Two posts went viral this past weekend. The first shows gay country music singer-songwriter Shane McAnally holding his infant son, who is calling for his mother while his male partner films the encounter. The singer looks down at the boy and tells him, directly, that he doesn’t have a “mama.” Both men begin laughing as the baby cries.
The second is a pregnancy announcement posted by two men. The photo shows an ultrasound. One of them provided the sperm. The egg was bought from a donor. The womb belongs to a surrogate they hired. Neither of those two women appears in the post. The caption reads: “SO HI GUYS!!!! Usually don’t post much on here about my personal life but my husband and I are going to be DADS!!! 😭😭😭💕💕💕” It is as though the two men did this themselves.
Millions of people saw these posts, which went completely viral with thousands of comments and shares. They hit hard because they made something visible that the gay marriage movement has worked for more than a decade to keep out of view: Gay marriage is not a private matter.
The lie they sold was simple: marriage is about two adults who love each other and want their love recognized. It involves no one else. What consenting adults do in their own bedroom is none of your business. And in those rare cases where it does involve children, those children are the castoffs of heterosexual irresponsibility, kids that straight people failed to raise. Gay couples, heroically, step in to pick up the pieces.
Then they went further. Why do you care? Mind your damn business. These tropes played on every talk show and came from every activist and celebrity ally across the culture for decades, and it worked.
Until it didn’t. The curtain is being pulled back. A child is on camera crying for a mother he will never have. A womb is photographed and posted as though it belonged to the men taking credit for the pregnancy. The private matter frame collapses right there. This concerns children. And anything that concerns children concerns all of us.
The Deal Required a Fiction
Strategically, the pitch for gay marriage avoided children at all costs. Marriage had nothing to do with kids. And on the rare occasion a child came up, adoption was the default answer, picking up the pieces of heterosexual failure, a rescue operation and nothing more: “you’d rather have children languish in an orphanage?!”
But underneath that messaging sat a question nobody bothered to ask. Were we really going to pretend that gay men and lesbian women would not share the same natural urge to procreate that every other human has carried for all of recorded history? That once the “equality” of marriage was achieved, the “equality” of family would not be next? That adoption, of all things, would be the satisfying endpoint of that desire if necessary?
For decades, it has been the snake under the table, with activists praying it would avoid the spotlight until the public was sufficiently brainwashed to accept the premise that children do not have a mother and father. That they are merely an accessory to adult desire to be cut and pasted into any adult relationship. Children complicated the privacy claim. The “mind your business” claim.
The unspoken presumption baked into that deal was that gay couples were, in some fundamental way, unlike the rest of us. That their family aspirations would run on a different track than everyone else’s. That they would not feel the pull to have offspring of their own, and that if they ever did, adoption would do.
None of it was true. When asked, when surveyed, when given the choice, gay men and lesbian women want what everyone else wants. They want children. They want biological children, the pregnancy photos, the genetic connection, the child who looks like them. When they have the money to acquire those things, they do.
When You Ask, They Tell You
In December 2024, the Williams Institute at UCLA surveyed 263 married same-sex couples under the age of 50. Sixty-one percent said their ideal path to parenthood was a biological one — insemination, surrogacy, or reciprocal IVF. Only 36 percent said adoption was their ideal.
When the researchers asked what they expected to actually do, the numbers flipped. Only 41 percent said biological parenthood was likely, and 51 percent said they expected to adopt. The 20-point gap doesn’t tell us biology is irrelevant. It tells us that surrogacy runs between $90,000 and $250,000 in this country and adoption runs around $30,000. Seventy-nine percent named cost as their top barrier.
Same-sex couples are more like heterosexual couples than the movement ever let on. The vast majority would rather create a child than adopt one, and when they have the money, they do exactly that. This should not come as a surprise. It is human nature. What it means, though, is that the premise on which same-sex marriage was sold to the American public was false on its face.
Nothing About It Was Ever Private
If most same-sex couples want biological children, and two men cannot produce one between themselves, then every child a same-sex couple raises requires a third party. It turns out what happens in their bedroom is not enough. They need someone from outside it.
For two men, that means an egg seller (the industry calls her a “donor,” but no one donates). A premium profile (young, athletic, Ivy-educated, clean medical history) runs $30,000 to $50,000 after weeks of hormone injections and a surgical retrieval. Then a surrogate, with agency fees and medical costs pushing six figures, who signs a contract dictating her diet, her exercise, her travel, and often her sexual activity for nine months.
For two women, the pathway is cheaper. You pick a sperm seller from an online catalog, filter by height, education, and race, and buy the output. He went into a private room at a clinic with pornography provided, masturbated into a plastic cup, and walked out fifteen minutes later with a check. That specimen gets frozen, shipped, thawed, and injected into a woman he will never meet, to produce a child he will never know.
In every same-sex parenting case, a child is separated from half of her biological family before she is born, sometimes from all of it. And every one of these arrangements involved adults the couple priced, contracted, and purchased.
The Promise of Privacy Was a Lie
This is the part I don’t think anyone should miss.
The promise of privacy was the lie that got the movement through the door. It was the moral centerpiece of the argument. What two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom is no one else’s business, and to say otherwise is to be a bigot.
That framing ignored what was already happening. By 2015, same-sex couples in some states were already using donor gametes and hiring surrogates to build families, which proved they wanted gay marriage for more than hospital visitations and insurance benefits. The bedroom was the opening pitch. The children were the next ask.
In April 2025, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch called “New Parents,” in which Jon Hamm and Bowen Yang played a gay couple who showed up at a friend’s gathering with a baby nobody knew about the day before. When the friends asked where the baby came from, the men refused to answer and flung accusations of bigotry back. The sketch wouldn’t have been produced five years ago. It debuted now because the orthodoxy has started to crack. The viral posts of this past weekend indicate the orthodoxy is beginning to crumble.
It Was Always About Him
The movement was never going to accept “equality” that stopped at the altar. It always wanted the birth announcements, the pregnancy reveals, the shirtless men in hospital beds with motherless newborns.
The only way to get there required commercially separating a child from one or both of the people who made her, and a wholesale rewrite of our laws so that motherhood and fatherhood no longer mean what nature has always said they meant. A parent used to be the man or woman whose body produced the child. Now parents are assigned at birth, roles granted to whoever signed the contract and wrote the check.
The victims of gay marriage are the children. They would not have signed the contract. They did not pick the gamete seller. They did not choose to be denied a parent in the name of “equality,” and they did not consent to lose their mother or father so two adults could have the illusion of a family.
Go back to the first video.
The boy is still crying. He is reaching for his mother. He is not going to find her. He will grow up in a home headed by two men who laughed at his grief the day it was captured on camera, and one day he will start asking his questions. Who is my mother? Why did they take me from her? What did they pay her to stay out of my life? Why didn’t she want me?
The answer was bargained away before he was born. Nothing about gay marriage was ever private. It was always about him.
