A winning cultural argument

Back in 2014, I found myself on a few giant conference calls with think tanks and pro-family organizations strategizing about how to fight gay marriage. There was a general consensus that the best tactic would be highlighting threats to religious liberty. As Jack Phillips and Baronelle Stutzman can attest, those were well founded concerns. But the six of us on the call with an LGBT parent decided on a different tact. We filed three separate amicus briefs, each with dual authors, focusing on the threats to children should marriage be redefined.

The traditional marriage side lost at the Supreme Court, but we also lost in the court of public opinion. What conservatives rightly understood as serving all Americans—religious liberty and freedom of conscience—the culture interpreted as serving only us Christians. We projected self-protection, where the other side projected protection for the LGBT vulnerable. The lesson: Religious liberty is an inadequate defense against identity politics.

Once activists claimed their prize for “gay rights,” they pivoted to “trans rights.”

Not one month after the Obergefell ruling, Vanity Fair splashed a corset-squeezed Caitlyn Jenner across their cover. In 2016, the Obama administration issued new guidance for Title IX requiring public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. In 2017, a federal appeals court ruled that schools could not deny a girl identifying as a boy from accessing the boys restroom. The number of gender clinics, and transgender surgeries, exploded. Schools across the nation started hiding children’s transgender identities from their parents. “Name and pronouns” were expected from kindergartners to CEOs. In 2015 there was one major transgender character on one cable show. By 2022, there were 32 across broadcast, cable, and streaming services.

The trans train felt unstoppable.

But then something happened. Chloe Cole told us how her breasts were removed when she was 15. Riley Gaines went public with being forced to undress in a locker room with a male swimmer … who had unseated her on the winners podium. We saw footage of trans sprinters destroying girls’ records, videos of female volleyball players with concussions from being on the receiving end of a man’s spike. We read reports of the Loudon County father arrested after accusing the school board of hiding his daughter’s assault by a trans-identifying boy in the girls’ bathroom.

And the nation said, enough.

As of 2025, over 20 states have passed laws restricting or banning “gender-affirming” medical interventions for minors, transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, and changes to gender markers on birth certificates for minors. All that without Trump’s multiple trans-obliterating executive orders. A 2024 Gallup survey now shows a clear majority (61%) of Americans (even a majority of Democrats) oppose surgical or chemical interventions for minors and boys competing against girls. Globally, progressive countries like Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom have slowed or outright banned “gender-affirming” care for minors, and the megaphone personalities of Bill Maher, J.K. Rowling, and Joe Rogan have emboldened normies to push back against the trans narrative.

Conflicts between identity politics and religious liberty were also present in the trans debate. A Christian professor at Shawnee State University was disciplined for refusing to use a transgender student’s pronouns, citing his faith. A man who calls himself Aimee Stephens sued his religious employer for refusing to allow him to present as female in his workplace. The result was one of the most damaging and consequential Supreme Court decisions of our lifetime, Bostock v. Clayton County. But most of your friends have never heard of it.

That’s because while religious liberty is critical to the functioning of any free, fair, and just society, in the court of public opinion, it was not in this case powerful enough to combat identity politics. Only highlighting child victimization could do that.

The fiction that a man can become a woman has damaged the lives of countless children. Because the American public saw those children, heard those children, and empathized with those children, we have seen a reversal of the transgender movement.

The fiction that children do not need a mother or a father because they are raised in a same-sex headed household is also damaging the lives of countless children. We must allow our country to see those children, hear those children, and empathize with those children. And only then will there be a reversal of the erosion of marriage.

Like it or not, few are willing to lose friends by speaking up for an adult who doesn’t want to arrange flowers for a gay couple. But a whole lot of people are willing to endure the social cost of decrying a motherless baby being raised by two “married” men. (Be honest, you got angry just reading that last sentence, didn’t you? That’s the power of child-centric advocacy.)

The trans domino is falling. Other than the judicial overturning of Roe, this is one of the first cultural wins social conservatives can take credit for. It was achieved because we adopted the historically and biblically consistent Christian mandate of child protection.