Family is a terrible investment — unless you want to be human



Mark exited his family group chat after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and, shortly after, stopped speaking to his family entirely. He knew his mom and siblings were conservative and pro-life, and though they didn’t really talk politics, his suspicions about their votes were confirmed when he pressed them. They had made a choice, and now he would too.

Mark had taken to social media the day after the election to rant about half the country, but there was little he could do with anger at that scale. His family offered something more manageable: a localized target for a generalized grievance. He couldn’t control how millions of Americans voted, but he could control whether the few he knew who voted for Trump remained in his life.

For anyone seeking a controlled, frictionless existence, cutting people off offers a deceptively clean solution: eliminate the point of contact.

His mother, recently widowed, is heartbroken by her son’s decision to go no contact. She tries to focus her attention on the rich relationships she still has. Mark’s siblings vacillate between annoyance and deep hurt, bewildered that something so distant from the ordinary life of their family — national politics — could enter their intimacy and overwhelm it.

The no-contact phenomenon is one manifestation of a deeper spiritual jaundice. We’re estranged from ourselves in a way that makes the risk and friction of other people difficult to bear. Politics gives that interior unease somewhere to go. It can be particularly potent as a repository for discontent because it supplies both a diagnosis and a culprit. Diffuse dissatisfaction is difficult to metabolize.

Ideology offers a simplistic answer for why you feel bad and who did it to you. And once the culprit is someone you know, you can do something about it.

Obvious forces are contributing to the rise of this phenomenon, a topic I explore in my new book, “No Contact.” Social media is an accelerant driving estrangement in a couple of ways. We habituate ourselves to a curated “community” and proceed to block, unfollow, and mute voices that introduce friction into the seamless zombie scroll. Social media also spawns what I call TikTok psychologists, whose endless short-form videos invite you to examine your workplace, family, or childhood for the hidden toxicity, narcissism, or trauma.

For a fee, you can sign up for courses that will help you “break the cycle.”

The promise is seductive: Excavate your past, locate the wound, identify its author, and your present unhappiness begins to make sense. Pundits and politics offer the same explanatory relief in the present tense, supplying villains and catastrophes with enough regularity to keep us perpetually activated. Past or present, the gaze remains trained outward. We will go surprisingly far down rabbit holes to discover what someone else did to us or is doing to us while avoiding the much more frightening journey down the rabbit hole of our souls.

The accelerants, however, presuppose something already combustible. Social media can supply the siloes, pundits the villains, and therapists the permission, but none fully explains the strange zeal with which we have embraced the promise that amputating even our most primordial relationships can make us well. And we’ve been amputating them at a rapid pace. According to recent polling, 38% of Americans are estranged from a family member, with political and ideological disagreement accounting for a significant share of these ruptures.

While it can be entirely healthy and prudent to distance oneself, even permanently, from an abusive or dangerous friend or relative, the hundreds of estranged parents I’ve encountered across the country — and those I interviewed for the book — testify to a different phenomenon: a diminishing willingness — particularly among young people — to endure the risks and friction that durable relationships require.

And nowhere are the risks higher, the friction more unavoidable, or the returns less certain than in family life.

RELATED: The myth of the ‘good person’

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Weighing the costs

By our current calculus, family is a fool’s bet. It’s a long-term investment in other human beings, with few variables or outcomes under our control. We choose a spouse without knowing who they will become in 30 years. We have children knowing they will suffer and make us suffer, without knowing what kind of people they will become, what they will believe, what they will make of their lives, or ultimately what they will make of us.

Besides the risk, there is relentless friction along the way: competing needs, irritating habits, misunderstandings, disappointments, heated political disagreements, and obligations that arrive at the most inconvenient times. Family continually frustrates our preferences and interferes with our plans. The people closest to us are those with the greatest opportunity to disturb our peace. The friction is certain, but the return on investment is not, as the no-contact phenomenon makes painfully clear.

For anyone seeking a controlled, frictionless existence, cutting people off offers a deceptively clean solution: eliminate the point of contact. And there is good reason to think its justifying logic metastasizes easily. Colleges that implemented no-contact orders to protect students from predation now report demands for such orders because a roommate ate their bagel or someone looked askance at them in the cafeteria. Avoidance pays an immediate dividend.

But the costs of avoidance compound. First, avoidance makes us more brittle. The more accustomed we become to eliminating friction rather than navigating it, the less friction we become capable of bearing. Avoidance trains us in avoidance. What begins as relief from a difficult encounter can become an increasing dependence on controlling the conditions of encounter.

Second, avoidance keeps us stuck. Friction is a form of contact with reality. Once contact ends, we lose one of the most powerful correctives to our grievances: the encounter with the actual person. In memory, the mother who wounded us can remain frozen in our minds at the moment of injury. In person, she is harder to reduce so neatly. She is irritating and funny, selfish and generous, capable of the same old failure and suddenly vulnerable in some way we hadn’t expected. The living person keeps interfering with the story we tell about her.

There is a third cost: Avoidance can become a means of avoiding ourselves. Rehearsing the reasons for a cutoff can be a vital reminder to stay away when estrangement is necessary. Persons escaping abuse may need to remember clearly what happened, particularly when guilt or loneliness threatens to draw them back imprudently.

But when the relationship was merely difficult but not dangerous, that same rehearsal can work against us. Avoidance invites us to recount our grievances continually, quieting the dissonance that might otherwise invite us to question our narrative. It’s far easier to rehearse our righteousness than it is to wrestle and reckon honestly with a more complicated account that might in part implicate ourselves.

RELATED: The real reason 1 in 3 Americans are cutting off their family

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Strangers to all?

A culture organized around minimizing risk and friction will eventually find family difficult to justify, because family is a long-term wager on goods that cannot be secured in advance and a daily encounter with people we can’t control.

Before deciding to go no contact, consider that you may be losing far more than you gain by cutting ties. Risk and friction are prerequisites of life and love. Family is indeed a bad bet if we prize control and an untroubled life, but it might be our best bet if we want a more human one.

Mark can eliminate the friction his family creates. He cannot make them cease to be his family. Nor can he know what might have happened had he stayed in contact long enough for all of them to become again something more than the worst thing he believed about them.

There is a terrible risk of remaining. But there is a risk in leaving too: that in protecting ourselves from the people who disturb our peace, we slowly become people incapable of loving and knowing anyone — and will secure one terrible result: remaining a stranger to all and to ourselves.

Editor's note: This article is adapted from Noelle Mering’s new book, "No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them" (Forum Books), and appeared originally at the American Mind.

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Like most gay men, I wasn't 'born this way' — and I refuse to lie about it



“Why are you gay?” intoned Tucker Carlson in an African accent. Then the internet exploded. The voices of countless homosexuals and their supportive family members rose in unison to a pitch so shrill it could crack silicon data chips.

They trotted out all the predictable labels. Homophobe. Bigot. Christian nationalist. Carlson was promptly denounced across social media as a homophobe, a bigot, and a purveyor of hateful Christian nationalism — simply for asking the question we are not allowed to ask.

'I’m not crying because you’re gay,' she said. 'I’m crying because I know that life is going to be harder for you.'

It happened on Carlson’s December 4 podcast, which featured an extensive conversation with “Dangerous Faggot” Milo Yiannopoulos. For those who don’t know, Yiannopolous is a right-wing cultural commentator and provocateur with a pronounced histrionic gay affect. Today, he says he has abandoned homosexuality.

Trauma response

Before I go farther, it’s necessary to clear some underbrush. I am interested in the content of what Yiannopolous said, not in what anyone thinks of him as a person. Whether one thinks he’s honest, dishonest, annoying, or charming is irrelevant. What he says is what I’m interested in.

So what did he say?

"In almost every case, and certainly in every male case, [homosexuality] is a trauma response. It is not a sexuality."

Milo Yiannopolous speaks for me. I endorse what he said and believe it to be true. I believe I became a homosexual because I grew up under a mother with narcissistic personality disorder, a father who left before I could ever meet him, and an attempted murderer and pedophile for a stepfather.

Let me clear away some more underbrush, though it will probably be fruitless.

1. Yes, I believe the large majority of male homosexuals are homosexuals because of childhood circumstances and trauma.

2. Yes, I believe that most of those who claim that they had no childhood trauma are not being candid — including, in some cases, not being candid with themselves. Personal and professional experience leads me to this conclusion.

3. No, I’m not claiming that every single male homosexual had abusive parents. Yes, I recognize that some male homosexuals come from stable, loving families. I have male homosexual friends who fit this description.

What we used to know

We have lived for so long with the culturally enforced mandate to believe in “born this way” that we have to remind society of what it used to know just yesterday. Those of you in middle age will remember that until the past 25 years or so, homosexuality was understood to be the outcome of an abusive or neglectful childhood.

Not only psychiatric researchers, but everyday Americans noticed that most male homosexuals had troubled or nonexistent relationships with their fathers. They noticed that male homosexuals were unusually close to and emotionally enmeshed with their mothers. They noticed that those mothers often had overbearing, domineering, or melodramatic personalities.

If you’re younger than 40 and reading this with shock, I’m telling you the truth. This view was normal, but it was deliberately re-cast as “homophobia” and “ abuse against gays” in the past 25 years by the same activists who brought you “trans kids,” breast removal of healthy teen girls, and cross-sex hormones for teen boys who “are actually girls.”

That’s the set that brought you “born this way.”

'Science' fiction

As I write this piece, I’m struggling with how to give readers some citations. The trouble is that on the topic of homosexuality, just like with all things “COVID,” most people think there’s something called “the Science.” Even based right-wingers who rejected the authoritarian commands that tried to compel us to take mRNA “vaccines” and wear masks jump right to “show me THE SCIENCE” when the subject is the origin of homosexuality.

When the topic is this emotional, people stop thinking and start emoting. They start pretending that humans can’t know anything about the world, can’t recognize any patterns, and can’t come to any conclusions unless a Scientist published a Paper in a a Peer-Reviewed Journal.

Nevertheless, I’ll try. Surprising though it may be, the psychiatric and psychological literature, starting with Freud in the early 20th century, has long noted the pattern I described above. And most, though not all, male homosexuals were sexually abused as children or as minors. (I am a homosexual, but I was not molested as a child.)

Commentator and “ex-gay” Joseph Sciambra has published several bibliographies that round up much of this literature.

Normally, people don’t demand “the Science” on other subjects. No one demands “the Science” before noticing that most teenage drivers are more erratic and dangerous and therefore it pays to drive defensively around them. Everyone knows this, not because they read “the Science.” They know it because they have eyes, ears, and a brain that detects patterns.

Gay Old Party

Today, even conservatives are invested in the “born this way” gay narrative. While I’m pleased that the right wing came around on unfair laws that penalized homosexuals simply for being homosexuals (not laws that properly punished lewd public behavior), I’m not pleased that the average Republican now treats “born this way” as the end of the conversation.

The gay activist set has conquered the right wing. Those conservatives who find the position taken in this piece hard to bear have been manipulated emotionally by gay activists.

If you’re a conservative who finds this uncomfortable or “mean,” I think I know another reason why. You have homosexuals in your family whom you love (so do I, friends). Some of them are your children. And if they’re your children, you’re hearing an implicit accusation: “He’s saying I’m a terrible mother who made my son gay.”

No. I’m not (necessarily) saying that, even if you “feel” that I’m saying that. I don’t know you, and I don’t know how you raised your children. As a peer support coach, I’ve spoken to many moms and dads with gay children. These are loving moms and dads, but sometimes they made mistakes, or divorce or other trauma came to pass in the family.

Even the most loving parents will make mistakes, and the culture outside the parental home is ravening at your children and pushing them to adopt deviant and hedonistic lifestyles. Even the best parents can’t keep all of that out.

RELATED: Milo Yiannopolous dares to tell the truth about homosexuality

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'Coming out' to my mother

Let me tell you the story of a night in 1986 when I “came out” to my mother at age 12. Align readers know from my past columns that my mother was an abusive, deranged woman who veered into psychopathy at times. But there were moments when a real woman with real feelings came through.

I sat on the avocado-green pleather daybed we used as a couch. My mother was in her armchair, the square glass ashtray and a pack of Merit Ultra Light 100s at her side. It was 8 p.m., and my mother had sent the other children to bed because I had something important to tell her. I think she knew what was coming.

I told my mother that I was gay and that I felt duty-bound to tell her the truth about it. Looking back at myself at 12, I shudder that I was already forming myself into a “gay identity” that would trap me in promiscuity, addiction, and emotional disturbance for decades to come. But I didn’t know any better then.

My mother started crying. It wasn’t her usual self-pitying kind of crying, and it wasn’t her angry crying that would escalate to slaps across the face and screamed insults.

“I worried for so long that I would do this to you, that I would make you gay,” she said while she looked down at her hands. “I never gave you a father, and the father figure I brought into your life turned out to be a monster.”

This was one of the few times in our life together that I can remember when my mother seemed genuine and honest and seemed to care about my well-being. I think her sense of responsibility and guilt was real (my mother wasn’t much for feeling normal parental responsibility).

“I’m not crying because you’re gay,” she said. “I’m crying because I know that life is going to be harder for you. I’m terrified that you’ll get a disease and die early. Please be careful.”

Because my mother had already parentified me, turning me into her “surrogate husband” and emotional caretaker (almost universal with personality-disordered mothers and their children), I started comforting her.

“You didn’t do anything to me, Mom. I was born this way,” I said.

And I believed it.

The limits of tolerance

It is true that my mother never sat down one day and said, “How can I derange my son and turn him into a homosexual?”

But what my mother feared did happen. The abuse, the depravation, the disordered emotions in my childhood home did make me a homosexual. How I choose to behave is my responsibility, but I did not “choose” to be sexually disordered this way. I was just a child.

If you’re reading this and you’re a homosexual or the parent of one or a loved one, and you don’t believe this applies to you, then go in peace. But please let those of us for whom this is important — let us have this conversation. Too many emotionally triggered people do everything they can to shut it down.

They accuse homosexuals like me of being “abusive” and of “hurting” them. No such thing is occurring. All the sympathy "allies" claim to have for homosexuals when we are “born this way gays” evaporates the moment we change our minds. They insult us and call us insane, with more vitriol than actual anti-gay bullies who beat us up in high school.

Silence equals death

We are going to have this conversation. We’re not going to be silenced or manipulated into being good, quiet little gay boys to fit someone else’s fantasy of having a “fabulous” best friend or son.

I lived the “fabulous” life, and it nearly killed me through alcoholism and self-destructive promiscuity. The way I lived brought despair. And I am typical. I am not “just an unusual gay.” My life story looks like the life stories of the majority of gay men. Yeah, I know. They tell you that isn’t true.

They’re lying because they’re terrified that something they’ve relied on too heavily to define themselves as human men may have been a lie all along. I know, because I lied this way too.

Yes, I’m still attracted to men and not attracted to women. I don’t believe I have the ability to change those subjective feelings, but I may find otherwise in time. For seven years I’ve been single and celibate, and I plan to remain so.

Others must choose their own path in their own time. Nothing I’ve written here can honestly be construed as an attack, or an assault, on other homosexuals or those who love them. The truth is not an act of hate or abuse.

What’s real and true matters, and it’s well past time to tell the truth about the lie we call “born this way.”

Christian students are pushing back — and universities are cracking



As one of the last conservative Christians serving as a tenured philosophy professor at a public university, I’ve had a front-row seat to the intellectual circus that critical theory and intersectionality have unleashed on higher education. I call it out on X and Substack. Professors from ASU’s Barrett Honors College and English Department have attacked me for doing so, calling me a “joke” and a “sloppy thinker.” This is the abuse anyone receives for defending God’s word.

But something new — and encouraging — is happening.

Christian students are speaking up. They are filing complaints. They openly quote Scripture in their assignments. And in this case, the university backed down.

Students are calling it out, too.

Last week at the University of Oklahoma, two instructors were removed for blatant viewpoint discrimination against a Christian student. If even 5% of cases like this see daylight, the DEI structure will start to crack within the academic year. If the polls are right, 97% of faculty identify as left or far left. What we see now — open disdain for Scripture — is not an anomaly. It’s the visible edge of a worldview that has captured entire campuses.

Beneath the surface sits the full intersectional framework, built on one central assumption: Christianity is the axle around which oppression supposedly turns.

The assignment that exposed the bias

The student’s psychology assignment was simple: a 650-word response to a study about gender norms and bullying among middle-schoolers.

She wrote: “Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth.”

She grounded her argument in Genesis, explained God’s creation of male and female, and correctly defined ezer kenegdo as “a helper equal to man.”

In short, she used: Scripture, theology, linguistic analysis, and a historical ethical framework. That is a well-reasoned paper in the humanities. Except when the worldview is Christian.

The instructor’s response?

“Your reaction paper contradicts itself, uses personal ideology over empirical evidence, and is at times offensive.”

And then the tell: “Every major psychological, medical, pediatric, and psychiatric association acknowledges that sex and gender is neither binary nor fixed.”

This is false. No serious biology text claims human sex is nonbinary. Disorders of development exist, but disorders do not replace design.

The deeper problem stood out like a vegan at a Texas barbecue: The Bible does not count as evidence. Even if the rubric justified deductions, dismissing Scripture as “personal ideology” exposed the bias.

Quote Judith Butler or Michel Foucault, and the academy nods solemnly. Quote the Bible, and you lose points.

The modern university’s dogma is simple: The Bible is never admissible. Everything else is.

Christians have known this for decades and quietly self-censored to protect their grades and academic futures. Which raises the question: How did we arrive here?

How we got here

Hostility toward Christianity did not appear overnight. It grew slowly through deliberate gatekeeping. Hiring committees screened out conservatives, shaping departments where 90%-97% of faculty became ideological clones. Administrators learned to view biblical faith as bigotry. DEI offices began to enforce viewpoint discrimination while denying it.

Fair hiring does not produce a 97% monoculture. That is ideological capture.

Christians allowed it because they confused niceness with faithfulness. Niceness — a word that never appears in Scripture — is fear disguised as virtue. It keeps people quiet so they can stay liked.

The left used a strategy straight from Marx, who took it straight from the enemy (“devil,” meaning accuser): Accuse Christians of oppression; rewrite history so the West is defined by its sins, never its virtues; demonize Scripture and its adherents; and weaponize shame to silence dissent.

It worked — for a time. The spell is breaking.

No neutrality

Many Christians assumed universities were neutral. They aren’t. They never were.

Every institution aligns with one of two cities: “the City of God” and “the City of Man.”

The City of Man controls the universities. This is not hyperbole. Romans 1 describes it plainly.

Those who reject God do not become neutral observers. They become evangelists for a rival religion. That rival religion has doctrines:

  • The Bible is oppressive.
  • Christianity is harmful.
  • Gender is unlimited.
  • Identity is self-created.
  • The highest good is “authenticity.”
  • The greatest sin is disagreement.

A new orthodoxy rules the campus, and the Oklahoma student violated it — praise God that she did.

Something has changed

Christian students are not taking the abuse quietly any more. They are speaking up. They are filing complaints. They are quoting Scripture openly in their assignments. And in this case, the university backed down. The instructors were removed.

Even on a left-dominated campus, viewpoint discrimination remains illegal — even if DEI treats it as sacred ritual.

If this continues, the monopoly may begin to break — maybe even by spring break.

RELATED: Why the kids are not all right — and Boomers still pretend nothing’s wrong

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What you can do

As someone inside the system, here is my advice.

Follow those speaking publicly. We are few, but we are here — and we are not silent.

Equip your children. They will face hostility. They will be mocked. They will be graded down unless they can respond intelligently. Ask pointed questions on campus tours. Get administrators on record renouncing DEI discrimination — then hold them to it.

Consider alternatives. Trade schools, Christian colleges, apprenticeships, online programs — all viable. Many offer a serious education without forcing students through gender theory with Judith Butler 101. Seek professors who teach the great works with a biblical foundation.

Speak boldly. The gospel is not a whisper. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” the Apostle Paul writes in Romans, “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”

Christian students are rediscovering that courage. It is long past time the rest of us did, too.

Radical gender ideology is secretly radicalizing children — in their own homes



Modern gender activists have convinced much of the world — and themselves — that transgenders are suffering from gender dysphoria and truly believe they were born in the wrong body.

However, there’s a dark underbelly to transgenderism that BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes is more likely the reason for the surge of gender transitions among young men and women today.

And it’s readily available on your children’s devices.

“I no longer believe that most people today who say that they’re the opposite sex have true gender dysphoria. I believe that gender dysphoria exists as it is defined, or was defined, in the DSM5,” Stuckey says.


“Today it is, I believe, mostly due to pornography,” she explains. “It is due to a sexual fetish that they have developed over time, that there is now a very real algorithmic pipeline via Pornhub and other porn sites that push young men to seek more and more exciting dopamine hits.”

“So the pornography changes from something that is simple to something that might be more erotic, more violent, more subversive, and it gets into not only like different kinds of sexual deviancy in addition to just pornography, homosexuality, but then gender bending and gender fluidity,” she continues.

This presents a major issue as pornography has been widely normalized over the years as almost a rite of passage for young boys — but it can have devastating effects on their impressionable minds.

“I believe that is what is motivating the majority of transgenderism among men today,” she says, “And I just want you to know that this is not nuance, that this doesn’t deserve more of our empathy, that these people don’t deserve to be allowed into any women’s spaces at all.”

“I want you to stare at it in the eyes as sexual depravity and perversion,” she continues, adding, “That doesn’t have anything to do with gender. It has do with sex. And I’m not talking about biological sex. I’m talking about sexual fetish and pornography.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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