Regardless of rhetoric to the contrary, surrogacy comes down to the belief that gays deserve a child more than a child deserves a mother. Instead of bearing their own pain of being childless, they trade it for a child’s pain of being motherless. It’s not about being gay, it’s 1/3
Notice that what you are being given here isn't an argument, it's an advertisement.
What we have before us is a moral and political issue, namely surrogacy. This issue is being directly lobbied for by a powerful ID-pol group that has a history of viciously attacking traditional institutions. The way this activist apparatus operates is always the same, it leads with "too good-to-be-true stories" about ideal situations and highly professional standards, and it gets you to ignore the ACTUAL trade-offs and the reality of the situation on the ground. This is how it worked with Matt Shepard, Gay Marriage, the spread of AIDS, the attempts to mainstream child transitioning, and the reconstruction of sexuality-based holidays so that, now, if you live in a Blue state, LGBTQ+ holidays are the new liturgical calendar.
The formula is always the same. And you can see it on display here.
"Life is Good, human life especially so."
Woodgrain's first two paragraphs are Woo Woo new age nonsense. All children are valuable. That's why I am pro-life. But that doesn't make how they were conceived moral. That's why "Life is precious" isn't an excuse for incest, rape, abuse, or adultery even if "they generate life". Imagine a man who raped his daughter giving you this speech about the "value of life". Does the life of a child he forced on this daughter justify his crimes? No one would say yes. This is just a diversion from the actual issue.
"the remarkable altruism of a few women willing to help others create that life. Money enters in, of course, as it weaves its way into even the most sacred facets of our world."
Next comes the downplaying of the reality of surogacy's transactional nature. Woodgrains goes back and forth on whether the women are getting paid for a service, or are doing this all pro-bono, again, trying to invite you into that "too good to be true" world where millions of women altruistically sacrifice their bodies so that random strange men can procure offspring without commitment to them. Does this sound real? Does this sound like the world you live in? Give it the smell test. Yep. It's bullshit.
"it's easy to accuse people doing something fundamentally altruistic of just doing it for the money: a doctor, a nurse, a pastor. After all, they accept money for the act, don't they? Does it not profane the sacredness...?"
This is easy to answer. People get paid for their professions. But once sacred things are paid for quid pro quo, their sacred nature is destroyed. I am sorry, but do I really need to explain this? Do I have to explain why prostitution is different from marriage? Do I have to explain why a pastor can be paid to hold his job, but the second he sells absolution and blessings he is guilty of Simony? Once more, we see rhetoric trying to confuse common sense that everyone knew before five minutes ago.
And this is all easy to test with a hypothetical political compromise. Allow for open adoptions, but if there is an exchange of money, we charge all parties with human-trafficking. Are there still going to be any of those altruistic women signing up? I highly doubt it.
Hey, if you wanted to make this test REALLY interesting we could ship it with the punishments for trafficking recommended by Woodgrain's hero Lee Kwan Yu. Spicy.
"But people have never been so simple. Ask: in a country where 0.1 percent of births are via surrogacy, where everyone who becomes a surrogate has children of her own, where most people who apply to be surrogates are rejected..."
Once more we get a smoke screen, the story of absolute professionalism and high standards to ensure only "non-exploitative" situations are admitted.
You might recognize this story from the recent trans debate. Up front, the narrative is all about SCREENING and HOW PROFESSIONAL WE ARE. But this is all bullshit and lies, as everyone can clearly see now from the exposes done by Redux and others. The screening process around transitioning is just a rubber stamp. It's political to the core, and run by people who want as many patients in the system as possible BECAUSE THAT'S HOW THEY GET PAID.
And it's not hard to see the problem, even beyond politics. We are talking about a situation that is naturally twisted and perverse. The non-exploitative scenario is the EXCEPTION and not the RULE. Just like it's not generally mentally healthy for a 13-year-old boy to want to cut off his penis because he is depressed. It's not generally mentally healthy for a woman to birth a child and then sell it to strangers. There has to be something VERY VERY wrong for these situations to occur. Yet because of activists' pressure and profit, we push the exception to be the rule and manufacture mass catastrophes.
"Ask whether the intended parents, straight or gay, sacrificing years of organization and salary for the chance to have children do so out of crass selfishness or out of a conviction that sacrificing to become a parent is worth it."
I have to comment here on an implicit moral contradiction. Why are these committed liberals and progressives, after YEARS of accusing us righties of "Racism" or "Kninism" or "Nativism" (and using these accusations to destroy people's lives) now SO concerned about their genetic legacy that they are ready to scrap every moral regulation we have to protect women and children just so their SPECIFIC genes can carry forward? In any other context, this sense of genetic particularism is viciously attacked by liberals. The same man demanding to take a child from her mother to preserve his own genes, will call you an "Ugly Ethno Nationalist" for wanting a border to preserve your nation's demographics.
"I am trapped between worlds, torn between a mess of cultures I cannot possibly feel at ease in."
This is the part where the author completely personalizes the issue, trying to escape from the general political implications by an appeal to sympathy and "being nice".
Good grief, I am sick of this shit.
The things we have destroyed just so we can "be nice". What HAVEN'T we lost to this appeal? Every shitty piece of degeneration and oppression from COVID to TINDER to TRANS has been sold to us via the cult of nice. It waltzes in with a smiling face, whining about "being hurt", and then it knifes you right in the back, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
And of course, it goes without saying that this "niceness" is NEVER reciprocated. The kid who cries when you don't acknowledge his neo-pronouns will return later to scorn you for believing in "a flying spaghetti monster" just before publically desecrating your sacraments. The activists who demand we modify our doctrine over their feelings will return later to spread lies and burn down your church, like they did with mine in Canada the other year.
And do I even need to comment on identity? Theirs are always legitimate. Ours are always a hate crime. And they will try to get you fired from your job if you express pride. As they have with many of us.
I know Woodgrains doesn't want me to associate him with the lies and crimes of the LGTBQ movement of the past decades. But this isn't about the individual. It's politics. And right now Woodgrains is pushing forward the same movement, in the same way, using the same ies, as usual.
It's not that I don't have sympathy for Woograins' condition. As a fellow apostate whose move to the right ruined family relations and friendships, I have nothing but empathy. But what is sympathy supposed to buy? A blind eye to an exception? Maybe. I could even imagine an alliance at an individual level.
However, personal sympathy and "being nice" is not going to sell me lies and goad me into laying down in front of a demonstrably evil political apparatus. Not after what I have seen. And my sympathy for your situation is not going to get me to endorse vicious harm done to children, which the willful separation of a child from their mother always and everywhere is.