Liz talks with Glenn Stanton, Focus on the Family’s Director of Global Family Formation Studies about Chip and Joanna Gaines featuring a gay couple with twin boys on their new series Back to the Frontier. As evidence of the prevalence of the normalizing of LGBTQ families, this development has caused quite a stir on the internet, as the Gaines profess Christian faith and values. Glenn wrote about this timely topic recently in the Daily Citizen. Stanton can break down the problematic elements of this development for your audience, highlighting the ethical dilemmas with not only the couple, but their
00:00:01 Introduction of Glenn Stanton and Episode Topic
This is Liz Franzel with Crawford Media Group, and today our guest is Glenn Stanton, Focus on the Family’s Director of Global Family Formation Studies. And we’ll be talking about the controversy surrounding the new Chip and Joanna Gaines series, Back to the Frontier. Welcome to our program, Glenn.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s good to be with you, Liz. Thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER 01 :
Glenn, tell our listeners about this new series and what the controversy is all about.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, Chip and Joanna Gaines have been like a crazy popular couple. And, you know, all their, you know, fixer upper show and Magnolia Empire and everything. And then they’ve moved into television and they have produced a number of television series. But this new one that they have called Back to the Frontier is kind of sounds like a pretty cool idea for a show. Basically, it’s three families. one from Alabama, one from Texas, and one from Florida, where they hang up their modern, connected lifestyle, and they move and become like 1800s homesteaders up in off-the-grid life in Alberta, Canada. And you just kind of get to observe how they adjust to that. And, you know, it’s like a show. It’s a show I would watch. It sounds pretty cool. But one of the problems is Chip and Joanna Gaines, in picking their three families, picked two guys who are married and have two boys. And how they got these two boys and the kind of family that they formed is really what is very, very concerning and should really alarm everybody. And that’s what has gotten Chip and Joanna Gaines a lot of attention. attention lately that I’m sure that they didn’t want, but they deserve it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right. So, you know, we’re talking about traditional family values and a biblical ethic of marriage and family, and that’s not exactly what they’re promoting.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, it’s not. This couple, this couple, they… In social media, just a couple of weeks ago, we’re very proud about saying these guys, Joe Riggs and Jason Hanna, they’re both from Dallas, and they said that they wanted to be super upfront about being on this series because they see it as, quote, a great, amazing opportunity to normalize same-sex couples and same-sex families. And the funny thing, if you know anything about these guys’ story… you know, the way that they came about obtaining, they really purchased these two boys and they did it through brand new fertility technology. And the irony is a family like them would never exist on the frontier because they had to rely on manipulating science and manipulating human fertility in order to arrange for the creation of and purchase and selling of the two boys that live with them. And, of course, I mean, like that’s nothing that anybody can celebrate.
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, and it’s interesting because, like you said, starting with the two, Joe and Jason, you know, they’re – I only read the bio and then I looked them up, but they’re quite – flashy is the word that comes to mind –
SPEAKER 03 :
But attention seeking is the one that comes to my mind.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. Tell us tell us how they went about, you know, getting their eggs. And that’s a whole controversy in itself.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, it is. And here’s I mean, I’m going to tell you my experience just as a researcher and a writer. Like, I don’t know anything about these guys. So I just do a little bit of research, and I find a Dallas Morning News article on these two guys from 2014. And this was a very splashy piece that the Dallas Morning News did on these two guys who had just recently gotten married, and now they were basically crowdsourcing the money that they needed in order to get married. the new baby that they wanted. And so here’s what they did. Basically, they raised a whole bunch of money and they had a good bit of money themselves because they’re both quite wealthy from their careers. And they got 43 eggs from a 22 year old South Texas anonymous woman. Okay. This woman is the biological mother of those babies because these eggs created the two boys that they’re raising. And so what are two guys going to do with 43 eggs? Well, they fertilized every one of them. The Dallas Morning News story says, and these guys joke about producing their contribution to this from watching gay porn. There’s a whole paragraph in the article on that. And 43 of the eggs were fertilized. They took two of the eggs And they implanted them in a surrogate that they hired. Now, the surrogate is a black woman. That’s really neither here nor there. But these guys are white. The egg donor mama was white. Here’s the most concerning thing, though, is. This surrogate woman, she is married to a man and they have a 10 year old child at the time. And she says that being a surrogate for other people was a part-time job for her. So these two guys basically hired an anonymous woman to be an egg producer for them. And then they hired a womb to incubate and gestate these kids for nine months. And then after it’s done, both women get paid. And these kids don’t have a biological mom because these two guys just want two kids for themselves. And there is nothing ethical about that. Objectifying womanhood, commodifying womanhood and commodifying a woman’s womb just to produce what these guys want. And now these two boys who they call their twins and they’re not really twins. They just are the same children from the same biological mother. And I mean, this is like this is just nuts. This is nothing to celebrate. And again, like I said earlier, the great irony is. You can’t produce a family like this on the frontier because there’s nothing normal about it. That is exactly why Joe and Jason wanted to be on this show, to normalize something that clearly is not normal.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, not only that, the other 41 eggs, they were all fertilized. Basically, they had life. And, you know, we as Christians and along with God, we’re pro-life. And so basically, 41 children were aborted.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, what these guys said was that they froze them. They’re frozen somewhere. And so, yeah, they’re not technically aborted, but there are 41 little human beings, and that is exactly what a fertilized egg is. It is the earliest stage of being human, and they just discarded them, completely discarded them. They warehoused them somewhere. And, like, there is nothing humane or civilized or kind or praiseworthy about about that. And so when you say they aborted them, they aborted them in the sense of like they just cast them off. And who knows, you know, who knows what’s going to happen with them. But it’s such a shameless disregard of the sanctity of life, the sanctity of human procreation, the sanctity of mothers and fathers. And all of this is because two fabulous guys who are super excited about themselves want special kind of families. And in order to deny these children, these two boys, their mother, just because these guys get what they want, I mean, nobody can agree that that’s an ethical thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
And that kind of leads me to my next question is that, you know, we as Christians, how is the church dealing with the whole LGBTQ movement according to the Bible? You know, we are to love others and lead them to Christ. But I’m seeing a lot of greasy grace is what I call it as accepting everybody and, hey, it’s okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, here’s the deal, and it’s greasy grace and it’s sloppy thinking. A little phrase I always have is, folks, it’s born again, not born yesterday. Don’t be dumb. Here’s the deal. God loves everybody, but God doesn’t love everything we do, or he can’t love every idea. We cannot love every idea. Every human being, regardless of how screwed up they are, how many mistakes they make, how… how twisted they are, like they are to be loved and cared for. But we do not have to love or accept or embrace every idea. And individuals who do things that are clearly bad, clearly harmful, clearly selfish, they need to be denounced for those choices, for those actions. And we can walk and chew gum at the same time. And Chip Gaines, bless his heart, and I say that in a sweet southern sort of way, he says, why don’t you think about maybe just listening to these guys? And in an article that I wrote, that’s exactly what we did, Chip. We listened to them. We listened to how they manipulated nature to get the boys that they got involved. And there is nothing praiseworthy about that. And none of us, nobody should stay silent about that. So we as Christians should never be bullied when we hear, like, when we have our compassion and our kindness weaponized against us to say, dude, I thought you guys were the loving people. You know what? We are the loving people. But we also, there’s something called right and wrong. There’s something called gravity. There’s something called right. And we have to call out wrong when we see it. Romans 12, 9 says, love must be sincere, but hate what is evil and cling to that which is good. And that’s what we must do in our daily lives and discern those things. And that’s exactly what Christians are doing here when they’re calling out the gains for this choice.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, you know, the ultimate voice in this is Jesus. You know, that saying, what would Jesus do? Well, Jesus did call out sin. And God loves us too much to leave us where we are.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, and that’s exactly right. And that’s the thing, is love embraces, it’s warm, it’s kind. But every parent knows that love says really hard things sometimes. And love… warns people when they’re heading in danger. I mean, a parent who does not do that to either their young or even adult children is not a loving parent. And so we understand that in normal life, but in the LGBT world of politics, we have really confused that, and we’ve really perverted the idea of love, that love is never saying anything ugly or critical about And that’s just an absolute perversion of that big idea and that value of love.
SPEAKER 01 :
Exactly. We’re visiting with Glenn Stanton. He’s the Focus on the Families Director of Global Family Formation Studies. And we’ve been talking about the controversy surrounding the new Chip and Joanna Gaines series called Back to the Frontier. Glenn, tell us, our listeners, where they can find out more about Focus on the Family. And I know you have a lot of biblical resources on your website.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, we do, and we write a lot of this kind of stuff to help Christians discern the various issues that they confront. But they can go to FocusOnTheFamily.com and DailyCitizen.org. It’s a place where I write and a number of my colleagues here write, and I have an article at Daily Citizen on that. Chip and Joanna Gaines and this whole thing. It is titled Chip and Joanna Gaines Platform Couple to Normalize Same-Sex Families. And again, that’s found at Daily Citizen, which you can find at Focus on the Family.
SPEAKER 01 :
Glenn, thank you so much for joining us today.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you. It’s good to be with you. And thank you for having me. And thank you for being willing to talk about this topic because it’s a critically important one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Absolutely. I think it’s important that we bring these issues to light and, you know, bring God’s biblical foundation to light also and to be prevalent in our walk with God. So thank you so much.
