Photo Credit: Moshe Feiglin
Moshe Feiglin

“We fled with the children, but the state of Israel isn’t helping us,” explained two homosexual men who fled their collapsing Nepal hotel with their new surrogate children. “We don’t have diapers or baby formula and soon it will be night and it is starting to rain.”

I pray for their well-being. But something very fundamental is bothering me. Politically, it is entirely foolish for me to get involved in this issue. Homosexuality is a topic that every rookie politician knows to either enthusiastically support or to leave completely alone, lest he commit political suicide.

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The Thought Police who work overtime on these issues put Orwell and Solzhenitsyn in their back pockets. So why on earth am I writing this? After all, they will accuse me of being primitive, dark, fundamentalist, racist, a known ISIS supporter, and worse.

I do not pretend to be objective (as if such a thing exists). I am a believer. I believe in the God of Israel and the values embodied by His Torah. All that I expect is the same measure of honesty from those who disagree with me. Nobody on the other side of this issue is more “objective” than I am.

Why should I get involved? Because I really think that we are in the throes of a destructive process that includes a number of spheres of foolishness: toward society, toward the state, toward morality, and toward Jewish identity. Entire civilizations are collapsing today before our eyes. And since Israel is a young and sensitive society, it would be wise for us to be extremely careful before we play with the foundations of society.

First and foremost, though, it must be stated that surrogate motherhood for homosexual couples is a terrible injustice to the children who are doomed from the day they are born to be bereft of a mother. Recent research shows that children living in same-sex households are twice as likely to suffer from emotional problems. (But who cares? The value of self-fulfillment easily takes precedence over the well-being of the child.)

I know that I will not convince the homosexuals. I know that the traditional, normative majority does not need convincing. But there are growing spheres of society that are simply born into this reality. They do not have time to think about it, they are not used to contemplation or critical thinking about the message they are getting from the Big Brother screen. So if the state lends its hand to it, then apparently the destruction of fetuses from unwanted pregnancies and renting the bodies of Third World women for surrogate pregnancies is somehow fine. It is progressive, enlightened.

Why didn’t he breastfeed the babies?

What?

If he didn’t have baby formula, why didn’t he breastfeed them?

Is this some kind of joke?

No. Not at all. We are in an era in which everything is turned upside down. The simplest truths of yesterday are undermined and then turned on their head. Truth is falsehood and falsehood is truth. War is peace and peace is war. It is Orwell at his very best.

In this type of era there is no choice but to go back to the basics. Why is it that the homosexual couple that brought children into this world via a surrogate process in Nepal and then were suddenly disconnected from supplies of baby formula did not breastfeed those babies?

Because they don’t have breasts for feeding babies.

In other words, suddenly, when we peel off all the layers of progressivism and enlightenment, when the quaking earth leaves you and your babies alone – without intermediaries – suddenly it turns out that men don’t have lactating breasts. A man cannot nourish a newborn.

We can conclude, of course, that anybody unable to breastfeed must walk around 24/7 with spare baby formula. You never know when disaster will strike. This is the natural, logical, technically-true conclusion of all the ostriches.

But might there not be a deeper conclusion? Perhaps only a mother can supply a baby’s physical needs? Perhaps there is a spiritual parallel to the womb? To breasts? Perhaps there is an emotional foundation – spiritual milk – that a mother and only a mother can give a baby? And perhaps – perhaps – enticing a woman from the Third World to give birth to a baby that she will never see is cruel? A horrible On-Off? And perhaps we have something inside us that is beyond what we can see and sense? A soul?

I have always been repulsed by the concept of “making babies” – as if children are made out of play-dough and we produce them. The recklessness with which we stop the development of life on the one hand, and create it in a twisted process on the other, has always given me the chills. Isn’t some humility in the face of the wondrous riddle of life required? Suddenly we are masters of the universe. God is nothing compared to us. We suddenly decide that we are smarter than Him or than evolution or whatever you think created this wonder that we will never understand. We decide that a child does not need a mother. After all, we have baby formula.

“The state of Israel is not helping,” cries the man in Nepal.

Have we gone crazy?

What do you want? That the state should breastfeed your babies?

The poor baby needs a mother. A real mother! Only a normative marriage can supply that basic need.

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Moshe Feiglin is the former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. He heads the Zehut Party. He is the founder of Manhigut Yehudit and Zo Artzeinu and the author of two books: "Where There Are No Men" and "War of Dreams." Feiglin served in the IDF as an officer in Combat Engineering and is a veteran of the Lebanon War. He lives in Ginot Shomron with his family.