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Perhaps this insanity is better understood as a new form of religious fanaticism — and this proposed policy is just the latest offering to the “new gods” of the sexual revolution.
You work hard to provide for your family. To put food on the table. To cover the mortgage or rent. To pay for your kid’s education. Every time you look at your pay stub, you wince. That much to the federal government? Really? Sure, you don’t like paying taxes, but you do it faithfully every year because if you don’t the government will penalize you. But you tell yourself it’s for the common defense, or social security, or infrastructure — whatever — to help ease the sting of your hard-earned money getting siphoned off by Uncle Sam.
Then, on March 11, you see this post from the Secretary of Veteran Affairs: “For the first time ever, VA will soon offer in vitro fertilization to eligible unmarried Veterans, Vets in same-sex marriages, and Vets who need donors.”
That’s right, the Department of Veterans Affairs, with its long and inglorious history of unfairly denying medical claims, lengthy wait times, poor care, and general mistreatment of the American men and women who served our nation in the Armed Forces, has decided to get into the rent-a-womb business — for singles and homosexuals. And all on your dime.
In the official press release, the VA celebrated this new initiative and made sure to put the most offensive part in the opening line: “Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it will soon be able to provide in vitro fertilization (IVF) to eligible unmarried Veterans and eligible Veterans in same-sex marriages.”
The statement goes on to explain that “Before today’s expansion of care, VA was only allowed to provide IVF services to Veterans who were legally married and — within that relationship — able to produce their own gametes (both eggs and sperm). Under this expansion of care, VA will offer IVF benefits to qualifying Veterans regardless of marital status and — for the first time — allow the use of donor eggs, sperm, and embryos.”
This proposal is nothing less than the taxpayer-funded trampling of children’s rights and the government-sponsored destruction of the family.
If I were a veteran, I’d be furious that this is what the VA is choosing to spend its time, attention, and limited resources on. As a Christian, I know that what’s even worse than it being an extremely poor stewardship of tax dollars, is that it is immoral, unethical, and unbiblical.
Every child has a natural right — derived from God’s creation-order plan for reproduction — to be raised by his or her biological parents. Sometimes tragic circumstances intervene, and in those cases, adoption is a wonderful opportunity to show the love of Christ and welcome an orphan into a family. But that’s not what happens with surrogacy. Surrogacy violates God’s good design for child-rearing by turning children into commodities to be manufactured in a lab, implanted in rented wombs, and then purchased by the highest bidder — which, under this proposal, can include single persons and even homosexual couples. In both of those scenarios, the child in question is intentionally denied either a mother or a father.
Writing for The Federalist, Katy Faust explains,
“Stories about intentional motherlessness and fatherlessness will always depict the adults as victims, and children as something owed to them. Don’t be duped. When it comes to surrogacy and third-party reproduction, it’s not the adults to whom we owe our sympathy, it is the children.”
This program will only continue to grow the victimized class of children who will never know their biological mothers or fathers — and will suffer for it. As Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, has argued,
“Men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.”
From a biblical worldview, the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family are central tenets of our faith. Children are a gift from the Lord, not something to be bought and sold: “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3-5).
The union of man and woman, as outlined in the Bible, is the foundation upon which society is built (Genesis 1:27-28, Matthew 19:4-6). It is through this sacred bond that children are born, nurtured, and raised to become responsible, compassionate, and God-fearing adults. The decision to extend taxpayer-funded support to single individuals and homosexuals seeking IVF and surrogacy treatments is a direct affront to these foundational realities and moral values. By providing financial assistance for these procedures, the government is endorsing and legitimizing “alternative lifestyles” and “family structures” in opposition to the teachings of the Bible and the natural law.
From a politically conservative standpoint, this program represents a deeply problematic and dark shift in societal values as advanced by the federal government. The traditional family unit, long considered the bedrock of conservative ideology, will be actively undermined by this program and by the state’s willingness to subsidize non-traditional and immoral methods of family creation. This erosion of our cherished values threatens the very fabric of our nation.
But perhaps the destabilization of society is the point. Perhaps this insanity is better understood as a new form of religious fanaticism — and this proposed policy is just the latest offering to the “new gods” of the sexual revolution. As the Christian conservative commentator Steve Deace put it, “To be fair, governments always deploy policies to advance the official state religion.”
Just to reiterate: Christianity, the one true religion, teaches that children are a gift from God, given as the fruit of the union of man-woman marriages, where those children can be raised by both a mother and a father.
The new state religion of the United States, as demonstrated by the VA in this disastrous proposal, teaches that children are a commodity, available for selection and purchase by any adult — single, homosexual, or otherwise — who wants one.
And if you don’t like that, too bad. Under the current administration, your tax dollars are going to pay for it anyway.
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