I posted this brief review on Facebook last September, but it really belongs here as well.
Katy Faust's book Them Before Us should be high on everyone’s reading list. I have followed Faust’s outstanding work for several years on various social media platforms and this book represents the distillation of much of her research. It is a defense of children’s rights. For too long, our culture has lived “us before them” - putting adult desires above children’s needs (especially adult sexual desires above children's needs). The result has been the wreckage we see all around us - abortion, no fault divorce, fatherlessness, intentional single motherhood, the pain children experience from surrogacy and placement in same-sex households, etc. Virtually all our social ills can be traced back to our rejection of God’s design for family life. This book makes the case that marriage matters - it’s the only proper context for sex, and the original “safe space” for children. It makes the case that biology matters - men and women are different in complementary ways, and there are deep reasons why God designed for children to ordinarily have both a mom and dad who are permanently and exclusively committed to each other. Children need paternal, masculine love and maternal, feminine love poured into their lives. A child has a right to the man and woman who created him, and the man and woman who create a child have obligations to that child. There is no substitute for the God-ordained natural family. Faust shows that legitimate concerns from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum could be met with a renewed emphasis on the vulnerability of children and the importance of marriage/family.