GOP Supported Gay ‘Rights’ Until They Saw It Destroy Kids’ Rights

Conservatives are jumping the gay marriage ship. According to a new Gallup poll, Republican support for same-sex marriage has plummeted from 55 percent in 2021 and 2022 to just 37 percent today. 

The reason is simple: Republicans were told that supporting same-sex marriage meant supporting their gay brother, daughter, coworker, or friend. They were told that opposing it meant they hated gay people, and many bought it. If supporting same-sex marriage was simply the price of treating loved ones with dignity and respect, they were willing to pay it.

What they were not told was that same-sex marriage would victimize kids. No sooner had gay marriage been achieved on the grounds that marriage had nothing to do with children than activists, judges, and lawmakers turned around and demanded parenthood too.

Republicans have no interest in persecuting their gay friends and family members. What they reject is the claim that adult equality requires making children lose their mother or father. And after a decade of watching the consequences unfold, it has become obvious that “equal marriage” was never just about adult “rights.” It was about parenthood and children.

‘Parentage’

Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the Obergefell majority opinion, wrote that same-sex couples needed access to the full “constellation of benefits” associated with marriage. The last decade has proved that children were among those so-called benefits. In the name of constitutional rights, the law had to accomplish what biology prohibits: making two same-sex adults the legal parents of a child. Thus, through the use of language and state force, activists began to meticulously eradicate a child’s mother and father.

In 2017, with Pavan v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not treat same-sex couples differently on birth certificates. The presumption of paternity, a centuries-old doctrine designed to unite children with both biological parents whenever possible, was repurposed into a presumption of parentage. A legal tool created to secure a child’s mother and father had become a mechanism for erasing one of them.

Then came the Uniform Parentage Act. A growing number of states have adopted all or part of the Uniform Parentage Act, a sweeping legal framework designed to redefine parenthood itself. Previously, the right to take a vulnerable infant home from the hospital was recognized on two grounds: a biological relationship or proof of having undergone significant screening, vetting, and background checks to ensure the adoptive parents would love and cherish that child as if he or she had been born to them. Under the UPA, however, an “intent” to parent and a state-backed contract allowed unrelated adults to purchase children under the umbrella of constitutional requirements.

I watched this happen firsthand in Washington state in 2018, when Democrat state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a gay “married” father of four boys he commissioned via surrogacy, helped author and pass Washington’s Uniform Parentage Act. That law totally rewrote parentage law and legalized commercial surrogacy in the state. The overhaul scrubbed “mother” and “father” from Washington parenthood statutes, made new pathways for unrelated adults to acquire children without undergoing background checks, and explicitly allowed payments from intended parents to birth or genetic parents. In any other context, the exchange of money for parental rights would be regarded as trafficking.

Even Pedersen admitted that all of these changes flowed directly from the legalization of gay marriage. Like I’ve often repeated, Obergefell commodified children. Once husbands and wives became optional, mothers and fathers became optional too.

Parenthood statutes are being stripped of sexed terms. Mothers and fathers are now interchangeable “parents.” Infertility is being reclassified so same-sex couples can deliberately produce motherless or fatherless children with the help of insurance subsidies. Birth certificates have been altered to legally exclude a child’s biological parent. New parentage pathways bypass both biological and adoptive safeguards. It is the legal obliteration of the nuclear family. When familial distinctions are erased, children become items to be awarded by state-enforced contract.

The madness has not stopped. Even now, New York Democrats are advancing legislation that continues to scrub sex-specific parentage language from state law. New York legalized commercial surrogacy through its version of the UPA, the ironically named Child-Parent Security Act. Now lawmakers are cleansing the remaining statutory code so the language matches the new reality they created, replacing longstanding mother-and-father terminology with sex-neutral parentage concepts.

That’s because if you can’t name it, you can’t legally defend it. And gay activists regard even the mention of mothers and fathers as an attack on their “rights.”

Undeniable Consequences

While all of this was unfolding, another reality became impossible to ignore: The “T” in LGBT was wreaking havoc everywhere. The same movement that insisted sex did not matter in marriage eventually insisted sex did not matter anywhere else either — not in sports, locker rooms, prisons, you name it. Republicans saw pictures of teen girls with top scars and read terrible stories of detransitioners whose bodies were permanently mutilated. The excesses of transgender ideology forced them to look upstream and ask where these ideas came from. Many rightly concluded that gay marriage led directly to transgender madness.

Then came headlines of the terrible sexual abuse of children raised by same-sex adults:

• “2 [Married Gay Men] Arrested in Harnett County on Child Sex Crime Charges”
• “Surrogacy’s Loophole: How Family Law Gave a Convicted Sex Offender a Baby”
• “Oklahoma [Lesbian] Couple Sentenced to 20 Years for Torturing and Beating Boy So Badly He Suffered Multiple Strokes”
• “Veterinarian Accused of Planning to Sexually Assault His Unborn [Surrogate] Child”

These headlines are not random; they’re the predictable outcomes of a legal framework that prioritizes adult identity, desires, and equality over child-centric biological reality. The issue isn’t sexual orientation; it’s that these legal changes require children to live in homes with unrelated adults. Decades of social science have shown that unrelated adults, specifically men, are statistically the riskiest people in a child’s life. Yet Obergefell’s parentage promotes those exact arrangements in the name of adult civil rights.

Republican opinion changed because the consequences of gay marriage became impossible to ignore. They were promised adult “equality,” but what they got instead was child inequality. They were told gay marriage was about hospital visitation rights and health benefits. Instead, they watched lawmakers redefine parentage, legalize commercial surrogacy, erase mothers and fathers from law, alter birth certificates, redefine infertility, and create entirely new pathways for unrelated adults, some of whom have criminal records, to acquire children.

Republicans are not becoming less compassionate; they are becoming less naive. They are waking up to the reality that gay marriage has resulted in child harm. That’s why I am spearheading the Greater Than coalition. We will overturn Obergefell because it victimizes children.

No longer is our warning that redefining marriage will redefine parenthood hypothetical. It is now clear that the law cannot simultaneously uphold same-sex marriage and a child’s right to his mother and father. We have to choose — and, increasingly, Republicans are choosing the kids.

Katy Faust is the founder and president of Them Before Us and spokeswoman for the Greater Than campaign. Follow her on X @Katy_Faust.