good afternoon.

hello to our live stream youtube and c-span. we are thrilled to have you with us today. my name is kimberly begg. i am the president of the clare

boothe luce center for conservative women. we are an all women educational organization that, empowers young women to live happier, freer lives and contribute to a stronger, freer america. it is a confusing time to be a young woman. truth still exists, of course, as do goodness and beauty. but they are harder for women to recognize nonetheless. pursue and attain in a world with new and innovate rejections of the moral law. what is a woman to do when her teachers, social media influencers, peers promote a leftist worldview steeped in lies, lies that celebrate vice virtue disorder over order and animus. of traditional american values. support human flourishing.

well, she can come here to the luce center. she can participate in our internships, summits and, seminars, campus lectures and other programs. she can hear from brave truth tellers like our speaker today who can help her see through lies the culture that sabotage her well-being and that of those around her. she can receive life changing mentorship, meet like minded peers, establish healthy friendship ships, and develop the confidence to embrace a vision of womanhood rooted in eternal truths. before i today's speaker, i want to tell you this the legal scholar erika bach yockey spoke here just a few weeks ago on the crucial topic of inspiring women to lead a life of high purpose, to strengthen their families, communities, country. she was excellent.

what an important message. here's the neat part of the story that relates to today's event. on her way here, one of our attendees listened to a federalist radio podcast with a compelling guest who also shared in message this woman texted me on her drive here and you have to get this guest for an upcoming luce center event. let me just tell you how satisfying it was be able to tell her that that guest, katie foust, had already conferred and to be our next conservative women's network speaker. oh, how thrilled we are to have you here today, katie. i am so honored to introduce you to all of her. to all of you. katie is the founder and president them before us, an organizer and dedicated to defending a child right to their mother and father. she writes and speaks on importance of marriage and

family and is the author of three books, including pro child politics why every cultural, economic and national issue is a matter of justice for children. this book addresses critical societal issues through the lens of what is best for kids. katie's articles have appeared. newsweek public discourse, the federalist, the american conservative and other publications. has appeared on many wonderful shows and podcasts, participating in fascinating discussions with tammi peterson. allie beth stuckey, lila rose, louise perry and others. just this week, she spoke at the heritage foundation and appeared the daily signals problematic women podcast. if i may recommend she is a fantasy follow on ex. you can find her at advo underscore katie. her tweets are uniquely honest and insightful. we are thrilled and so grateful.

have this unapologetic of children's rights with us today. please join me welcoming katie fast. ladies, what a joy to be you today. i did not envision doing any of this 15 years ago. i was a stay at home mom, a pastor's wife, and very, very aversive to the culture wars. but i think like a lot of normies out there, something in culture that sort of pushed us over the line. something was so egregiously wrong. so wildly out of step with whether that was american traditionalism or simple common sense that said. okay, it looks like i need to get in on game here. and so that moment for me was the marriage debate. that when back in 2012 when gay marriage especially was being debated in my home state washington and what i heard the advocates for gay marriage

saying was things like kids don't care if they have two moms or dads. in fact kids are even better if they're raised by two moms than if they're raised by their mother and father. now, to me, i been working with kids long enough to know that what they're really is. kids don't if they've lost their mother or father. because when you're looking at the picture of, a child with two dads, you're looking at a picture of. a child who does not have their mom. when you're looking at a picture of a child with two moms, you are looking at child who's being deprived their father. and after doing youth ministry for a couple decades. after being the assistant director at the largest adoption agency in the world, after becoming an adoptive mother myself and having three of my own children after doing 25 years of counseling, my pastor, husband of people who are going through all kinds of challenges very, often connected to their childhood wounds. i can tell you that there is one thing that children deeply, desperately care about, and it

is whether or not mother and father love them and whether or not their mother and father love each. but i did not hear child centric aspect represented in the conversation around marriage. that debate both in culture and in law was dominated obsess civilly by the feelings desire and identities of the adults. the kids just had to take whatever crumbs were thrown their way. if they were mentioned at in the debate. so that is put me over the line. i was i'm generally very, very agreeable. i, i don't like to make waves. i don't like to lose friends. but when you come for the kids you have crossed my line. so started anonymously blogging because i am a chicken. and i know what these people will do to you if you out yourself. and i got to work out of my arguments and understanding

about the importance of mothers and fathers in, relative obscurity. and then i outed by a very tolerant gay blogger with a massive following who also doxxed the members of my church in an effort to silence me. but in sort a what the enemy means for evil moment. what he ended up doing was expanding my by about 100 fold. like well, now that i can't hide under a pseudonym, i guess now i can submit amicus brief to the obergefell at the supreme court. i guess now i can go to the united nations run workshops on the importance of mothers and fathers. i guess now i can advocate around the world the czech republic and south korea and australia and taiwan on all kinds of matters that impact. and the more that i wrote and the more i spoke and the more that i interviewed, i realized it's not just marriage. it's every topic around, marriage and family that puts adults first. it's always us before them. it's always adults before children. and it needs to be exactly the

opposite. it needs to be done before us. it needs to be children before adults. and if we don't do that, we not only get broken children, we get a broken nation. so i'm going to give you sort of the basics of what the them before us framework looks like in matters marriage and family. we believe that children have fundamental natural rights. many of you are probably familiar with the truth, that children have a natural right to life. and even if our civil government does not recognize that right, we have to fight for it. we want to have it reflect. it both in culture and in law. some of you may be a little more surprised to hear that children also have a natural right to the two people responsible for their existence, their own mother and father. and the amazing thing is, when we defend that fundamental, we solve nearly every major issue

that we are battling back as a country today. because when you look at massive problems like child poverty teen homelessness, teen suicide, high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy, high incarceration rates, there's something there of notice. and that is that all of those demographics are overpopulated with children. and if you were to defend children's fundamental right to be known loved by both their mother and father, you would decimate. and i mean, like take down to 1/10 of the problem we're facing why 90% of homeless youth didn't have a dad in the home. 63% of teen pregnancies come from fatherless households. 71% of high school dropouts don't have a dad. 70 to 85% of men in state run institutions incarcerated did not have a father. there's not anything you can look at. no major issue that we are

starting nonprofits throwing hundreds of billions of dollars try to solve that cannot be solved by securing justice for children at the level of the family. so why is it that this natural right to one's mother and father is so powerful? why is it that if we can say, that children should and endorse and incentivize both parents loving them and loving each other for life? why does it have that level of power to exempt them from the major issues that they would be facing without it? and it's for three reasons. number one, if you can defend right to their mother and father, if they are raised by the two people responsible for their existence, you automatically grant safety and love. now, a lot of the narrative and even a lot of the policy that is being advanced in the marriage and family realm is on the back of biology, doesn't matter. kids just need to be safe, loved. but the answer is if we believe

children should be safe and loved we recognize the biology, mainly because we have been researching family structure for decades and it isn't undeniable fact that biologic parents are the most connected to, invested in and protective of kids. now there are. there are exceptions. there are biological parents who are negligent or abusive. and there are incredible stepparents who fill the gap of that absent or abusive biological parent. but the rule is that up biology advantages children in ways that unrelated adults, especially those that are just in a romantic relationship with the child's other parents, simply don't. so i want you to get your phones out. we're going to do a little on experiment here. a lot of the cultural narratives of our society will tell us things like biology doesn't matter love, makes a family.

there was a very popular book that came out earlier this year called the two parent privilege, which is most of the story. but any two will not do. it's not two adults in the child's life and the mantra that. if the adults are happy, the kids will be happy. you know, was one of the lies that drove us into the divorce epidemic. so if it was true that if the adults are happy the will be happy that any two will do. and that love makes a family then kids who are living with mother and her cohabiting boyfriend would be doing great because they have two parents and the adults are happy and they even have a and a father figure. so i want you to google the words mothers boyfriend for me. get your phone out and mother's boyfriend. because if those cultural lies are true, then those kids are doing great. so when you've had a chance to see some of those returns.

i want you to shout them out. what are you seeing when you google the words mother's boyfriend. she shoots her mother's boyfriend shoots son and kills daughter. what else? like abusing child statistics? abuse child statistics? what else. charged in the death of toddler. a mother's boyfriend. charged in the death of toddler. what else? grooming. was molested by my mother's boyfriend. grooming alert was molested by my mother's boyfriend. and this will go on. it's sorry audience. why? why? abuse by mother's boyfriends? why you. over and over. why the overrepresentation of child abuse on behalf of mother's boyfriend? this will go for pages and pages. you will exhaust yourself. you will never get to the end of this. the reality is that biology affords a level of protection to this simply intending to parent or being in a romantic relationship with the child's other parent never can. never.

if we really believe that children deserve to be safe and loved, we will advance the reality that children have a right to their mother and father. we will endorse it, incentivize it and promote it both policy and in culture. and the refusal to do so is confusion or cowardice. we put very real children in danger of abuse and in danger, death when we believe cultural lies that love makes a family or any two will do. why else is this fundamental to be known and loved by a mother and father so? powerful. first of all, it really does furnish them with the adults who will make sure they're safe and. but number two, only two adults who grant children their life give them something else that not only children, but all humans crave. and that is the answer to the question who am i? it is very hard for a child to answer the question who i. if they can't answer the

question, whose am i. here's another thought experiment. jolly since you guys totally aced your last one. i want you to think about a great work of art, a great novel, a blockbuster movie, some story where a child goes on a search for their long lost mother's boyfriend. anything there? no. raise your hand. anybody? okay. okay. anybody have a story from any genre at any time where a child goes on a search for their long lost missing father. tell me what they are. e.t. and e.t. yeah. star wars. like luke, i am. your stepfather is not very satisfying. what else.

yes. thank gen xer. i see you. yeah. i mean, even like pericles, you know, like shakespeare's been doing this, you know, some of the great everyone's searching their father. why? i bet they had father figures out there. i bet they had nice uncles. you know, to try to fill in the gap. but a father figure does not you who you are. this is an existential question that especially teenagers are wrestling with and we are starving them of some of the most transcendent and, timeless ways for children to answer the question who, am i? this is exactly why in adoption with adoptions, we have wildly swung away from closed adoptions, which the norm in the sixties and seventies to now open adoptions. does anybody have a guess what percentage of adoptions, domestic u.s. adoptions are open? what percentage do you think are open? adoption cities where the child has some knowledge contact our relationship with their first

family. 80. mm hmm. anyone else here. 80. do i get 85? 85? 85. anybody 85, 92. who said 92? you when it's 95. so the default is open. adoption. why? because workers, agencies and even adoptees themselves would say that they benefit from as many connections as possible with their first family, even if they cannot be raised by them. because that adoptive family, those adoptive parents who are better educated, wealthier, spend more time the child, and typically more stable unions than the average family arrangement. the average biological family, they still cannot fully compensate for everything that child has lost. the child still needs to answer, who am i? so is a child's right to the mother and father powerful? they're more likely to be safe and loved. they are granted the answer that

child asks, who am i? and number three, if you're defending children's rights to both parents, you automatically grant them the perfect gender balance in the home. it is amazing to me how much progressives value the male and female voice in every institution except the family they have mandated a variety of states. female representation on public publicly held boards and she have the right political persuasion. they will celebrate. she becomes vp or, is nominated to the supreme court. but the left has relentlessly destroyed the one institution that gets the gender balance perfect 100% of the time. and that is the institution of marriage. now, male and female involvement is not optional in the life of child. mothers and fathers fathers

offered distinct and complementary benefits to children. they approached the child. they talked to the child differently. they disciplined differently. they orient the child to the world differently. let me ask you another. raise your hand hi if you've ever a child thrown up in the air like a baby, a toddler, raise it and keep it really high. okay, look around. look at how many people seen babies thrown up in the air. now, i want you to keep your hand up. if the person throwing the baby was a woman. so we've got a few baby throwing women here. and you are the exception or you've seen done once or twice. but reality is that women don't throw their we we wear our babies. we fasten them to our bodies, carry them around with us all day long. and that actually is emblematic of the distinct ways that men,

women approach child rearing. men tend to play with. women tend to care for. children and i say tend to because i will give my children an occasional occasion like towel snap in the middle of kitchen. right. but generally, i'm the one that is making sure that they are eating their vegetables going to bed on time, that they've done their homework and that they are saying, please thank you. at the end of the emails to the secretary, get out of school early for the golf match. you that's i'm the one that does that. okay. my husband tends to be the one that takes them on adventures with inadequate snacks and keeps them up late at night. when i'm out of town, like bingeing the star wars trilogy, eating only like twizzlers and pizza and dr. and actually that benefits children developmentally in ways that two women or two men never could. women, because of the nature of our interaction with children, hone their fine motor skills. right. it's with mom. you're tying the shoe and coloring and cutting and chopping bananas next to her.

when makes soup, it's who develop children's gross motor skills when they're running to the mailbox, when they're climbing the trees, when they're wrestling in the living room. when they are setting things on fire. okay. and that actually advantages children developmentally in ways that just having never can. so when we understand that these are fundamental child realities, children have a right to their mother and father they benefit from their mother and father. i'll tell you one more thing. they long for love of their mother and father. one of the things we do at them before us is, we catalog the stories of children who have lost their mother and father. some those children had two moms or two dads, and they were safe, loved, and they had prosperity. they had enough money in their they went to good schools, but they hungered for the father that they were missing, hungered for the mother who was absent. and we have a term for this mother hunger. father hunger.

one woman said, you know, when she was raised by two fathers, two loving men, there was no women, her world, no no mother in her life didn't even know that mothers existed until she watched the land before time. as a five year old and realized, oh, my goodness, there's a thing called mother. and it's something that gave birth you. and then she with you every day. and loves you. and i don't have one. and she said. i cried the arms of a teacher that i didn't know before that day. and i never saw. and she said, after that, i went to, every woman in my life, you know, there was a lesbian that came over for dinner or an aunt that i met. and i would go to them and i'd say. will you be my mother? will you be my mother? how about you? and it wasn't because she was not well loved by her two gay dads. it was because she was made for

craved, deserved, and had a right to be known and loved by her. these are unbending child realities. five supreme court justices cannot wish away can not legislate away a child's right to their mother and father. and when we understand that these are unbending child realities. we solve of the problems that we're facing today in matters of marriage and family. we get definition of marriage exactly right. it is not a vehicle of adult fulfillment. from the public policy standpoint, it's not even a sacred union. it is the only institution that unites the two people to whom children have a natural right. their mom and dad. we get the right answer to divorce, which is sometimes when there somebody that is at fault of abuse, abandonment, addiction, and then the courts, public support has to swing towards the innocent spouse and

punish the spouse. that's breaking up the union and failing to uphold their vows. we get the right to modern families and the answer is modern families is just code for child loss. the child had to lose something to be in that family and that's injustice. we get the right answer to reproductive, especially and egg donation and surrogacy, which always intentionally and commercially strips children of their right to their birth mother and or their genetic mother and father and get the right answer to adoption that children who have lost their mother and father are not items be acquired by anybody that wants them. they are the client. a just society will protect nurture that child by furnishing them with both a mother and father so that they can benefit from that distinct maternal and paternal love that benefits their development and satisfy

their soul. so i'll stop there because what i really want is your questions. i want you to stump me. if you ask me the that you're like, but how do i talk about. but what if when somebody asked me this, but how do i interact? the two lesbians next door who have a seven year old boy and i love all like, give me those questions. like, let's send you out here. like fully ready to take on the world on behalf of. just raise your hand. i'll bring them around you. and and then i'll. i never raise my hand first because i hate public speaking. but i am curious of something so i am, you know, i went through

separation 2018 or 15, divorced, 2018, not able to recover in the marriage. horrible situation but i was by really good people with really good advice. and one of the nuggets i received that i have since give to so many other mothers is let them be free to love other boys. and that was really hard for me because satan kept telling me, i want to tell boys, this is not my fault, it's all him and so i've taken that advice and i've really tried to take it to heart and them be free to love their father. yeah and they have been. and they're now 19 through 12. and despite all of the turmoil in their lives, they're pretty they're they're very grounded, balanced. lord, kids, great boys, great. but i've told them all that i cannot tell them why their father and i had to divorce that i love the lord. it's too big of a burden. but i will not lie them so that

when they are adults, they may come me. mm hmm. and i will tell them the truth. my 19 year old has since done that. my 17 year old, i don't know whether he will. but how do i help them through this covering and then processing that ugly reality of the man behind, the mask that they love so much, because that's going to devastate some them, maybe not others. it sounds like have been surrounded by great advice. great advice, right. it's interesting that whether it in marriage or in divorce, the woman does tend be the channel through which the husband has a connection with his children, which is why when men live apart from their children, after two years, 40% of kids never see that father again because the mom is the gateway, right? and even in marriage. a lot of the time, the woman is the one that is sort of facilitating and coaching the father's connection to the child. so it is important that you keep that channel open. you're also doing the right thing in terms of making sure

that they have access and not sharing new information about your with them. you can share your part of the story honestly, but not his part. the story. but i think that the best advice that i have for anybody is in a situation where there is brokenness and loss. is your child experience has experienced that. they're going through grief, they have questions, they're mourning, they've experienced something that is shocking to their system. and what you don't want is for your kids to process that in isolation. you also don't want them processing that with the internet. okay. so what your challenge is is to be the place where they love. you want them remove all of the barriers between them feeling what they're feeling and talking to you about it. you should the safest place for them to say this out loud. that is challenging for you because it can raise feelings of defensiveness where you want to maybe react emote only react to

something that they're saying, especially when they don't have the story exactly right in our we have a our second book is called raising conservative in a woke city. and it is just about like how do you instill your values in your kids inculcate that worldview in them when everything lying to them and we have a rule in there called the no flinch rule which is when your kids say something that shock you, your brain is going what? how you i can't believe that your teacher said that to you or i can't believe your father said that to you. your your brain freaks out. face needs to say thank you for telling me. i'd love to hear about that. yeah, that makes a lot of sense. and you ask a lot of questions because what you don't want is to unnecessarily erect barriers between sharing with you very. there's one study that we have that compares outcomes between adoptees who raised by neither biological parent and children created by -- donation who are

raised always by their biological mother. and then maybe another mother, maybe a single mother, maybe a social father. but very interestingly, on the metric of anxiety or distress, emotional struggles and trust with parents, the adoptees fared better and. it is because adoptive parent s are seeking to mend the wound. they did not choose for the child to experience loss. whereas if the child to talk about their identity struggles, their questions about commodification or whatever it is with their biological mother in, the -- donor situation, they are talking to the that is responsible for loss. so in one of these scenarios, the child is free to process because this adult is seeking to mend their wound and their that them in a better position to genuinely enter into the grief with their child.

this inflicted the wound and so they're much more likely to be defensive and say you should just pick to be alive, kid. you know this technology wouldn't without it. and it pushes kids into isolation. so that's my advice. you're to have to walk that tightrope. thank god you've wise counsel. but my is reduce any every barrier between your kids thinking. i love talking to my mom about this this. how how do we approach ivf sensitively? people who've already received ivf. this is good. so i did not start out. i didn't know much about reproductive technologies when i started this journey. but if you're going to defend a children's to their mother and father, you must be in incredible critique of big fertility because big fertility is victimizing children, not just in the sense of intentionally separating them from a biologic parent, which

somewhere between one third and two thirds of children born through ivf are. but unfortunately is a massive culprit when it comes to victimizing children's to life. it's a very hard pill for us conservatives to swallow because we. love babies. raise your hand. anybody here, love babies. same. and it's the love of babies. it is the protection of babies. and it is the recognition of the inherent human dignity of babies that drives us to be the most stubborn opponents of abortion that same that we need to defend babies from the moment conception requires that we be stubborn opponents of big fertility. why because big fertility destroys more life every year than planned parenthood. when you in for an abortion, when a woman is seeking an abortion, typically it's only

one baby that dies. when you are undergoing ivf rounds of ivf. oftentimes it's 2 to 20 children who are going to die. you know, paris hilton created 20 embryos. unfortunately for, those embryos, they were all male and she wanted a girl. so what do you think is going to happen to those boys? well, the options are for and discard, donate to research, donate to another family. and the donation to another family is a property transaction. by the way, it's not an adoption. so when we talk to our friends with ivf or who had children through ivf. what we say is god for your children. think god that they are one of the 3 to 7% who are born alive. but the vast majority of children who are created through ivf will not even make the transfer. they will be graded out existence because they are. they do all kinds of genetic pre-implantation screening and

screen them out of existence. there are sex selection options. so you can have the boy or girl you want. there's one designer. well, one fertility clinic in beverly hills and. 90% of their clients are not infertile. they simply want to not just select the babies that don't have any disabilities, not just select the boy or girl they want to select eye color of their child. they don't just want a blue, blue eyed child. there's actually five different blue shades of blue eyes that they can select. now, the fertility doctor there is very clear. he says, we're not making with blue eyes where eliminating the children who don't have the right kind of blue eyes that has big fertility. that is ivf, if you believe that children have a right to life from the moment of conception. you have got to say we now have two fronts on the war protect children's right to life. one is abortion and the other is ivf ivf.

so i i recall in florida in the nineties when i lived there, when when gay adoption was on the ballot and it passed the the pitch for lack of a better term was gay couples men mostly but you know later became women. couples would children that were less likely be adopted either because were older either because of their or flat out race. mm hmm. and so i was curious to know now, 20, 30 years later, because it's it's a topic i've followed. mm hmm. how much of that? and i it's probably a rhetorical question ended up being true or whether it's just a big lie. i'm curious to know, just like you talked about big fertility from adoption perspective, what is the what is the corporate culture there? what is really happening? great question. so first of all, we have have a proper understanding of adoption, and that is that adoption is not adults.

a lot of people will say, do lgbt couples have a right to adopt? and i'll say no, absolutely not. but the sweet christian heterosexual couple next door have a right to adopt either. nobody has a right to a child that is not biologically theirs. children who have lost their mother or father have a right to be adopted. they are the client in adoption. the whole narrative, the whole lexicon of adoption, best practice is the best interest of the child. and so unfortunately have gotten adoption wrong because. we see it as a way to complete our family. that might be true some of the time, but that is not the primary role of what we are doing. adoption. so is what about idea about the possibility of gay couples adopting children that are less likely to be adopted? that is true in a lot of places. there are two demographics that are more likely to adopt children, especially older special needs and sibling groups. it's christians and it's gay

couples. and so when you are talking about those harder to place scenarios, not the white drug free infants, for which there are years long waiting list, the undesirables of the adoption world. it is true that sometimes there aren't enough heterosexual married couples adopt the hard cases. and so sometimes it might be the best option for a single woman or a same sex couple to adopt the child if it means they avoid the revolving door of foster care. and for those of us that really believe children should have a mother and father through adoption, the solution is go adopt, you do it. put your hat in the ring. those kids need you. so that's a complex issue and a lot of people bring up i will say, too, that it's a very common tactic. the left and they used it at the early stages. the question about marriage and family. they like to build their case based on what i've heard called

edge cases. you know, they take the narrow, narrow exception and then they make it a rule. for example, you know, when you want to talk about limits on abortion everybody says, well, what about rape and incest. what percentage of abortions take place because of rape or incest? anyone know or less than 1%. so they are taking the exception and then they're making based on the exception. it is the same thing with adoption. there is a very narrow, narrow situation where maybe a gay couple might be the best placement for an adopted child. but it is an edge case. we need to make policy based on the rule and that is that every child has a right to their mother and father. and if lose that right, they deserve to be adopted by a mother and father. thank you for being so. yeah. can you please recommend a book or other resource i have dear

young friends. they're in their thirties, well-educated, did have good jobs. beautiful. three beautiful young children. and they say there is no culture war. hmm. and i don't know. i'd to hand them something that convinces them there is. their children must be very young. yes, they are. yes, i. because when they go to school and home or they start looking at media. you're a parent. if your friends believe in absolute truth, absolute beauty, absolute goodness. what they're going to see is they're probably doing a very good job of shielding their children from that, which is actually admirable. and i think a really important part of training your children up in this world is to actually filter out the distortions of the world as much as possible while exposing them to good true and beautiful. up to the age of ten. and so it will start encroaching on them. i don't if you're going to need to do anything but when they do realize there's a culture war

and that the progressive left is coming for their children and, the lies of the left destroy your children's life, family, mind and body. then you can get raising conservative kids a woke city and they will figure out exactly how to make sure that they inoculate their kids against those lies in age appropriate ways so that their kids know how spot those fabrications stand against it and have a worldview that is reflects the good, true and beautiful, you know, at every age. yeah. all right. is this on. now it is all my. my father was killed in war two when i was age nine. had three younger brothers. the youngest a year and a half. and so essentially, you say i was raised and my mother didn't remarry. however, i would like to make

this suggestion. my mother's father, my grandfather stepped in immediately. he came during the week. monday, friday, had breakfast with my three brothers. i went off a girls school for the day. he was my counselor. he was i felt i addressed him as my grandfather either in mentally, but he the male in my that advised me counseled me i could cry his shoulder and i think can that role when a parent is killed at such a great observation. and i would say the sort of what do we do because fragmentation all around us that we can step into those roles where children are missing out. but i'll also say that there a couple of studies that show that children lose a father specifically to fare better than children who lose a father to divorce. why is that?

because, well, closure, but also everybody mourned with you. nobody pretended like it didn't matter. nobody told you? well her mom. your mom's living her best life. you know. the other thing is like, you're not in your grief, but, you know that your dad didn't want to leave. he would have been there if he could. and children who experience family breakdown because adult desire is elevated above their fundamental rights can't say the same thing. as a matter of fact, in situations of, for example, no fault divorce that broke up a low conflict marriage. so some children who go through divorce, there's a study clearly shows that children whose parents were in a high conflict marriage where there was very clearly something really wrong, can experience some relief from the divorce. it's the 70% of kids who the no fault divorce situation where there seemed to be nothing wrong. who experienced the most distress after their parents

because they don't have an explanation for it. you had an explanation. these kids don't. but they find an explanation. and that explanation usually is it must have been me. i must have been the problem. it was because of me. because there's nothing else that makes for now. they're split homes and split lives and the tumultuous ness that often family breakdown for one word question. though, i have a neighbor that i notice all of a sudden when he pick up his son, he started looking like a woman. hmm. and, you know, i noticed it. but then i got that confirmation from his wife and. was actually happy to hear that she was actually divorcing him in the sense of like acknowledging problems. they're still living together and have been for like the last two years while he's transit shinning. mm hmm. and i, i i'm just like i my

children are going to see this like they're. they haven't noticed it yet, but at some point they will. mm hmm. and if it's not him, it'll be somebody else. or, like, we went to a restaurant and saw a girl with a mustache, but she was clearly dressed like a girl in ways. or i went to a store and a man was dressed like a man, but had earrings make up on a lot of all us. this like real gender confusion. so i was just kind of wondering, how do you and you're kind everyday with your kids like what kind of verbiage you using to affirm their identity, male and female, affirming marriage and affirming as not being a fluid thing. good you know how like what of verbiage do you use to like affirm that kind of honor? because like, we're seeing every day, i mean, it's not just like and there like the odd weird person. it's like everywhere in their face good though explicitly, pointing out the good, true and beautiful especially up to age ten, constantly reaffirming the biological differences.

oh, look at how daddy's throwing the baby up in the air. oh, look at how mommy's tummy is getting bigger because boys, girls, bodies are different, you know? so everywhere that you can't the world is your object lesson. there's another organization that i work with called kina box which you guys will love kind of vox.com and they talk a little bit about like barnyard biology use the animal kingdom. i mean like that's a very safe way to introduce, you know, concepts of male female differences, even like, you know, conjugal unions in ways that aren't very graphic and like how do babies come about? and, you know all of that? so you need to go on offense related to good turn beautiful about the sexes and that's something you need to start from the minute your can talk the part also matters so you have to tell your kids what is about the confused things are happening in their world. it doesn't mean you major on it, but it does mean that you respond if it comes up into their world. and here's another raising conservative kids in a woke parenting tip. you have to get to your kids first.

the first person that tells child about something that is challenging or disturbing or controversial, they will automatically consider the. so if the first time they know that exists is when a fourth grader puts a smartphone in their face, they will be disturbed and and sickened. and three weeks later, go back and say to the fourth grader, what was that? where did that come from? but if mom and dad say, when the kid is in third grade, honey, there's a lot of screens in your life at some point you might see pictures of naked people on there. and it makes you feel really. that's called --. and you can always come to to me and your dad if you have questions about that, then when the smart phone gets put in their face, they're shocked, disturbed and sickened by it. and they go back to you and they say, i saw something the playground today. i think it's that that you said that i might see so you have to in this area, maybe you haven't

noticed, but jimmy's is starting to dress like a woman he is confused and unfortunately he love his body as a man and that's very sad. and if you have questions about that, you can come to your dad in me. doesn't mean you have to give him a big ceremony. you don't have to like introduce the concept of arrogant ophelia with them. yes, but need to know that you know, you need to tell them first because they will notice and they'll go, my mom knows about that. oh, my dad told me that i. might see that. so yeah, challenges abound, but we are on the side of the good. true and, beautiful. and so reality is going to work with us, not against us. i'll say too, since we're actually the books that are here are pro politics, which is most recent publication that out just a couple of weeks ago. and what we tried to do with that project was take the them before us perspective and apply it not just to marriage and,

family, but to energy, to immigration, to the environment, to national security, to education, to pornography, to masculinity and femininity basically every evergreen issue we said, what would happen if you put kids? what would it happen if we actually looked at the national debt through the lens of child protection and what you get is not only justice on behalf of children, but you actually get national thriving. so that is not one that i authored myself because you don't want to hear what i have to say. esg and i but i got justin danoff who was at founding of strive with vivek ramaswamy to write that chapter. and i got tiffany, co-founder of moms for liberty, to write our education chapter. and i got, abby johnson, to write our life chapter. and i billboard chris to write our transgender chapter. and i got neil chatterjee to write our energy. so it's like i conscripted the

top subject matter experts on all these issues that have some of them. you know, grover nark, grover norquist did our taxes. i mean, like i made them give me their life's work in 3000 words through lens of what if we put kids first? so that is what we have outside for you today. and i hope that it will not only be informative, but it will fuel your for justice on behalf of children in every area of and politics and life. thank you. how katie, that was fantastic. thank you so much. and katie has agreed to. stay with us for lunch and. signed some books. her books are available for sale, but before we do that, we have a tradition here at the luce center. we have a beautiful mug for you

with favorite quote by clare boothe luce s, which is courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount. katie i love that katie. thinks thank you. please join us for lunch and the bookselling and the book signing. thank you