Hi, my name is Frank Schaeffer, and today I want to talk about the liberal death wish. Now, before you get me wrong, let me quickly add that I am a harsh critic of the right, the religious right from which I come. Today’s sycophant Trump-worshipping Republican Party, Donald Trump, the most corrupt president the United States has ever had. And anybody who watches my commentaries, It Has to Be Said, or Duty to Warn, or reads my new book, The Gospel of Zip, will know where I’m coming from.
That said, when we look at why so many people seem to have turned against the American left, even electing Donald Trump in reaction, and how far out the right wing and the conspiracy theorists have become, there’s also room for a little introspection. And one of the things I want to say, which may surprise you, is that the proof of what I’m saying about the liberal death wish is there for us to look at in the success and the moral victory of the right for gay men and women to marry. The reason gay marriage became legal in the United States is because the gay rights movement tapped into the reality of human biology. And they did that in two ways. First of all, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt through their own lives, as well as psychology, science, neuroscience. And biology that same-sex attraction is as natural as heterosexual attraction. And it is a usual phenomenon going right back into pre-history. Every recorded human history includes homosexual love, homosexual connection, gay men and women from the beginning of time.
But the second thing the gay rights movement did in legalizing gay marriage was to tap into the common, normal human experience of sexuality and attraction leading to more than just mundane, random orgasms. The fact of the matter is, by tapping into the deeply rooted compunction to love, to marry, to mate, to have children, gay men and women, won over an enormous proportion of Americans to their side, including people who came from conservative religious backgrounds like me.
I’m one of those people they won over.
Now, I left my evangelical religious background long before the idea of gay marriage in the United States became a political tool and trope of both the left and the right, and the arguments between all factions.
But that said, It was not a difficult thing for me, who comes from a traditional religious background, to talk to my gay friends 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. People like Mel White, who was a gay rights activist who came out of a religious background like me, who was the editor on a film series that I made called How Should We Then Live? that propelled my father, Francis Schaeffer, the theologian, to international fame, along with the book companion. And then later we made an anti-abortion film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race, that most historians credit with bringing the evangelical movement into the so-called pro-life camp. That’s my background. So when I look at the phenomena of gay marriage and how impossible it seemed to gay rights activists, let alone to their opponents, not so many decades ago, the reason the gay rights movement won was that far from being some outlandish idea, the idea of the right to love and to share convinced many people.
Why?
Not because of ideas of sexuality and same-sex attraction first, but because the right to love and the ability to mate and procreate and start families is hugely attractive to most human beings for a simple reason. It is the way we evolved to survive. It has nothing to do with women’s studies or left-wing politics or right-wing politics. It is a shared phenomenon in all cultures. And because the gay rights movement tapped into that, there was tremendous moral energy to their argument. And they won. And they should have won. Again, for two reasons.
One, same-sex attraction is real. And people are born with that attraction in the same way that I was born as a heterosexual, with heterosexual attraction, and I’ve been married for 56 years to Genie, and we have three grown children and five grandchildren, three of whom I do daycare for or did when they were little. Now they’re all in high school, and I’m going through another empty nest syndrome. But when my gay friends talk to me about their desire to marry and to share in the joys of what I understood to be the foundation of my own life, which was my closest human sexual friendship and partnership with my wife, Genie, multiplied into my friendship with my children, nobody had to explain to me why this was right and why it felt right and why it was moral.
Okay, so where is this liberal death wish I’m talking about?
It’s that in our time, political liberalism has pushed the envelope. Of individual liberties around sexuality, drugs, gambling, suicide, as well as sex and sexual practices, at exactly the same moment, the technological process has given a platform to not only every antivirus conspiracist and whack job out there, but to anybody with an opinion or complaint against things that most people through history have assumed are, and I use the word again, normal. Family love, marriage, devotion, partnership. And there has been, since the 1930s and 40s, a movement, especially in the academic liberal circles, against traditional religion that has spilled over into what has to be called an anti-family sentiment, anti-marriage, anti-sexual fidelity, anti-monogamy.
Now, weirdly enough, When this butts up against the gay rights movement and the right to marry, you can see the difference between a traditional view, which, by the way, the right to marry amongst gay men and women upholds the right to bond, connect with aspirations to lifetime connection. The old hackneyed phrase, “someone to grow old with,” which, by the way, I’m doing right now at age 73 with my wife, who’s 74.
Thank God for her.
Thank God for this union we have.
Someone to drive me to doctor’s appointments and have sex with! Someone to reminisce about the Tom Stoppard plays we went to, like Night and Day, where we saw Diana Rigg starring on the London stage one day long ago.
All the way up to the granola Genie makes that I ate for breakfast this morning and then shared with my dog, Zip, who loves to lick the bowl out. This warm connection, this lifetime of commitment and love. Now, not everybody gets there and some people get divorced. OK, fine. But that was always an ideal. And it wasn’t just a “Christian ideal” or a “religious ideal” or approved by the Roman Catholic Church or Protestant evangelicals or right wingers. But these days you would think it would be because the left has a family problem. Progressive messaging, whether it’s in The Guardian or The New York Times or The New Yorker, Often seems to side with and devalue, and deny and deconstruct the value of family life and hold up and celebrate solo living and careers.
As if somehow, human evolution has taken us to a new place where we no longer need love and connection. The exact opposite of the gay rights movement trending towards legitimizing marriage and love shared by heterosexual people. Hey, we all understand each other. My partner, who’s my producer, Ernie Gregg, who produces my podcast and my online presence and will put this video out, visited me with his husband, Rock, who’s a pastor. And they came to Genie’s and my home. And we all understood each other perfectly. Because what united us was this commitment to the idea of a relationship that binds and lasts and defines the rest of our life. I don’t need that explained to me. What I need explained to me, however, is articles in The New York Times, such as the one that was headlined, “Married Heterosexual Motherhood in America is a Game No One Wins.”
What? What? Or “Divorce led me to my happily ever after” in the Washington Post.
Or “Women who stay single and don’t have kids are getting richer” in Bloomberg.
Or “Why are many single women without children so happy?” in Psychology Today.
Really? You see, the thing is, once you decide that somehow marriage and connection and childbearing and family are not as important as career and money and education, and all those stupid sapphire cards or platinum cards that get you a lounge or a special flight or a good deal on business class, and somehow all of this crap is held up as more important and more desirable. Then the love I had when last night watching a wonderful medical documentary, Genie had broken her foot a couple months ago, and I’m sitting there rubbing her foot because I love her and because we’re connected for life and we’ve been together 56 years. Now, she’s had a fancy career for part of her life. She managed a publishing company and I’ve had bestsellers and I was on Oprah and I’ve done all this fancy stuff. But at age 73 and long before that, when I was taking care of my grandchildren, none of that measured up to the truth of what actually matters most in my life and is in line with every hunter-gatherer group that ever lived that also bonded and mated and cared for each other. And when you look at young women on the left now viewing marriage as not for them, or at least not their top priority.
All the statistics are bearing out that people on the left are marrying less and connecting less than people on the right, You have to understand that in the future, we’re going to pay a tremendous penalty for this. Now, that’s why I wrote this book, The Gospel of Zip.
Because I’ve offered a challenge to people today. And I’ve done it for free by recording this online so that you can look at it on YouTube right now for nothing.
Or you can go to Amazon and do me a favor and buy it.
That would be nice because I’m still trying to earn my living, even in my retirement as a writer.
But I believed in the message of this book enough to put it online for free. Why? Because people read less today. And in the last decade, a chasm has opened between conservative and liberal young men and women who share the life that I’ve had or want to between the left, which tends to denigrate marriage and connection, and the right. Now, why has the left taken this turn? I don’t think most left-wing people hate children or marriage or connection. But I just want to again put this in the context of gay marriage. If the gay rights movement had simply been about the right to promiscuity and the legalization of homosexual sex, it would not have nearly had the traction it had by tapping into a much deeper and more ancient form of human existence, which is bonding and marriage. If it was all about everything but family values, it would have absolutely no following within the evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic community.
And the hypocrisy of the evangelical and the Roman Catholic communities following Donald Trump, this thrice married adulterer accused of rape, or JD Vance, who is the creature of Peter Thiel and these other titans of the online world, this ephemeral, strange world we’ve now descended into, who are selling the idea of genetic engineering of perfect children and who want to remake the human race.
And I did a whole commentary on the fact that, Peter Thiel, perhaps, is not God, and we don’t want him and the tech bros remaking the human race.
Tech bros like Elon Musk, who, by the way, doesn’t give money to cultural things or to beauty or to art or art museums or galleries or libraries or any of the things that traditionally billionaires gave to, but instead is trying to build this brave new universe of people just like him, breeding lovelessly, spreading their seed, as it were, to biblically paraphrase, but without love. Instead, what we find today on the left is people who, instead of standing up for family values, instead of standing for the beauty of love and children as more important than career, we have what’s been called the Midas Mindset that prioritizes making money and especially career. Work is viewed as the source of greatest happiness, of the most meaningful life. Focusing on love, marriage and starting a family, by contrast, does not merit nearly the same devotion. Ironically, everywhere except the gay community that still fights for and treasures this relatively new event of the right to marry as a gay couple, that see the value of this in contrast to the heterosexual elites in our universities and other places, of whatever color or sexual orientation, who seem to.
Feed this idea that we found in an ABC poll recently where Gen Z’ers of 18 to 29 who voted for Kamala Harris, especially women, ranked getting married and having children almost dead last. Almost dead last in their personal definition of, quote, success. Instead, women gave top billing to having a job career that you find fulfilling or having enough money to do the things you want to do. Well, I would stack my entire life experience of family and children that I talk about in The Gospel of Zip, which draws on the wisdom of my dog that is all about connection rather than career, all about love rather than money, and transposes what I’ve learned from my dog about neighborliness and being my wife’s best friend as well as lover into the larger world.
And I want to issue a challenge today and just say, you know, you can have your leftist credentials and your liberal credentials intact about religion or anything else. But if the left continues to commit suicide by denigrating and ignoring what I’ve written about in this book and ignore the message herein, which is that when you get too out of line with human reproductive biology, when you get too out of line with the way humans have survived for millennia, then you are pushing up against reality in a way that won’t work.
And when you see the level of suicide and depression and malaise amongst young people who don’t have connections to whom marriage or all these things seem like a distant reality, if anything at all, and it’s all about job and career, these are not satisfying things. And my book talks about that. And so I would say that the left is committing suicide finally in one other very literal way that the gay community has been very wise to avoid in their dedication to marriage. Ironic, isn’t it? And that is that the left wing actually is now having far less babies than people on the right. Because this propaganda that starts with people like Kinsey, who back in the 40s deified promiscuous sex, and in his case, pedophilia, because he was a pedophile who used to masturbate babies to orgasm to try to see if children could have sex at an earlier age.
He and his researchers did things like that. And somehow the left decided to go with Kinsey and his view of sexuality and promiscuity, whereas the gay community fought for marriage and connection. At a later time, ironic, isn’t it, that it was the left that identified with this pedophile researcher who made a pseudo-scientific basis, very much like our anti-vaccine people today, pseudoscience, that somehow sexual monogamy and commitment and marriage and childbearing was a construct of Christian values that we needed to move beyond so we could free ourselves. Well, if you look today that liberal adults rate in one study after another as less happy and more likely to report that they are lonely, as noted in research by many, many studies,
And the many commentators on the left, nevertheless seem oblivious to this fact and embrace even more individualistic career focus pathways day by day, and sell this to scores of young people and to young women, and don’t put these two things together that this life choice leads to unhappiness.
This is a death wish.
And it’s a death wish in two ways. Psychologically, spiritually, it is a death wish because it leaves us empty. If I look back on my life and think that I’d put everything into my career and not into my family, at this point, I’d be suicidal. Because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized what’s valuable in life. And it’s not all that bullshit I used to chase when I was younger. But the left continues to push that with its articles about how divorce is great and no children are terrific and so forth and so on. They don’t represent the majority of the human race or anything close to it. Nor do they represent the gay men and women who have fought for marriage rights, who wanted the same privileges that everyone else had. So what you have to understand is that the greatest shot at happiness is not what the left is selling. And as a result, because younger people have been immersed in leftist propaganda, they are not marrying and they are saying they won’t have children. And at the same time, they are increasingly unhappy. But the cost of the devaluation of family life by the left is not just psychic. Because people on the left are also social and political and civilizational animals. And by delaying and forgoing family fusion and formation and love, the left as a group seems poised to lose ground in American life. Literally, they aren’t having the babies.
And this should worry, my fellow–Yes, I just said fellow–liberals! You have to realize that the possibility of a better future is conditioned on the possibility of having a future at all. And the left is checking out of the future in a literal sense of not having children, and so the death wish is literal, just in demographics. Right-wing conservative people are having babies and, yes, happier lives than left-wing liberals who have bought into this anti-family bullshit that somehow every article you read in The New York Times that glorifies some brand new thing, whether it’s divorce or separation or polyamory or whatever it may be, always this sort of grinding, stupid idea that came out of the 1940s with Kinsey and kind of extrapolated into the present.
This is a literal death wish for happiness. And it’s a death wish for the number of people we have who in the future will be voting for progressive candidates. And it’s really, really stupid because progressives instead should be fighting not only for child care and for pregnancy and for care of mothers and visiting nurses and all the groundswell of things that people need in order to have families. But if we want to tap into the greatest resource of all, which is our own biological history, what gives us happiness?
I throw this book out there as a challenge, and I throw it out there as a challenge to my liberal friends, as well as to conservative people. To conservatives, the challenge is this: I am a pro-choice liberal with feminist point of view, but I find my greatest joy in caring for my grandchildren and in the love I have for my wife. So I challenge you conservatives who think that all liberals are anti-family. Frank Schaeffer’s not. And here’s a book to prove it, The Gospel of Zip, which you can buy on Amazon right now on Kindle or as a paperback or watch for free in case you’re saying to yourself, oh, he’s just trying to make a buck. No, it’s all online. It’s been out a few weeks and it’s had 4,000 views already on YouTube, and you can go to thegospelofzip.com and either link to buy the book or go to YouTube and watch it for nothing. But I throw this out as a challenge to my conservative friends that think all liberal are anti-family bigots. I’m not.
I also throw this out as a challenge to my liberal friends who have been indoctrinated at every level of education to believe that career and money, this Midas view of the world, is what brings happiness. It doesn’t.
And I would just say The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian and these other papers of record that always print these stories or opinion pieces by people denigrating marriage, denigrating connection, denigrating family, denigrating child care, have made a real and tragic mistakes. And they have killed the future of the left, literally, because there will be less people born in liberal households, far less, and the right is going to win.
But they’ve also killed us psychologically because it’s a lie. It is a lie. The greatest joy in life, as the gay community recognized when it fought for gay marriage, comes through connection, fidelity, love, care, selflessness, and sharing.
And that’s what family is about.
