Converting Conservatives: The Importance of Moral Consistency
Recently, my wife Deborah sent me a YouTube video of Michael Knowles’ speech at a Young America’s Foundation event held at Clemson University. Therein, Knowles addressed the question of who is to blame for the evils of surrogacy.
The background to the discussion is recent growth in the practice of same-sex couples “purchasing children”—as he puts it—via surrogacy and in vitro fertilization. He states that political liberals enthusiastically support this development, while many political conservatives find it “abhorrent.” Yet, he contends, “even some self-styled conservatives celebrate it.”
Some may find it surprising that this conservative Republican political commentator places the chief blame not on the homosexual couples themselves but rather on “capitalism unconstrained by morality” and what he calls “the commodification of children.” For those who know that Michael Knowles is a practicing Catholic, that fact may be less surprising. He is simply following the principles of Catholic social teaching, which—while explicitly rejecting communism and socialism—also opposes “unbridled capitalism.”
Essentially, Knowles’ charge is that political conservatives, who often style themselves as the morally superior party, are inconsistent with respect to certain political and moral stances and practices. While many of them are against IVF or surrogacy for same-sex couples, they support it for themselves or for other heterosexual couples. In response, Knowles offers arguments against IVF and surrogacy in general, showing why they are immoral in-and-of-themselves and not merely depending upon who is requesting them.
Before I watched the video myself, Deborah insightfully expanded upon Knowles’ arguments by applying the same principles to two other analogous situations: so-called “gender affirming care” (especially for minors), on the one hand, and various forms of contraception, on the other hand. Her comments could be summarized as follows: (1) Many conservatives are rightly opposed to hormonal “treatments” and surgical procedures that attempt to alter minors’ (or anyone’s, if they are more consistent) sexual phenotype; (2) These same conservatives are often okay with mutilating their own bodies via hormone treatments (e.g., “the pill”) or elective surgeries (vasectomies and hysterectomies) that intentionally cause healthy organ systems to stop functioning properly; (3) This is morally inconsistent. The premise that “such procedures are not healthcare” applies to both sets of practices, not just the former.