An eleven-year assault on children’s rights and needs

For the first time in years, support for gay marriage is falling, driven primarily by collapse in approval among Republicans. According to Gallup’s May 2026 Values and Beliefs survey, Republican support for legal same-sex marriage has plummeted from 55% in 2021-2022 to just 37% today. Something is shifting in the American conscience.

It may be because Americans are beginning to see the truth. They are seeing what I warned about eleven years ago.

In 2015, along with five other children raised by LGBT parents, I submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges—the landmark case that would ultimately mandate marriage “equality” across the nation. My brief shared the stories of children separated from their mother or father through same-sex parenting arrangements and the pain, identity struggles, and mother-hunger or father-hunger that followed. I warned that if the highest court affirmed gay marriage, it would imperil children’s rights to be known and loved by the two people responsible for their existence.

Eleven years later it's clear we were right.

In the Obergefell opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared that same-sex couples must be afforded the full “constellation of benefits” that accompany society's smallest institution. These things included tax benefits, inheritance rights, hospital visitation, government protections, and societal legitimacy. They also included legal recognition as parents. Because marriage law and parenthood law are so tightly connected, making husbands and wives optional in marriage inevitably made them optional in parenthood. What biology prohibited—two same-sex adults as parents of a child—the law was forced to accomplish. That required a flattening of all distinctions of the natural family, replacing it with a state-constructed “family.”

The natural family always includes a male parent and a female parent. Today you'd be hard pressed to find the words “mothers” and “fathers” listed in parenthood statutes. They’ve often been replaced by gender-neutral terms like “parent,” “guardian,” or “non-gestating parent” perceived to be more inclusive.

At its core, the natural family recognizes that the husband of a woman who gives birth is the father of the child. Thus the presumption of paternity, which stretches back to pre-colonial times, has allowed the spouse of a woman to be listed on the child's birth certificate, uniting children to both biological parents in nearly 100% of cases. Under Obergefell v. Hodges, that principle was reinterpreted as a presumption of “parentage” and extended to same-sex couples. The presumption was effectively inverted—now separating children from at least one biological parent 100% of the time.

The natural family affirms the pre-political privilege of the biological parent-child relationship, which binds children to the adults who are statistically the most connected and protective of a child. But biology is a bigot when it comes to same-sex parenting. It stubbornly insists on one man and one woman for conception to take place. Thus, new pathways for “parenthood” have been created to defy those nature-driven realities. “Updates” like the Uniform Parentage Act, allow adults who assemble sperm, egg, and womb to effectively “intend” their way into taking a vulnerable newborn home from the hospital, bypassing both biological and adoptive safeguards.

The cumulative effect is the reduction of children to the status of accessory—objects to be acquired by any and every adult with a high bank account balance and a state-backed contract.

Eleven years later, I'm no longer just a blogger. I'm the founder and president of the nonprofit Them Before Us, dedicated to defending children’s rights in the family. I am also spearheading the Greater Than coalition to overturn gay marriage on the grounds that it victimizes children.

We're no longer debating hypotheticals. Across the country, accounts from children conceived through egg donation, sperm donation, and surrogacy are emerging. We watch videos of people who experienced mother- or father-hunger, and see headlines of children denied their needs, commissioned by predators, acquired by single elderly men, and even mass-produced as a result of Obergefell-mandated parentage makeovers. All in the name of adult “equality.”

Children cannot protect their own interests. So we must do it for them. The Greater Than coalition includes over 100 child advocates, legal scholars, religious leaders, conservative influencers, and adults who have lived this reality. What unites us is not ideology but a shared recognition: Every child has a natural right to the man and woman who created them.

A just society does not force the weak to sacrifice for the strong. Thus it should not redesign parenthood to satisfy adult desire at the expense of children’s rights. Justice safeguards the most vulnerable, even if that means some adults will not get what they want. If we got that wrong in Obergefell v. Hodges, we have a duty to recognize it, and to fix it.