Ten years of harm to marriage

Ten years ago today, five Supreme Court justices told the nation that the male-female complementarity at the heart of marriage was optional. By blurring the difference between husband and wife, the Court necessarily blurred the difference between mother and father. The law, once a tutor of right conduct, now teaches not only that mother/father households are just optional, but that elevating them is discriminatory. SCOTUS sowed a legal fiction that has reshaped the national imagination.

Almost overnight, classroom gatekeepers set about normalizing the new creed. Before 2015, the National Education Association encouraged teachers to be sensitive to family diversity, but still referenced “mothers” and “fathers” as normal parts of school life and featured lesson plans around Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. After Obergefell, however, the NEA shifted sharply to eliminate traditional language. Its April 2020 “Checklist to Support LGBTQ Students” directs teachers to “use inclusive language,” e.g. “students” instead of “boys and girls” and “family” or “caring adult” instead of “mom and dad.”

GLSEN’s 2016 Ready, Set, Respect! elementary toolkit repackaged after the decision, opens with a K-2 lesson, “What Makes a Family?” whose stated aim is to convince five-year-olds that two moms, two dads, or no dads at all are equally natural options. What the Supreme Court de-gendered in law, activist curricula now de-gender in the childhood imagination.

Publishers raced to support the narrative. In 2021 American readers bought nearly five million LGBTQ-themed fiction titles, double the previous year. By May 2023 sales had jumped another 11% to 6.1 million units, a 173% increase since 2019. Many of those units land on tables at elementary book fairs: Heather Has Two Mommies (2015), and My Two Dads and Me (2019), condition small children to believe that a missing a mother or father was actually a good thing for kids.

On-screen content creators picked up on the SCOTUS cue as well. According to GLAAD, LGBTQ representation in children’s programming exploded after Obergefell. Streaming platforms saw the number of queer series regulars climb from 43 in 2015–16 to 109 by 2019–20, a rise of over 150%. Since 2016 hundreds of shows, many aimed at kids including Steven Universe, The Owl House, DuckTales, Blue’s Clues, and Power Rangers, have featured LGBTQ characters. By 2018 GLAAD had inaugurated a whole awards category celebrating Kids & Family shows for their inclusive storytelling.

The net result was an overrepresentation of LGBTQ characters in media—close to 12% on screen vs 7% in real life. Fictional families now skew far queerer than reality—reflecting not social diversity, but social engineering. Gen Z got the message. I often repeat, “you become what you behold.” In school, on screen and between pages our children were beholding depictions of LGBTQ characters, LGBTQ relationships and LGBTQ families. And that's what they became.

When the CDC first asked teens about sexual identity in 2015, 11% of U.S. high-schoolers said they were not heterosexual. By 2021 that share hit 26%. Gallup finds the pattern continuing into adulthood. More than one in five Gen Z adults (ages 18-27) now identify as LGBTQ+. While we are seeing a conservative/progressive split with many Gen Zers embracing more traditional gender roles, the LGBTQ bug has bitten a huge percentage of teens and young adults. How could it not? They were swarmed by Obergefell-initiated, LGBTQ propaganda.

#BigFertility got the message too. Law begets markets. The CDC’s ART surveillance shows that embryo-transfer cycles using a gestational carrier (the clinical term for surrogate mothers) more than doubled from 2.2% in 2011 to 4.7% in 2020. Fertility clinics openly advertise “two-dad family-building packages,” because post-Obergefell, making a (very profitable) motherless baby was regarded as a constitutional right.

Gen Z and fertility clinics weren’t the only ones affected by the SCOTUS-induced culture shift. Our politicians also fell in line, or rather, fell silent. During the 113th Congress (2013-14) the phrase “every child deserves a mother and father” appeared in at least thirty-two floor speeches, easily found in the Congressional Record. By the 118th Congress (2023-24) such appeals surfaced fewer than five times; one rare example being a March 26, 2025, speech lamenting “programs with an apparent hatred of having both a mother and father at home.” It’s no wonder: Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan legislatively declared that failing to equate same-sex and opposite sex households constituted a form of discrimination. And our congressmen apparently believed them.

In the meantime, gay marriage has inflicted very real harm on very real children. Harm to children is the timeless, nonnegotiable call for Christians to take action. Scripture is not vague on this point. “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the rights of the afflicted and destitute” (Psalm 82:3). For two millennia, the Church has answered that call—founding orphanages, reforming child-labor laws, standing athwart child mutilation, rescuing abandoned children. Despite cultural opposition, that great cloud of witnesses understood child defense as a nonnegotiable manifestation of our pure and undefiled religion before God. It's time for the modern American church to go and do likewise.

We therefore declare without apology that the “right side of history” is never the side that victimizes children. We, the people who serve a Savior that threatens severe punishment for any who cause these little ones to stumble, must work to correct the Obergefell error, through biblical teaching, good policy, and compelling media.

Recognizing that “Ten years ago a great injustice was done to children,” a cohort of committed Christian leaders endeavor to right this judicial wrong. May it not be another decade before we can make those words reality.