On Thursday, right-wing Christian nationalist podcaster Seth Gruber had big feelings about gay people participating in adoptions or surrogacies or both—he wasn't very clear—so he spewed his thoughts onto Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) where bigoted content is routinely supported.
Ironically, Musk himself has used artificial insemination (IVF) and surrogacy for an undisclosed number of his 14 children—it may be most or it may be all—in part so Musk would be able to choose the biological sex of each embryo.
His ex-partner, Canadian singer Grimes, disclosed they used a surrogate for one of their three children with Musk. His estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson, disclosed her father used IVF to choose only male sexed embryos for implantation with his ex-wife, Canadian writer Justine Wilson, partially explaining why Musk was enraged that Vivian's gender is female.
Was Gruber also condemning Musk?
At 8:42am on May 28, Gruber posted:
"Gays should be banned from buying children. We fought a war to end the practice of buying and selling people and now the gays are bringing it back in the name of 'progress.' Evil then. Evil now."
Not getting adequate atta-boys on his first post, Gruber decided to throw the United States' slave trade into the mix.
Gruber compared anyone who chooses to adopt a baby or to use a surrogate (again, it's unclear WTF he's prattling on about) to the plantation owners of the antebellum South.
So at 3:44pm, the self-proclaimed "proud Christian nationalist" posted:
"Those who buy babies would have bought [B]lacks. Both are justified based on the 'desires' & alleged 'rights' of rich elites. But in every case, innocent people are harmed and treated as property. Today’s gay’s were yesterday’s plantation owners. Make buying humans illegal again!"
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Gruber's posts lacked the context to support any of his claims.
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Was Gruber referring to the Civil War or the fight against Christian nationalist Nazis in WWII?
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Gruber's strong anti-surrogacy, anti-adoption, pro-abortion stance was unusual for someone who proclaims himself to be pro-life.
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Many were confused about what Gruber thought he was expounding on, since nothing was clearly explained.
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Between 106,000 and 120,000 children are adopted in the United States each year. Of those, only about 35,000 involve same-sex couples.
Between 2,000 and 4,000 babies are born via surrogacy in the U.S. each year, but because of the nature of surrogacy, the sexuality of the parents isn't tracked.
Surrogacy is banned in eleven countries in Europe, three countries in Asia, and restricted to heavily regulated altruistic surrogacy in the states of Nebraska and Louisiana and the countries of Australia and New Zealand.
But surrogacy is still chosen as an alternative path to parenthood by people across the globe, requiring some people to travel to another state or country to become parents.
Statistics on U.S. surrogate births don't show how many are for people who live outside the country, nor the sexualities of the parents.
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