The billboard they hate

When my nonprofit Them Before Us purchased billboard space in a couple of Midwest states we expected it to be a conversation starter. We did not expect it to go viral. What was our controversial message?

No child has two dads.
No child has two moms.

The billboard has garnered both massive support and loud condemnation. It’s been highlighted on local news and mega accounts. Ohio’s largest paper, the Columbus Dispatch, reached out to me for comment. Their article about our “Anti-LGBTQ+ billboards” was brief. They couldn’t or wouldn’t print my full remarks.

So I wanted to share a bit more of what I said.

The simple message on our billboard stems from the crucial fact that every child has one mother and one father. Decades of social science tell us that man and that woman are statistically the adults who are the most invested in, connected to, and protective of them. Conversely, unrelated adults sharing living spaces with children always increase risk of abuse and neglect. (This is the very reason why adoptive parents must undergo extensive screening and vetting.)

Children long to know the identity of and have a relationship with their mother and father. (This is the very reason why 95% of domestic adoptions are now “open.”) Further, children do not want generic love from caregivers. They crave maternal and paternal love and often hunger for male or female attention when their household is deprived of it.

Despite this universal human reality, there has been a coordinated campaign to condition the American public, and even American children, into the idea that mothers or fathers are optional. Especially in the wake of gay marriage, the law is scrubbing the words “mother” and “father” from parenthood statutes. The courts have allowed two mothers or two fathers to erase one biological parent on a child’s birth certificate. Children and teen programming regularly present children with two mothers or two fathers as even better adjusted than their peers, despite the fact that studies using the gold standard of the scientific method reveal diminished outcomes.

This is unjust and cruel. Conditioning children to believe that mothers and fathers are optional and interchangeable leads to children struggling with their identity, vulnerable and hungry for male or female love, and raised in homes that are less stable and less safe.

This is why our billboard does not harm children with gay parents, as some of our critics say it does. Children are harmed when they lose their mother or father—especially intentionally and certainly when those kids are told that their deepest wounds are the necessary price of admission for this new adult “civil right.” The billboard didn’t create the pain. But it might be exposing it.

No one can erase a child’s longing to be known and loved by their own mom and dad, and children don’t need a billboard to prompt that longing. They will fantasize about their missing father on their own. They will search the depths of the internet to find the identity of their missing mother. They will wonder why they aren’t as happy as all the “good kids” on TV who love having same-sex parents, and they may feel guilty about it.

Consider the example of Millie, a sperm-donor conceived daughter of lesbians. She recalls:

The truth is that growing up with two mothers forced me to be confused about who I was. … I was wondering what is wrong with me and why don’t I have that connection with my father. … And as time went on, and the lies went on, you know, ‘You don’t have a father’ … and ‘You have another mother’ … as a result of that … I suffered guilt, because who was I to reject this other parent?

Another anonymous girl with two moms feels like she “destroyed their happiness … because I wished I just had a dad in my life…” She feels “lonely and guilty” and “like a bad child” because “the good kids of gay parents” on TV seem perfectly happy.

Woe to a society when a highway billboard is the first thing that validates what some child with two moms or two dads has already thought and wondered about but cannot express freely.

The other claim critics make is that the billboard will “harm” children with stepparents or adoptive parents. It won’t, though people are right to understand that there is a connection—because those scenarios also involve loss for children. But there is a critical difference. Children raised by adoptive parents, grandparents, foster parents, and some stepparents have adults who are seeking to mend a child’s loss. They are doing hard things on behalf of children.

What they are not doing is trying to incentivize or enshrine in law ideas and technologies that intentionally inflict mother-loss or father-loss on children in the first place, especially in the name of “love.” That’s what normalizing same-sex parenting does. It is not a benign family formation. It’s one more manifestation of a broken home.

These are the truths that critics of the billboards cannot refute and that the Columbus Dispatch didn’t print. At Them Before Us, we hope our billboards will give more ordinary citizens the courage to push back against the national conditioning campaign that has sought to normalize motherless and fatherless homes.

It’s always right to tell the truth. Especially when children pay the price for denying it.