Richard Land, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, recently delivered a speech at Truett-McConnell College in Georgia where he proclaimed that Satan is behind both legal abortion and gay marriage and railing against the practice of gay couples using surrogates in order to have children, calling it a “travesty” and “child abuse”:

The Southern Baptist Convention’s former top expert on moral and public policy concerns says same-sex marriage is opening doors for a gay-surrogacy movement that he predicts will be harmful to children.

“We’ve conducted a 40-year experiment in this country in whether or not fathers are optional accessories in the rearing of healthy adults, and they are not,” Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, said Jan. 30 in the inaugural H. Ray Newman Ethics and Religious Liberty Lecture at Truett-McConnell College in Cleveland, Ga.

“Up until now, no one’s been dumb enough to argue that a mother is an optional accessory,” said Land, who moved to the non-denominational school in Charlotte, N.C., after retiring as president of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission last year.

“But that’s exactly what same-sex marriage says, that two men can do as good a job raising a child as a mother and a father can,” he said. “That’s just plain goofy.”

Land said there is “a thriving business now in gay surrogacy” for homosexual couples who want to have a baby.

“They don’t just want a marriage license,” he said. “They want to have a baby. So they’re hiring, they’re renting wombs, and they’re buying eggs, and they’re having the eggs fertilized and implanted in the rented wombs.”

“There are many businesses that are thriving providing this kind of commodification of human flesh so that they can follow the trend and have two men try to raise a baby,” Land said. “What a travesty. What a collective sense of child abuse it is.”