David Rubin is a podcaster who “left the Left,” largely over disagreements about the importance of free speech. Rubin is also in a same-sex “marriage” and recently announced two surrogate pregnancies. Commentator Bethel McGrew ventures into why that’s a problem, and why it’s strange that so many conservatives lined up to congratulate Rubin.

After Dave Rubin tweeted that he and his partner were welcoming two IVF babies later this year, it didn’t take long for some wag to make an Office meme juxtaposing their glossy reveal picture with Pete and Chasten Buttigieg’s infamous “hospital bed” photo. As the line goes, “Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures.”

In fact, there is one significant difference: While Pete and Chasten were holding adopted newborn twins, Dave and David hold ultrasounds of babies in surrogate wombs, carrying their own genes — one matched to each man with a shared egg donor. It’s the culmination of a long and costly process for the couple, which Rubin began documenting in Don’t Burn This Book and describes at more length in a video announcement. As the Twitter reveal went viral, congratulations began streaming in from some surprising sources, including anti-CRT firebrand Chris Rufo, BlazeTV, PragerU, Libs of Tik Tok, and other self-styled “right-wing” media voices. Even Ron DeSantis’s press secretary joined the chorus.

Matt Walsh was one who didn’t join that chorus, saying, “There are indeed many ‘conservatives’ who’ve surrendered these fights, but I’m not one of them and will never be one.”

For his part, Rubin says “most people just want to live and let live,” and he doesn’t “see any real issue anymore with conservatives and gay people.”

Conservatives are not anti-homosexual, but what does it mean to be conservative in this context?

In a new video, BlazeTV podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey goes on record that she “definitely disagreed” with her distributor’s decision to make a statement “that seemed to be representative of the company as a whole.” Speaking for herself, she argues compellingly that with no commitment to biblical morality or the nuclear family, the center cannot hold. Conservatism shall not live by anti-wokeness alone. “We can be anti-woke, we can be anti-left-wing, we can be anti-post-modern nonsense together. But you can only get so far playing defense. You can only get so far saying what you are against. You can’t win if you’re not building, and you can’t build without a foundation.” Stuckey also notes the irony that many of the same people congratulating Rubin spent that week protesting Lia Thomas’s ill-gotten NCAA championship. If they’re so concerned about “female erasure,” what of the women “erased” in Dave and David’s announcement picture — both the surrogate mothers and the egg donor, selected on the egg-shopping equivalent of Tinder? (That’s Rubin’s analogy, not mine.)

This is a sorry imitation of family, and it does a serious disservice to women and children made commodities for the benefit of two men. McGrew continues:

But let’s, for a moment, be fair to Dave and David: They are going through motions that many infertile straight couples have already normalized for them. Though of course, for straight couples, infertility is a bug, not a feature. For gay couples, the elaborately abnormal is by design the only path to an imitation of the normal. As Rubin jokes in his announcement, “It wasn’t as if Mother Nature was on our side.” This means that, in practice, the problem of gay parenting and the problem of the lab baby aren’t fully separable.

McGrew also notes Rubin’s support of abortion as the “right of women” only to say they’d “terminate the pregnancy” of a disabled child before concluding:

As I gauged reactions after Rubin’s announcement, many said that while the lab baby/surrogacy angle was the most disturbing element for them, their concerns wouldn’t vanish if that element were removed. The maternal void would remain.

The two pictures may in some important senses be different. They may not raise all of the same questions. And yet, they are also the same picture, in that they extend the same artfully curated invitation to normalize. They are two variations on the same theme: man’s willful refusal to listen to Mother Nature, when Mother Nature is trying to tell him something.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.