The child-centered argument The Seattle Times ignored

On Mother's Day, The Seattle Times published a lengthy front-page article about my efforts to challenge Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.

Readers learned where I live, my husband’s former and current employer, details about my childhood, what I earned last year, and even where I was scheduled to speak.

What readers did not learn was the child-centered argument underlying my work.

The article dropped selectively provocative fragments from speeches, articles, arguments, and blog posts spanning more than a decade, yet failed to link to or even to seriously engage the central claim underlying my work: Redefining marriage required the redefinition of parenthood.

That is not a religious claim, despite the Times framing me on social media as “a Seattle-based Christian activist.” It is a legal and political reality already visible in Washington law.

If same-sex couples must receive the same “constellation of benefits” as opposite-sex couples, as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Obergefell, then the law must accomplish what biology prohibits: Make two adults of the same sex parents of a child. In that framework, even referencing mothers and fathers in law begins to sound discriminatory.

That transformation is no longer theoretical. Washington lawmakers made it explicit when they passed SB 6039, the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA), in 2018. The law made parenthood gender-neutral, created new pathways for unrelated adults to acquire children without screenings or background checks, and enforced payment arrangements between intended parents and birth or genetic parents. These are transactions that adoption law has traditionally treated as trafficking.

State Sen. Jamie Pedersen, author of the updated UPA and sponsor of SB 6037, explained that after Obergefell, the Uniform Law Commission began rewriting the parentage act so it would “apply equally to same-sex couples.”

Translation: Because of gay marriage, biology became a legal obstacle to overcome and mothers and fathers were deemed optional. But from the child’s perspective, neither biology nor gender is optional.

Children come from a man and a woman, and those two people are not interchangeable. A child’s own mother and father are uniquely connected to them, biologically, relationally, and historically. They grant children access to their identity and their ancestry. Male and female parents maximize child development.

Social science consistently shows that, on average, children do best when raised by their married mother and father. Their biological parents are the most connected to, protective of, and invested in them. When unrelated adults enter a child’s home, the risks of abuse, neglect, and instability rise significantly.

Those child-centered realities do not disappear simply because activists repeat “love makes a family,” lawmakers pass a UPA, or five Supreme Court justices declare mothers and fathers legally optional.

The choice before us is simple: Recognize and respect the rights of children and build our laws around them—or ignore those rights and victimize children in the process.

That’s my argument, and it’s not “thinly veiled bigotry.” It’s not unresolved resentment over my parents’ divorce. And it’s not guilt-by-association involving “Christian nationalism.”

The debate is not whether a lesbian can be a loving mother or a gay man a loving father. As the Times article itself noted, I was and remain very close to my mother, who has been in a same-sex relationship most of my life. The question is whether two unrelated men could have replaced her—or could replace any child’s mother. The answer is no. The law should not intentionally separate children from one or both biological parents to satisfy novel adult arrangements.

But that’s what legalized gay marriage requires. The biological parent-child relationship itself was deconstructed. As demonstrated by Washington’s own “progressive” statutes, parentage is no longer recognized, it is assigned.

Children increasingly become the subjects of contractual and state assignment, detached from the very relationships that most reliably anchor identity, responsibility, and lifelong care.

The Times article didn’t bother to address any of this.

Instead, it spent far more time explaining me than explaining the legal transformation I have detailed in dozens of interviews. Readers were encouraged to speculate about my motives rather than evaluate my claims.

The article quoted activists and voices who dismissed concerns like mine as “thinly veiled bigotry.” But it never even referenced the widely circulated stories of predators creating surrogate born children, babies being mass produced, or elderly single men raising twins, all facilitated via Obergefell-driven parentage statutes.

These are, after all, the predictable legal consequences of transforming parenthood from a biological and relational reality into a contractual and state-assigned status.

That debate was absent from The Seattle Times article. It gave readers a detailed profile of the dissenter while carefully avoiding the dissent itself. Because my argument is not only potent. It is provable.

The question is not whether adults can love whom they choose. The question is whether children have a right to their mother and father—or whether a state-assigned stranger is just as good.

That is the debate reshaping family law in America. And it is the debate The Seattle Times doesn’t want to allow.