It has been ten years since the Supreme Court issued its Obergefell v. Hodges decision mandating that states allow same-sex marriage. Save a long shot attempt by County Clerk Kim Davis, no group has attempted any kind of legal challenge to the ruling.
Until now.
The nonprofit organization that I founded and run, Them Before Us, is spearheading a coalition to overturn Obergefell on the grounds that it victimizes children. No longer are our warnings hypothetical — “if you redefine marriage, you will redefine parenthood.” It’s now clear that the law cannot simultaneously uphold children’s right to their mother and father and affirm same-sex marriage.
Gay marriage was passed on the grounds that so-called adult “equality” required overhauling the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known. Our campaign sends a clear message that children’s rights and needs are greater than those adult agendas, which is why we are calling our campaign Greater Than.
Sweeping Changes to Families
Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the Obergefell majority opinion, wrote that same-sex couples needed to be afforded the “constellation of benefits” that marriage provided. The last 10 years have proved that children are among those so-called “benefits.”
Thus, in the name of constitutional rights, the law had to accomplish what biology prohibits: making two same-sex adults the parents of a child. That legal mandate has reshaped family law in sweeping ways: parenthood statutes have been stripped of sexed terms, regarding mothers and fathers as interchangeable “parents;” infertility has been reclassified so that same-sex couples can deliberately produce motherless or fatherless children with the help of insurance subsidies; birth certificates have been altered to legally exclude a child’s biological parent; new parentage pathways have been created that bypass both biological and adoptive safeguards; genetic parenthood has been downgraded as just one option among many; procreation has been stripped of its unique social value within adult partnerships.
Obergefell did not merely extend legal recognition to same-sex couples, it was a legal change that is incongruent with any familial distinctions that had, for centuries, grounded marriage and parenthood in both common law and biological reality. These are not mere academic shifts. They are foundational changes in how the law and culture understand the human family, with real consequences for children. When familial distinctions are erased, children become items to be awarded by state-enforced contract.
Horrific Headlines
Take recent headlines: In California, 21 surrogate-born children — 15 under three years old — were removed from the home of their mother and their former Chinese Communist Party member father. The couple ran a surrogacy business and under California’s Obergefell-inspired Uniform Parentage Act, could mass produce children for uncertain ends with zero scrutiny applied.
In a widely shared viral video this summer, two men celebrated their surrogate-born son — and shortly thereafter it was revealed that one was a convicted sex offender. A month later, twin six-year-olds who had been kept in cage-like conditions and were legally acquired through California’s Parentage Act were removed from their 74-year-old father.
These are all the predictable outcomes of a legal framework that prioritizes adult identity, desires, and “equality” over child-centric biological reality. These legal changes were driven by both the Obergefell mindset and the Obergefell ruling. Gender, biology, even the number of adults, have become immaterial when it comes to family formation and the well-being of children.
Reasserting Reality
The problem is that biology itself draws discriminatory distinctions. Children are most likely to thrive when raised by their married, biological mother and father.
Ten years of Obergefell has shown us, loud and clear, that children deserve better and that they are greater than any adult’s desires. It’s time we make a change, which is why this coalition of concerned citizens, parents, siblings, faith leaders, nonprofit organizations, and others have linked arms to overturn Obergefell’s failures, law by law.
Greater Than will urge states to pass and defend laws that explicitly name mothers and fathers in parenthood law — not generic “parents” or “guardians.” We will insist that unrelated adults do not belong on children’s birth certificates. We will encourage states to elevate and incentivize homes where biological parents are raising their children within marriage and to affirm that biology and adoption are the only two legitimate pathways to parenthood.
We will reassert sex-based realities, insisting that family law reflect the fact that sexual difference is essential to child development. We seek to give biological parentage primacy, recognizing the natural parent-child bond as a child’s first and most reliable safeguard, while requiring adoption screening for any unrelated adults who seek parental status. Above all, we work to center children’s rights across parentage law, birth certificates, divorce, and marriage policy, so that a child’s objective right to his or her mother and father supersedes subjective adult preferences.
Simply acknowledging the child-centric contours of the natural family will provoke a challenge. But then the question before the court will not be about how the adults identify or whether they have dignity. The question will be whether children benefit from their own mother and father, or if a state-assigned adult is just as good. The answer? They absolutely are not.
Recognizing the child-protective realities of the natural family is a matter of justice for children. The alternative is a legal regime that commodifies them, places them in statistically riskier and less stable homes, and deprives them of the relationships they need to flourish. That outcome is unacceptable to me and to so many others across the country — which is why the time is now for the Greater Than campaign.
Children are the overlooked casualties of a legal regime that has elevated adult desire over biological and developmental reality. If we are serious about protecting children, we must dismantle the decade-long framework of Obergefell that has systematically failed them.
