Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. Parents, please note that this episode touches on some mature content, so please be cautious if you're listening with young children. Thank you for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.
I'm Mitch Prosser, Vice President of NC Family, filling in for Tracy this week. In 2015, the Supreme Court's decision in Obergfeld v. Hodges legally redefined marriage to include same-sex unions nationwide. Our guest today believes that this decision fundamentally restructured not just marriage, but parenthood itself with profound implications for children's rights. Katie Faust is the founder and president of Them Before Us, which is dedicated to what she calls child-centered family policy.
Out of this, she's recently launched the Greater Than campaign with the goal of overturning Obertfeld because, as she says, when marriage was legally redefined to make husbands and wives optional, mothers and fathers became legally interchangeable and children lost something essential. The Greater Than campaign has built up a coalition of faith leaders, legal experts, and policy organizations just like NC Family around a provocative central claim that children have a right to their biological mother and father, and that this right should take precedent over adults' desires for parenthood. NC Family has joined the Greater Than campaign and our efforts to support and amplify this message that children have a right to a mother and father. Katie, thank you for joining us on Family Policy Matters. It's great to be with you, Mitch.
I like you guys anyway. I've been to North Carolina and spoken at two of your banquets, but I really am grateful to be with you today because NC Family was one of the very first state-level policy organizations that got in on this with us. And they have been so instrumental when it comes to crafting strategy and policy related to putting children at the heart of these questions about marriage and family.
So, if you are listening to this and you live in North Carolina, you have one of the most effective policy organizations in the state. You should be grateful for them because not every state-level family policy organization is doing the work that NC Family is doing. Thank you for those kind words, Katie, and we are honored to be part of this campaign. Let's go a little bit backward, back to 2015, and this legal redefinition by the Supreme Court of the United States of what marriage is.
Now, we understand that there is no redefinition of a biblical understanding. Understanding of marriage between one man and one woman for a lifetime. But as the court redefined this, you say that it redefined parenthood. Can you explain the impact of Obergfeld and how it relates to children's rights? Absolutely.
So many of you might remember that in his case stating his agreement with the announcement of the affirmative vote for gay marriage. Justice Kennedy talked about how these same-sex couples needed to be afforded the same constellation of benefits that were given to heterosexual couples.
Now, the thing is that we're not just talking about insurance or hospital visitations. Marriage law is intricately, intimately connected to family law. It is directly tied to how we understand the nature of parenthood. Those two things are linked at the hip. And so what we've seen over the last 10 years is in order to satisfy this demand that there be no distinctions between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, we have had to reorder all of parenthood law around that expectation.
So what does that mean? Right. What that means is that over the last 10 years, the law has had to accomplish what biology prohibits, and that is making two adults of the same sex the parents of a child.
So, how does the law do that?
Well, number one, it has to strip all gendered terms from parenthood law. You may notice that we very rarely see the words mother or father when we're talking about parenthood laws.
Now, we talk about guardians or just parents in general. There's a variety of different states that now allow or force you to list parent one and parent two on a child's birth certificate. They've stripped the birth certificate of mother and father because now just saying the word mother or father constitutes some form of discrimination under this Obergefeld mandate. What else have they done? Biology is a massive bigot when it comes to parenthood.
It always says that children come from two biological parents, a mother and a father. But if we're going to treat same-sex couples as legally interchangeable with a child's own mother and father, that means we have to downgrade the importance of biology when it comes to parental recognition. And that's what we've done. Biology is just one of many pathways for adults to acquire children.
Now they've invented new pathways. To take claim of a vulnerable infant, it's not biology, it's not adoption where adults have to undergo screening and vetting and background checks.
Now, many states can render a child, hand them over to unrelated adults because the adult intends to parent the child. And that's just state-sponsored child trafficking, right?
So, we've also seen the redefinition of infertility. Infertility is a medical condition where 12 months of unprotected heterosexual sex that does not result in a live birth is considered infertile. And sometimes those couples are then able to acquire insurance funding for IVF treatments, for example. But unfortunately, regardless of how long a same-sex couple engages in unprotected sex, they will never produce a child.
So, now we've redefined infertility so single or same-sex couples can have state-subsidized or insurance-subsidized manufacturing of motherless or fatherless children in the name of non-discrimination.
So, overall, what has happened? Gay marriage requires. Flattening any distinction in the family. You can't talk about gender. You can't talk about sex difference.
You can't talk about how procreative relationships are different from fundamentally sterile relationships. You can't talk about the importance of biology. You have to sideline adoption as it relates to child acquisition. Any distinction other than this is what an adult wants has been destroyed. The problem is, those distinctions are very important to children.
And so we have 10 years of receipts. We see a direct connection between the legalization of gay marriage and treating children as legal commodities to be awarded to whatever adult has the money and means to acquire them. Thank you so much for that. Wow. That's a lot to grasp and just a short amount of time over the last 10 years.
The aim of the Greater Than campaign is to see an end to Obergfell. And so if that were to happen, what would be the immediate implications, especially for children currently being raised in same-sex households?
Well, we recognize that. Stability is important. And so nobody's going to go in there and be like, we're going to take your children away from you. But what overturning Obergefell would do is actually signal to those children, many of which experience mother hunger or father hunger, or who are struggling with identity issues, or who are being raised in statistically risky households, which is always what happens when an unrelated adult shares a living space with a child. Overturning Obergefell is actually going to validate what many of those children already experience, what they're already thinking, what they're already wondering.
And so it is going to actually legitimize a lot of what those kids are already walking through on their own. But no, no one's going to go in and take children away from the people who have legally been deemed their parent. But moving forward, it means that no child has to lose their mother or father in service of adult identity. Speaking of these children, you've collected multiple, numerous testimonies from children raised in these same-sex households. What are you hearing from these children?
And how is that shaping the policy advocacy? side of the greater than campaign. The only reason why we are in this place where we have completely undone the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known, where we have redefined an institution that has been recognized throughout history by the five major religions of the world and throughout a variety of centuries, if not millennium, is because we have majored on the backstory of adults who did not get what they want. The only power really that is behind the gay marriage agenda is adults who say that they have been victimized because they cannot have their relationship status validated by the state. And so, whenever you hear them talking, they will often talk about how when they were young, they felt so excluded, or they really suffered because they didn't want to be gay and they were never going to be able to have a family and society wasn't going to accept them.
And the truth is, some of that's legitimate. Like, I think that gay people have suffered in a personal capacity and definitely have suffered and wrestled through their own sexual attractions. They deserve our empathy, they deserve our friendship. But the problem is that sad backstory was the primary motivator to redefining marriage and thus stripping children of their mother and father.
So, one of the main ways we need to combat this gay marriage agenda, this gay marriage narrative, is to tell a different story about the real victims. And that is the children who have lost their mother or father because adult desires were prioritized above their own rights.
So, at thembeforeus.com, we've got a story bank of children who have lost their mother or father, some of whom because they were raised by LGBT parents on the greaterthancampaign.com website. We have pulled some snippets of those stories. To identify how it is that children suffer when they're raised by a same-sex-headed household. What are some of those things?
Well, they struggle with mother hunger or father hunger. Children don't just need to be loved in the abstract. They don't just need guardians or caregivers or parents. They crave maternal love and paternal love, and they hunger for it when it's absent. What else?
These children often struggle with identity issues. It is very hard for children to answer the question, who am I? If they can't answer the question, whose am I? And especially when children are purchased on the open market through sperm and egg donation or womb rental, those children disproportionately struggle with identity challenges. Third, anytime a child is separated from a biological parent and raised by an unrelated adult, which is the case in 100% of same-sex-headed households, they are statistically more likely to be subjected to abuse and neglect.
This actually has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the parents. It has to do with the fact that biology awards children with a level of provision, connection, and protection that unrelated adults do not.
So if you go to the greater than website, greaterthancampaign.com, you'll be able to click through some of these feelings that children have when they are separated from their mother or father and raised in a same-sex-headed household. It's very important that we not just share the data, that we share the natural law, that we create the talking points to help people understand that this actually is about justice for children. We need to familiarize you with the victims and their stories because their stories matter more than the sad adult backstories who said, unless you redefine the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known, then we're going to be victims. It's almost like a designer. or a framer or a creator built this institution where two almost completely and totally opposite beings called a man and a woman got together, united in a covenant before that creator, God, and then decided that they then could have children, offspring that could then do the same thing in the next generation.
It's almost like that happened and has happened throughout all of time in history. Anyway, I digress. I'll just say, you know, you and I have had this. conversation about what the greater than campaign is all about how gay marriage victimized children you'll notice i haven't used any bible verses here that is not because i am not an absolute bible thumper i am mitch but you will see that we are not making a biblical scriptural case for the restoration of marriage in this campaign. That is not because I do not respect and revere the word of God.
It is because tactically, we need to appeal to an authority under which everybody must bend. And that is the authority of natural law, constitutional scholarship, and the lived experience of children who have actually undergone mother or father loss to facilitate a same-sex-headed household. The good news is that arguing from the world of God, which is what we're doing, is never going to contradict the word of God because the world of God and the word of God have the same author. It's just two different books expressing the same truth. Absolutely.
The campaign states that children need, deserve, and have the right to a mother and a father. NC Family could not agree with that more.
So, as we look at this campaign and the coalition spanning faith leaders, think tanks, policy groups, just like NC Family, what has been the strategy for building these alliances? And what do you see being the three most critical areas that the coalition can then affect change moving forward? I actually thought building the coalition was going to be hard. I thought that I was going to have to kind. of beg and cajole and twist arms for people to get in on this because it is politically expensive.
I do think that public opinion is changing, especially on the right. We have seen a precipitous fall in support for gay marriage among Republicans, but it is still unpopular. And certainly that is the case when you're looking at the current administration.
So I thought that it was going to be really challenging to put together a coalition. It wasn't. It wasn't. You know, when I reached out to major national organizations, state level policy organizations, individual influencers, I'd say 90% said, yeah, let's do this. Let's do it right now.
And let's do it with all our might. The other 10% was like, there were a few that's like, you're going to fail. And I'm like, yeah, we will. If we do it the way we've always done it, which has sucked. A lot of those efforts, I'm like, I don't want to be associated with how you're trying to defend marriage.
So we're doing it differently. And even since we launched the campaign, we've probably had another 10 organizations that are throwing their logo at us. Please let us join this. And it's just going to get better and better and better. That is because when you stand unflinchingly on the rights of children, when you articulate those needs from a natural law perspective, which allows you to build a pretty significant coalition, when you commit.
To saying, we are not going to demonize gay people. We are not going to call them sodomites or suggest they're all abusers because these people are made in the image of God. They are our family and friends. We're going to speak about them with dignity. When you actually have the right message and the right method, you can and will unite all of conservatism to speak with one voice.
And that's what we've done. And this is what we're saying. Don't touch the kids. And if you do, we're going to fight for them. Absolutely.
Wow. What encouraging news. And as you stated, this campaign just started on January the 28th, and there's a lot of exciting days ahead. I want to ask one bonus question, and that is this. What would you say to those who are thinking right now, it took 50 years for us to overturn Roe.
What's the likelihood that Obergefell is going to be overturned in the next generation? What would you say to those who have mental consternation or in some way oppositional to this notion that we can actually, in fact, overturn Obergefell? One thing I will say is, well, I certainly don't know how long it's going to take. The other thing I will say is faithfulness, not success. We are called to obey.
We are not called to obey only if we think we have a reasonable likelihood of getting what we want. But I will say, I do think we have a reasonable likelihood of getting what we want. Why? Number one, because we are standing firmly on the ground of biological reality, and number two. We have a couple centuries of common law support for the understanding that the natural parent-child relationship is pre-political and it is something that is protected by the government, not provided by the government.
And that is the fundamental shift that has taken place since we've legalized gay marriage. We have taken this relationship that has enjoyed. Rightly enjoyed preeminence and protection. And the state has actually gotten involved to such a degree that it is a massive power grab.
Now the state is deciding who is and is not a mother and father, not because of adoption, but because of adult contracts. And so if we bring the right case to the court, if we propose the right laws at the state level. And then that comes up through the lower courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court. We're going to be fundamentally asking a different question. It's not the question that was asked 10 years ago, which is: do gay adults have dignity?
Are they equal in the eyes of the law? Of course, individual gay people have dignity and are equal in the eyes of the law. The question that our policy and our cases are going to put before the court. has nothing to do with the adults themselves. It has to do with children.
The question we are going to be asking is, do children benefit from their own mother and father in ways that a state assigned adult does not benefit them? Or are they commodities to be awarded to whatever adult has the money and means to facilitate their acquisition? We are fundamentally changing the way not just the culture, but the courts are going to have to address this. And I will tell you, I think when you put it to them in that framing, we're going to see much more agreement than disagreement. Absolutely.
I tell my three boys all the time: anything worth doing is going to be hard. And tough men do hard stuff. If I look back over the annals of history, slavery was one of those things that took a long time, but people came around to this idea that it was wrong. Abortion, again, it took a long time for us to get that done. But we had to convince people and are still convincing people that that is wrong.
That's right. You know, I love John Quincy Adams' quote. He said, the duty is ours. The results belong to God. And so for anyone out there who's saying, I'm not sure, I'm just.
We do the job. As you said, we are obedient to the calling, and we'll let the rest the results. Belong to God. I will say, you know, I am a Baptist, so I'm not a name-it-claim-it girl, but I've been spending a lot of time in Nehemiah. And I do think that I heard a word from the Lord about what it is that we are doing.
What was Nehemiah working on? Rebuilding the physical walls around a society. And we are rebuilding the emotional and physical walls around the smallest unit of society, the family. And just like Nehemiah, we had to assemble a diverse coalition to accomplish the goal. And I pray like Nehemiah, it's going to be finished in 52 days.
But even if it doesn't, I feel like this is the theme verse for the Greater Than Coalition. And it is, the God of heaven himself will prosper us. Therefore, we, his people, will arise and build. And that's what the Greater Than Coalition is doing. It is we, his people, from a variety of different sectors of conservatism, from influencers like Michael Knowles to spiritual leaders like Albert Moeller to policy people like NC Family.
We, his people, are going to arise and build. And if we prosper, it is the God of heaven who will do it on our behalf.
Well, on behalf of our president, John Rustin, our team is so honored. NC Family is honored to be a part of the Greater Than movement and campaign. And we are looking forward to great days ahead for marriage and for children here in the United States as we wrap up this conversation. Conversation, Katie, where can people go? Where can our listeners go to learn more and how can they get involved?
Go to greaterthancampaign.com. And sign up. We will equip you. We will keep you posted about the wins, the challenges. We'll give you tips on how to navigate these challenging conversations.
We are building a curriculum for Christians specifically. I've got Catholics and Protestants on that team. We are going to create materials that are gonna work for both sides of the Tiber. And I want you to know about them. I want you to use them.
I want you to understand why natural marriage is God's plan A for child protection and why as Christians, courage and child defense is both a biblical and a historical pattern that we need to follow.
So come to greaterthancampaign.com. And sign up and just follow this work. We would love to pull you into this mission. Katie, thank you so much for joining us today on Family Policy Matters. As always, you can go to ncfamily.org to learn more and read the press release that we put out on January 28th in strong support and allied opportunity to stand for children and marriage.
You can read that at ncfamily.org. Katie, thank you for joining us today on Family Policy Matters. Always good to be with you, Mitch. Thanks. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
