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There's degrees of it though. I can show more sympathy when discussing trans issues with a trans person, and just focus on the facts of the matter. This is a pure values disagreement and it's hard to get around that. It's fun enough discussing those too, but the fun quickly evaporates when you discover the person you're arguing about Roe vs Wade with is getting an abortion next week.
Yes, everybody does, there's the rub isn't it?
Funnily enough Botonds comment could be interpreted as poking fun at either one of us, but I'm going to use it to support my argument here. Yes, what you want is understandable, again that's what everybody wants for themselves, but your comment is written in a weird way that seems to imply your values are best values. If you found out your next door neighbor is a cannibal - not a murderer mind you, everybody he eats is some weirdo he met online that wants to be eaten, you see stories like that every once in a while. Oh and let's say he doesn't even eat the whole person, just their hand or something, and the other guy is completely happy about it afterwards - wouldn't you let out the least bit of a hissing condemnation? Would you want the practice to be against the law? Would you want him to still be your neighbor? What would you make of the cannibal's pleas for wanting to live in a culture where he and his family can live according to their values?
The other thing is, while I find the dead-eyed "yes, I'm for surrogacy" attitude somewhat admirable, I can't help the resentment building up upon hearing the charming gay couple down the street, whose rights I helped fight for, tell me "what did you think was going to happen, bitch?". Thankfully there's plenty of gay people who are against surrogacy, so it's not all that bad, but Jesus, this has been a disturbing experience.
I'm not really a fan of IVF either, but even it doesn't involve taking a child away from their mother, and paying for the hospital bed is in a completely different universe.
Well, of course everybody wants that.
I feel like you're reading my comment as saying "I, uniquely, want a values-driven society, and cruel people like you prevent that."
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the rubber meets the road with values differences at some points, and that's where the culture war becomes most complex and most serious. It goes without saying that I believe my values are correct. They are, after all, my values. Others disagree with them, and the truce of liberalism is the most stable way I've seen to deal with those clashes up to this point, but the culture war stops being an abstract chat when your decisions cross someone else's line in the sand or vice versa. I condemn or criticize some choices. Some condemn or criticize my own. I have strong feelings about who is right and who is wrong in most culture war conflicts, but the stakes are high for everybody. At some point, conflicts or no, people decide what sort of life they want to live and find allies where they can. The value I have chosen to make my own stand on here is that bringing people into the world, becoming a parent, and working to raise children well is a good that should be pursued even as circumstances fall short of the most ideal.
The resentment you describe is understandable but a bit peculiar. There was no slippery slope from gay marriage to surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy has been legal in (most of) the United States since long before gay marriage was allowed. There was no carve-out in the push for legal marriage saying "we want to have all the legal rights straight married couples do, except for the option to pursue already legal surrogacy options". Marriage and surrogacy aren't even directly connected, except for questions like who the parents listed on birth certificates are: single men can pursue surrogacy, just like single women can find sperm donors.
Not to lean too much into the villain role in your story, but... what did you think was going to happen? Did you think all gay men who wanted to get married simply saw marriage in the shallower modern "if two people love each other very much..." light and not as the best option for stable, happy family formation and child-rearing? Did you see the collection of legal rights attached to marriage, routes to adoption and surrogacy that straight couples were already using, and assume gay people were simply uninterested; were you treating the idea as primarily symbolic rather than a specific legal change that would open up specific doors for people?
So part of the misunderstanding probably comes from geographical distance. Things look a bit different worldwide, and even in places where it's currently banned, we still get the western Blob's drumbeat about wonderful surrogacy is. From that perspective, surely it's more understandable how it looks like a slippery slope.
Since you asked the question directly, I've been trying to interrogate if I'm misremembering something. Is it that I was young and kids weren't on my mind? Maybe that was a part of it, but I distinctly remember adoption by gay couples being part of the controversy, and I assumed that that was going to cover the issue of gay people who want to start a family. Especially since gay people I knew were saying adoption isn't even that important to them (they were on the younger side as well though).
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Family benefits were always part of the package. Andrew Sullivan's landmark 1989 argument, to my understanding the first major advocacy article on the topic in the US, is worth reviewing:
Andrew Sullivan, one can point out, is for a gay man unusually conservative in his sensibilities and was making an unabashedly conservative argument in favor of gay marriage. But gay marriage has always been more the purview of the more conservative-minded in the subculture.
You're right that it's comparatively uncommon for gay couples to have kids, but it's more that their kids often don't enter the sphere of Public Discourse. I didn't know Neil Patrick Harris had kids. Looking it up, I see Anderson Cooper, Dan Savage, Jared Polis, and Perez Hilton have kids as well. Dave Rubin is a new father. It's not wildly common, but it's not an anomaly.
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