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Recently, a story broke out that got a lot of mockery in various right-wing circles, and I can’t say I blame them. The publication Daily Mirror wrote an article that carried the headline “Transgender man gives birth to non-binary partner’s baby with female sperm donor.”
“That’s nothing. I know a transblack genderfluid drag queen who got pregnant with non-binary twins in their female testes by lesbian sperm donated by a sapiosexual demi-queer horse fetishist,” joked the left-wing parody account Titania McGrath.
American Conservative writer Rod Dreher, took a more afraid approach.
“This is how the memory of what it means to be a mother, a father, a child, and a family, is erased from our culture,” Dreher wrote. “The radicalism of this is without precedent in human history. I do not understand why we’re just taking this in passing. We are collectively destroying the only stable basis for human civilization — and we call it progress, and celebrate it in our mass media.”
Personally, I find it wonderful members of the LGBT community are embracing traditional values. I’m old enough to remember when the big concern was they’d destroy such morals (anyone who lived through the 2004 election remembers that argument). But no, it turns out they’re people just like everyone else.
At one point on Twitter, I remember seeing someone (I forget who and I couldn’t refind the Tweet) saying that “conservatives see the child . . . liberals see the parents.” But if that’s the case, why does every article I’ve seen about this from social conservatives talk non-stop about the parents? Specifically, about how they are LGBT and, as such, this makes them unable to be parents.
That above rant was just something I needed to get off my chest. However, I want to talk about what the family sees — specifically, a $2,000 tax credit that is refundable for up to $1,400.
Back during 2017, one of the biggest talking points Republicans made was that the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act would increase the child tax credit. Economics 101 teaches us that all people, even those who are not straight, respond to incentives.
In the early 1950s, as the hippy movement started to spring up, social conservatives in Congress had what they thought was a great idea. One of the things the hippies were talking about was how they had no desire to get married. As such, to encourage marriage, legislators decided to tie marriage in with many federal benefits
By this point, federal recognition of marriage already existed, a tool segregationists first used as a way to stop interracial marriage from occurring.
This did lead to more talk of marriage, but not among the people they wanted. The first-ever Supreme Court case related to gay marriage–Baker v. Nelson in 1971–was the result of Richard Baker and James McConnell trying to get a marriage license in the state of Minnesota.
This came back around when Obergefell v. Hodges came along in 2015. The main reason the five Supreme Court Justices gave support to same-sex marriage was the fourteenth amendment, which states all laws must be applied equally to everyone.
Here’s my question: What did you guys think was going to happen? When you incentivize something like marriage, that means more people will marry. And, if you’re in favor of more people getting married, you might be in favor of that. However, and this is the big however, you must always remember your enemies respond to the same incentives as do your allies. As such, if you try to incentivize something like marriage, of course, gay people are going to be likely to fight for them to be able to marry as well.
Let’s talk about children. In his article on “Common Good Capitalism,” Senator Marco Rubio talked about how he has “worked to expand the federal per-child tax credit, as well as proposed creating an option for paid parental leave.” (Side note: It would not be “creating an option,” as Rubio implies. His legislation made it so any time on paid parental leave would be time taken out of social security benefits. Meaning, it would have little effect on encouraging people to have children unless they can also promise they’ll be able to work for longer.)
But what about that family mentioned above? Should they get paid family leave? Maybe not, considering Senator Rubio has voiced opposition to same-sex marriage on a federal level.
We know former Senator Rick Santorum endorsed paid family leave in a 2018 article for National Review. He also compared same-sex relationships to having sex with a dog.
At some point, the populist-right must figure something out: either they remain populist on economics and allow the left to win on social issues, or they remain free-market in nature and allow social conservative ideologies to exist on local levels. At that point, it won’t matter if the left or the right is in power. Both social conservatives and social liberals would just be people trying to live their lives as they see best.
A phrase repeated time and time again against libertarians is “the economy isn’t everything.” Something, I should note, people only say when the economy is in good shape.
I agree with this, hence why I’m against mushing social and economic policies together in some horrible sandwich. The economy isn’t everything, hence why we shouldn’t leave things like marriage and children in the hands of economists. Instead, we should leave them in the hands of the people actually getting married and having children.
Even as someone who likes talking about numbers, I must recognize those numbers aren’t telling us the story around a single one of those people.
In the end, the people must decide the most important and personal decisions in their lives. The government not only must not, but it can not.
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Ephrom Josine is a libertarian political blogger/commentator, and a frequent contributor to The Liberty Hawk. In 2019, he published his first book Ramblings Of A Mad Man: Life As An Anarchist. You can find him on Twitter @EphromJosine1, writing near-daily on Medium @ephromjosine or weekly on Freedom First Blog.
Editor’s Note: I have often described myself as politically Lockean and personally Burkean. That is to say, I could be described as live-and-let-live civil libertarian whose personal life reflects socially conservative values. Ephrom hits the nail on the head when it comes to statist drift in America’s political right in recent years. By expanding government influence into private lives, it creates political issues out of moral, theological, and even metaphysical questions. And, it creates a scenario where each side begins to fight for absolute victory. This is a recipe for dysfunction and disunion. That which is often called the “culture war” is little more than the resulting chaos of competing moral values played out on a political stage it was never meant to be upon. -Justin