LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 125

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So we’re seeing the Title IX mandates impacting any
educational institution that receives government
funds—saying you have to have bathrooms and locker
rooms and dorm rooms, hotel rooms for overnight
field trips, all based upon gender identity, not based
upon biology.
The redefinition of marriage and its refashioning of
human nature will also have implications for the culture of life. And I just want to mention this briefly to
plant the seed, pointing to ways this will happen. One
is a worldview, and then one is a specific technology.
You can simply ask yourself this question: Have you
ever heard an advocate for same-sex marriage also
advocate the virtue of chastity? It’s not that it’s impossible. You could be both in favor of gay marriage
and in favor of chastity. It’s just that I’ve never actually met anyone or heard anyone advocate both of those
positions simultaneously.
What we know from 40-plus years of pro-life work is
that one of the drivers on the demand side of abortion is unchastity, a lack of chastity. So until the virtue
of chastity is recovered in American culture, we will
never see much progress in the pro-life movement.
And yet the vision of marriage that the Supreme
Court just bought into—and it’s from every page of
Justice Kennedy’s opinion—is that consenting adults
should do sexually whatever consenting adults want
to do. And so that general worldview is going to be
driving up the demand side of the abortion equation.
The second is specific technologies. What we’re seeing now is that a problem that heterosexuals created
with assisted-reproductive technologies will now be
further exacerbated by same-sex couples who desire
“a child of our own.” Take the same-sex male couple.
They can purchase someone’s eggs, they can then rent
someone’s womb, one of them can provide the sperm,
so they can create a child and plant that child and
then “have a child of our own.”
What will this involve? It will involve the exploitation
of women. First, the process of egg harvesting, which
is an incredibly risky procedure. Then nine months
of renting someone’s womb. It tends not to be upper
middle class, white, college-educated women who
“volunteer” to sell their eggs and be surrogate wombs.
It tends to be people on the margins, people who are
already on the periphery of life. So, it will lead to the
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further exploitation of women.
And then what do we know about the infertility industry, the assisted-reproductive technologies? That
they create many, many more embryos than they
ever implant. And of the embryos that are implanted,
they’re “selectively reduced” to one because the couple doesn’t want to be Octomom. The couple wants
one child of their own. But they might create a dozen
embryos, freeze six of them, implant six of them, and
then selectively reduce five of them to arrive at the
live birth of one child.
Again, this isn’t a problem that gays and lesbians
created. Heterosexuals have created the unregulated
infertility industry. But the redefinition of marriage
will now exacerbate that problem. Again, it’s a refashioning of human nature.
So let me move on to the second point: the reordering
of society. What we are now going to see is that people
who don’t acquiesce to the Supreme Court’s new definition of marriage will be paying a price. And how can we
see this? Let me mention just three concrete examples.
The first way that we saw this is with charities. It
happened in Massachusetts. It’s happened in Illinois. It’s happened in San Francisco. It’s happened
in Washington, D.C. It’s involved Catholic adoption
agencies. It’s also involved Lutheran relief services
and Lutheran adoption agencies.
What we saw was that these adoption agencies
weren’t trying to prevent gay and lesbian couples
from adopting from other adoption agencies. Other
private adoption agencies and the government-run
adoption agencies were free to do same-sex adoptions. The Catholic agency wasn’t preventing it. The
Catholic agency just said for the children who have
been entrusted to us, we want to find those children
married moms and dads. We’re looking out for the
least of these. And we think that the mothers who
have brought us their children to place for adoption
brought them to us for a reason, so that we could
place them in a loving home with a mom and a dad.
And the government said no. In those jurisdictions,
the government has said unless you treat same-sex
married couples the same way that you treat married
mothers and fathers, you are discriminating on the
basis of sexual orientation. And those jurisdictions
had a sexual orientation and gender identity nonUPON THIS ROCK

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