can change that. Gays and lesbians can act the part of a married couple, but they don’t have the hardware or software to actually be a married couple. So whatever results from the standing up of two men or two women before a priest or judge and saying, “I do,” it is certainly not a marriage. Not in any true sense. You can no more have a marriage between two men or two women than you can have a male champion in women’s swimming. It’s not just nonsense; it’s pernicious. When you try to expand the definition of what a woman is or what a marriage is, you do positive harm to women and marriage in the process. There’s nothing enlightened or ennobling about it. 

Hold on, am I actually suggesting that if a gay man or a lesbian woman wants children, they should marry someone of the opposite sex—who they’re not sexually-attracted to—and have a family?! I am, and armies of people have done as much. So I just expect them to deny themselves for the whole of their life? I do, because that’s what marriage is. A lifetime willingness to put another’s needs ahead of your own—even in the bedroom. But it’s not just sacrifice. It’s also the reward of intimate family relationships that aren’t achievable in any other context. You give up one thing and gain something better. Homosexuality is not chosen in the classic sense, but neither is it an objective characteristic like sex or species. People with homosexual desires can still have a rewarding heterosexual marriage and needn’t feel they’re being untrue to themselves in doing so. Some wise sages once declared, You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. Desires are largely beyond our control, but behavior is not. If people didn’t have the capacity to choose who they love, then no marriage could survive. And if love is nothing more than the yielding to sexual desire—then love itself could not survive. 

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. How many men are married to the most sexually-desirable woman on the planet? And how many women are married to the most sexually-desirable man on the planet? There’s an excellent chance that there is literally no one on either list. Do you see what I’m getting at? At some level, everyone who marries is settling for something less than the ideal, but I don’t say that at all cynically. We are ALL less than the ideal. What a miracle that anyone would pledge themselves to us in the first place! Here’s another one. How many married men or women get to have sex exactly as often as they’d like? I'll confidently place that number at zero. Living with repressed or unfulfilled sexual desire is not a uniquely gay problem. It’s an everyone problem. The only way marriage works is when both partners forsake everyone else, no matter how much desire they have for another or how little desire they have for their spouse. The flaw in my argument, according to many, is that I’m expecting gays and lesbians to never have the sex they want. This is true, but I’m actually expecting celibacy of everyone who isn’t married. Gay or straight. I’m an equal-opportunity killjoy—though that’s not actually the issue. Unfettered sex comes with a tremendous cost. In America, that cost amounts to the violent deaths of roughly one million innocent human beings each year. Is that not reason enough to rethink our love affair with casual sex? And before you argue that homosexual behavior has no connection to abortion, may I remind you of GLAAD’s earlier assertion that lesbian women are statistically more likely to have an abortion than straight women.

Popular culture has been grooming us for decades to believe that the purpose of a romantic relationship is self-gratification. You stay with someone for as long as it makes you happy. You stay with someone until you meet someone better. That’s what moving in together before marriage is all about—giving you more time to find someone smarter, funnier, or more attractive before you fully commit. Everything is about personal fulfillment. Be true to yourself; follow your heart!—which is why the world now believes you can have a romantic relationship with anyone. Men and men, women and women. Men pretending to be women; women pretending to be men. Multiple men and women. Even the public abhorrence for pedophilia is being steadily chipped away at. People are looking for happiness, but they can’t find it, so they push the sexual envelope further and further in pursuit. 

There’s a scene in the third season of Ted Lasso where a closeted gay soccer player wistfully tells a confidante that all he wants is to be able to kiss “his fella” after the match the same way his teammates kiss their girls. It seems such a reasonable and sympathetic request, until you consider what it would actually require. Namely, the bending of reality to such an extent that men and women become biologically indistinguishable. That’s all it would take for a gay kiss and a straight kiss to be public equivalents. Until then, a kiss between a man and woman remains categorically different from a kiss between two men. The former has the potential for transcendence. It portends a future: marriage, kids, grandkids. The latter does not. It has nowhere to go, no means of creating something that outlives itself. Like every act of homosexual affection, it is intrinsically abortive. But even if it were possible to completely homogenize the sexes, the broader problem would remain—the one Bono has been singing about for 35 years. I have climbed highest mountains, I have run through the fields, Only to be with you. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

All of us, gay or straight, closeted or out, are working under the same delusion. If we could just get this or that, everything would be better. All our problems would be solved. But here’s what the gay Lasso footballer fails to realize. His teammates—who do get to openly kiss their girls after the match—are almost certainly struggling with just as much angst and discontent as he is. Everything the gay lobby is working to achieve assumes there’s a pathway to happiness, but what if there isn’t? What if consistent lasting happiness isn’t attainable—no matter how gay sex becomes? What if life isn’t actually about being happy? What if it’s about finding purpose? What if it’s about doing not what you want to do but what you were made to do? And here’s the thing. Biologically speaking, our bodies were made to reproduce. But homosexuality and abortion each work against that realization. Both are profoundly unnatural, profoundly anti-marriage, and profoundly anti-children. Both are fueled by reckless pride and pragmatism, and neither is sustainable. If everyone adopted a homosexual lifestyle, or everyone aborted their children, the human race would cease to exist—which does seem to be the end goal of radical left-wing environmentalists across the globe. 

Earlier this year, China ceased to be the most populous nation in the world, a title it had held for hundreds of years. Projections indicate that by 2100, China’s population will have been reduced by almost half. Russia, according to The Economist, “may be entering a doom loop of demographic decline.” Their current birth rates are the lowest they’ve been since the 18th century. Sure, there are numerous factors driving these steep population declines, but one thing China and Russia have in common is their early and widespread embrace of abortion. In conjunction, these two countries perfected the surgical techniques that have now become the global standard. Is it coincidence that both nations are now on the precipice of a population free fall from which there may be no recovery? Ya, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. That won’t happen in the United States. We needn't worry about our falling birthrates, nor will there be any negative consequences for blithely redefining marriage, pushing hormonal birth control on every teen girl, sterilizing children who were born the wrong gender, and annually butchering a million babies in the womb. It’s all good! But what if it isn’t? What if making husbands, and wives, and children expendable actually foretells something much darker? Killing children is immoral and unconscionable, but not having them at all is only marginally less dangerous—or, if you’ll indulge me the impropriety. Not having children at all is only marginally less gay.