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Federalist Radio Hour
The Children-First Case To Overturn Obergefell
00:48:28
On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Katy Faust, founder and president of children's rights organization Them Before Us, joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to discuss the devastating consequences the Supreme Court's...
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And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at the Federalist and your experience Sherpa on today's quest for knowledge. As always, you can email the show at radio the federalist.com follow us on XDRLST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast and of course, to the premium version of our website as well. Our guest today is Katie Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us, and spokeswoman for the newly launched Greater Than Campaign, advocating for the US Supreme Court to overturn Oberfell and prioritize children's rights. And that really is what this is all about, Katie. That is your background, putting children's rights first. Thank you so much for joining us on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
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A
It's really good to be with you. And I was honored that the Federalist ran a piece of that I wrote last week called Obergefell has harmed children for far too long. And I just explained, you know, what was the impact Obergefell really had on kids? Because I think a lot of people look at that and say, oh, what was the result of Obergefell? Gay people get married now. But it's actually gone far beyond that. There actually have been some very significant harms, especially for children, that resulted from that decision. And we're going to say no more.
- [02:55]
B
Yeah, indeed. I don't think that people fully understand where Things are today compared to where they were in 2015, when the Supreme Court, thanks to Anthony Kennedy, in large part he wrote the opinion on all of this. How much things have changed. In fact, you're seeing some polling here that shows a lot of people have misgivings about maybe where they stood in 2014, 2015, 15, as to where they stand today, you know, more than 10 years later. Are you seeing the moment momentum build on that front?
- [03:33]
A
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So I don't know what the Republican support was for gay marriage when they legalized it in 2015, but it peaked in 2022, 23, when it was about 51%. And since then, it has cratered. It has dropped 16%. So now, just among Republicans, we've lost 15% support for gay marriage over the last two years. And I think a lot of people would say, well, it's because the T went too far, right? The T in lgbt, the transgender movement poisoned everything. And now people are looking upstream and saying, this didn't come from nowhere, it came from the lgb. And so I think we've seen a lot of LGB trying to separate themselves from the T because they recognize that it is so toxic for their movement. But I think there's something else here too, and that is that we were told, I mean, gay marriage was passed on the line, that this has nothing to do with kids. I mean, infertile couples get married and they don't have kids. And this is really just about adult dignity. We just want to visit one another in the hospital. We just want insurance benefits. I mean, this is just about making sure that we're not second class citizens. This is the next step in the evolution of marriage. You know, first we struck down barriers for interracial marriage. Now we're striking down barriers for gay marriage. I mean, it was all adult centric, it was all adult focused. But what we've seen over the last several years, especially the last, I would say two or three or five, is so many pictures of motherless babies in hospitals on the hairy chest of men who may or may not be related, some of which we already know were convicted sex offenders who are acquiring children. And a lot of this is happening under the banner of, and certainly with the legal endorsement of the redefinition of parenthood that was part and parcel of the redefinition of marriage.
- [05:28]
B
Some of them are transportation secretaries, for the record, in previous administrations. But all of that said, what is interesting to me is always the politics behind all of this stuff. Do you think the change over the last few years in this country, in particular from conservatives, is they're seeing the naked power abuse that's going on here. That is to say, they have witnessed the use of this Supreme Court ruling for the left to expand and expand into places they never dreamed it would expand into.
- [06:14]
A
I think that some of it is they are actually seeing the very real impacts of defining the most child centric institution the world has ever known around something that has no children involved. And so they're seeing, they are seeing the effects of what every other country throughout the world has seen. There has been 38 countries across the globe that have legalized gay marriage. Zero of those countries have simultaneously reinforced the importance of children's right to their mother and father. Most of them have significantly weakened. Some have totally obliterated this expectation that children come from a man and woman and belong to that man and that woman. So this was totally predictable. And now we've had 10 years to really take a look at the impact that has had on children. I think the other thing too is the vibe shift is real. And, and what shifted? It was a. Your emotional manipulation tactics don't work on me anymore. You have called me so many names. You have called me racist, you have called me a white supremacist. You have called me a homophobe, you've called me a transpho. Like it just doesn't work anymore. And I do think that that was the primary vehicle that gay advocates used to advance their arguments. They didn't have natural law, they didn't have social science, they didn't have any constitutional support. They didn't have common law going back a couple centuries in this country. All they had was emotional backstory and the insistence that you hate gay people if you do not want. If you do not want to redefine the most child friendly instit institution the world has ever known. And I think that emotional manipulative tactic, it just doesn't work on as many Americans anymore because we were, you know, we've all just gotten used to being called ugly names because even when we went along with what they wanted, they still demanded more. So I think that the vibe shift has come in the form of us saying, you know what, we don't like this. We've never liked it, and we're not going to pretend like we like it anymore. You can say whatever you want about me, but the answer is no.
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B
It's such a selfish society. It has been for a while now. I look at what's happening in the culture, in society, And I think to myself it's only getting worse. Although as we just talked about, there are some signs that we truly are prioritizing children. We truly are prioritizing the family and the traditional family. In fact, greater than the campaign says this, in today's society, children are often treated as secondary, spoken for, negotiated over or reshaped to serve adult priorities. Greater than works from a different premise. Children's rights should not be overridden by adult feelings or desires. That's a lot of work on the campaign's front. I know you're up to the challenge and you've got some great people who've been working at this for a long time, but how do you go back decades of indoctrination your feelings? That's what, that's what matters. You know, you're all of these leftist woke concepts of your truth as opposed to the truth. That's very difficult to combat, isn't it?
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Yes. I will tell you though, the reason why we're going to win. We're going to win for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is when you, we, we often say it then before us, the victim determines the policy. So whoever frames themselves as the victim, the policy is going to wrap around them. So leading up to 2015, gay people presented themselves as the victims. Right. They are being treated as second class citizens. You're saying we don't have dignity. Look at all the ways that I have suffered. And the truth is a lot of gay people have suffered. I think a lot of I know plenty. Some of them have honored me by sharing their story with me. Many of them have personally suffered in terms of their peer relationships, in terms of their family relationships, in terms of being victimized by other adults. And they deserve our empathy and compassion. But when we get marriage policy wrong, they're not the victims. Children are the victims. And that's the way we're going to change not just law, but we're going to change public opinion. We are going to reframe the conversation away from adults that think they're victims if they don't get, they get what they want over to children who genuinely are victims. When we re organize the constellation of marriage and family law around adult validation rather than their fundamental rights. So it is an emotional battle and we are working against people that will say, oh, but you're marginalized me and you're victimizing me. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to match story with story. Like they're going to say what I have this hard life. I have this hard story. And we're going to say, oh, oh, you want to talk hard stories. Great. Let's look at this child who was trafficked because of these new parenting laws, these laws that said they don't have a claim to their own mother and father. They're items to be awarded to whatever adult had the money or means to acquire them. Because we have redefined parenthood laws, laws away from biology and adoption, which you guys said was discriminatory and towards de facto parenting or intent based parenting, which is now needed so you can have this constitutional benefit to children. We're going to highlight the children who experienced mother hunger or father hunger because they were raised in a home with two mothers or two dads and deprived of the maternal or paternal love that children crave, but also that maximizes their development. We are going to share the stories. They're already on the website, the GreaterThancampaign.com website. What kind of identity struggles do kids deal with when they've lost their mother or father, often through a commercial arrangement? And a lot of those kids are being raised by gay couples. We're going to share with you the increased household risk of children living with unrelated adults, the kind of neglect they face, maybe the kind of targeted abuse that they face, especially when they're in the home of an unrelated man. Guess what is present in the home of every child raised by a same sex parent. Unrelated adults, some of them may have gone through the process of adopting. A lot of them haven't. And so we're actually placing children in riskier households in the name of adult equality. So the whole thing is going to change. We're going to change not just the question before the courts, but the question before the culture. And it is around. Actually, we're going to reframe this around the true victims, the children who lose their mother or father so adults can have the so called equality that they're seeking.
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Street podcast with Chris Murkowski on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get Your podcast, Much has changed since Obergefell versus Hodges in, in 2015. We've been talking all about that, but what are some of the, the numbers that we have seen and with all of that, what do you think? This is the question for the justices, but they're not going to answer this for me. So I'm asking you, what do you think some of the justices who sided with this think 15, 16 years, excuse me, 10 or 11 years later after this decision and the impact of that decision?
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A
Well, I think that if we come to the justices and say, should you overturn gay marriage? A lot of them are going to say no. A couple of them might say yeah, it was a trash decision that was built on trash logic and has nothing to do with the Constitution. But a lot of them may say no because they're going to say, well, you know, we've got 10 years of precedence, but we're not settled law.
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B
Right, Katie, that's what, that's what they always say. It's settled law.
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And we're not going to come to them and saying, should you overturn gay marriage? We're going to bring to them cases or challenges that are not asking what do you think of gay marriage? We're going to bring them cases that say, do a child's own mother and father benefit them in ways that a state assigned adult does not. We're going to change the entire question that they're being asked. And when you answer the question, actually a child's own mother and father matter to them as it relates to their safety, their investment, their development, their identity, as it relates to their long term outcomes and as it correlates with centuries of common law that places and privileges the natural parent child relationship above other relationships. Now you've got a totally different equation before the court. It's not about how do these adults identify or what is the strength of their emotional relationship. The question before the court is do children need their own mother and father and should that be elevated and prioritized for the sake of kids? And if they answer yes, which social science is on our side and so is common law and so is natural law, then you're creating an environment where Obergefell is not going to be able to continue to exist.
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B
That's a good point. And I want to get to the science point of things. We were told in 2020 over and over again by the experts to follow the science. More to the topic when it came to Covid more to the topic at hand right now, we were told the experts so called for years that, you know, changing the sex of a 15 year old kid, you know, cutting off their, their, their genitals and, you know, and, and inducing them with all kinds of horrible chemicals was a good thing, a, a benefit. So I'm a little concerned about people actually truly following the science. Does that give you any pause based on where we've been over the last several years in this country?
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A
On that front, the science was hijacked in this conversation as well. If any of you guys have ever tried to say kids need a mom and dad, and I'm a little concerned about two men or two women raising a child and I just think that might be bad for them, immediately you're going to be hit with a link that says Cornell University has surveyed 79 studies of children raised by same sex households. And 75 of them say that they're. Those kids fare no different or even better than kids raised by their heterosexual parents. And so they did a lot of work leading up to Obergefell to create a lot of quote unquote studies that showed that number one, you know, they argued in a burgerfell, kids have nothing to do with marriage, but also kids love it and they need it. Kids have nothing to do with marriage, but the kids of same sex headed households, they really need marriage and they're very, very happy to have two moms or two dads. So they had the science all lined up for them as well. Just like the science behind the vaccine and the science behind transgenderism. They had trash studies that said, hey, kids love having two moms or two dads. If you go to the them before us substack, I looked at all 75 of those studies and interestingly, when you apply the gold standard standard of the scientific method that is generally used when you want to evaluate whether or not a conclusion for a sociological survey can be extrapolated to the general population. You want to look for things like, you know, adequate control groups or finding random participants. Rather than just asking somebody to complete a survey, you know, you know, asking a, somebody that is already at a gay and lesbian center if they want to participate in a study that might impact the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage. You're going to look at the actual outcomes of the children. What's their medical record, what is their academic record? You're not just going to ask the parents, hey, do your kids love having gay moms? They do. Awesome. Looks like the kids fair, no different. And so I looked at like all of those different variables. And of those 75 studies, that say that kids fair no different. There is one, there is one study that pulled from government data that had. It actually was a very small sample size but at least they used robust methodology. They had adequate control groups. There was one one out of 75. The other 75 were so obviously driven by bias that they really cannot be used in any meaningful way to say kids fair no different. And this should surprise none of us. Oh, by the way, there was one other study that was done since those 75 were complet. And it also is a good study from the Netherlands. But now you have to stack that up against the several robust studies that we have of children with same sex parents who show they do not do as well. And on top of that you have to contend with the fact that whenever sociologists are studying anything other than same sex parents, they overwhelmingly agree on three things. Number one, biology, advantages. Children. A child's own mother and father are the most connected to, invested in and protective of them. Number two, the parental loss through death, abandonment, divorce, even sub, even reproductive technologies. Children are harmed when they lose their mom or dad. And three, that mothers and fathers offer distinct and complementary benefits to children. And you could throw in the fourth, that unrelated adults in the home always increase risk of abuse and neglect. So that is what sociologists agree on across the board when you're not talking about same sex parenting. So then how is it that these studies, the science where children are always missing a biological parent, they're always raised by an unrelated adult, they've always suffered the trauma of parental loss and they're always starved of either the maternal or paternal love that maximizes development. How are those kids faring no different? That's the real question. And the answer is those no different studies are totally filled with bias. There's no way that you could come to that conclusion without upending everything else that we know about human behavior.
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Our guest today is Katie Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us, spokeswoman for the newly launched Greater Than campaign advocating for the US Supreme Court to overturn one Obergefell and prioritize children's rights. You mentioned those studies. I want to talk about the studies that do have the gold standard, do follow the scientific method and do find that there is indeed damage being done. Ten years after the Obor verdict, the ruling. What are they saying on the topic of same sex marriage and these other arrangements, non traditional arrangements if you will.
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Well, the first one to be done was in 2012 and that was Mark Rigneris study, the New Family Structure Study. And it Was a bomb that went off because he did what all the other researchers refused to do. He went and found these kids as adults, and then he asked them about their own experiences. It wasn't just gay fathers report that their kids do well in school. Gay fathers report that their kids have great emotional outcomes. No, they went to the kids that had two moms or two dads and said, did you have an IEP in school? Were you ever sexually assaulted? Were you on welfare? Did you struggle more with any depressive symptoms? And the metrics were off the charts. You know, when you actually apply the gold standard method of the scientific method for these same sex parenthood studies, that no difference actually becomes massive difference. You know, we did see higher rates of sexual abuse, sexual assault, higher rates of academic struggles, mental health challenges, emotional challenges were definitely off the chart. Substance abuse was also a big part of it as well. Well, then after that, Dr. Paul Solins pulled data from government data sources, and he found that children with same sex parents had double and triple the rates of emotional problems above children raised by heterosexual parents. Even things like daily fearfulness and crying was about four times higher among children with same sex parents. And then he also corrected a study that had widely been heralded as showing no difference. And he said there was a category error. Here you were accounting some kids as has same sex headed households that really were not in a same sex headed household. And when he actually categorized them properly, he found that those children of same sex headed households fared worse. But he also found that children of married same sex couples did worse than children of cohabiting same sex couples. Now, we do not have a, we have very, very little data now on the difference between children with cohabiting versus same sex married couples, because we've only had marriage, same sex marriage for 10 years. But when kids were mentioned during the oral arguments during Obergefell, one of the reasons they said, we need this is the kids with same sex parents. They need the stability of marriage. And yet Dr. Sullins found that the children with married same sex parents did worse than unmarried same sex parents. And he suggested, well, that's probably because they were more significantly cut off from their missing parent. Whereas the cohabit kids with cohabiting same sex parents, he hypothesized that they probably still had some contact with their father or their mother that was missing. Maybe that was more likely the product of a heterosexual breakup. And so the child still had some kind of a relationship with the parent that was generally totally excluded in the married homes. So whenever we actually get good data whenever we actually can put our hands on the real outcomes of kids and not just this, this ideological smokescreen or these poor methodologies that allow adults to wish cast onto children how they hope that they feel rather than what they actually experience. The results are damning. And again, none of this should be a surprise to us. What gay marriage is, what same sex headed households is. It's just another variety of broken home. It's just another kind of broken home. It's just another manifestation of a way that children lose a relationship with either their mother or their father or both. And so far in the whole pantheon of human experience, there's no way for a child to lose their mother or father and not be really significant harm, significantly harmed by it.
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B
Well, on all of that, let me ask you a question I think I know the answer to and a question I don't know the answer to, the question I know the answer to because I have, you know, reported on this. How come the studies that you mentioned that are, you know, they're so telling, they, they use the gold standard as you mentioned, and they're showing absolutely different outcomes for children, negative outcomes in same sex marriages. How come those are so buried? We never see those being reported in the, the usual arenas, the, the so called mainstream media, what I like to call the accomplice media. And I know we're only 10 years out after the fact, but are there any long term studies, the studies you mentioned really dealt with, you know, the, the, the children, a lot of them at the time. What about the long term impacts of this over 10, 15 years?
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Good questions, very good questions. So first of all, a couple of those are mentioned. You know, it is the four studies in that Cornell survey, you know, the 75 out of 79. Well the other, you know, 76, 77, 78, 79 that they don't like, that is Regneris, that is Dr. Sullins. So they have to acknowledge them there. But you have these massively strong studies that are just a handful up against this, this absolute, you know, there's just an abundance of garbage studies. And so it makes it look like all of the social science is on one side when the reality is like anybody can go out and kind of make that, that trash study, but it's very hard to do the kind of study that Rick Neris or Dr. Sullins did. And that's why it stands up to scrutiny. That's why you can actually extrapolate to the general population. What studies have been done since then? Very few. There's Been a couple that have come out, out of Europe. Like I mentioned, there was a good one, good by. It actually did use robust methodology from the Netherlands. And it showed on an academic level that children of lesbians had the same academic outcomes. So that's one that we do have to look at and contend with. Most people would say, well, the lesbians evaluate in that study had a higher socioeconomic status. So it's probably more of a distinction between rich and poor, not household structure. But that's a study that really does deserve some attention in terms of challenging those narratives. And anything in the United States, there's been virtually nothing. I think a lot of the research machine shifted as soon as they got Obergefell, right. Oh, you're so concerned about outcomes of children with same sex parents until you get your legislative win. And really that's been, it really has hardly been studied since. And everybody shift their focus and started, you know, cranking out, in my opinion, ideological, material and supposed research for the question about transgender and transing the kids and all of that. And now we've seen a lot of that research also is built on very shifting sands, you know, so why isn't more being done? Good studies are expensive and very few institutions are going to fund them because virtually nobody will publish them. There has been absolute widespread institutional capture across the social sciences. And so it's hard to get funding and it's hard to get approval. And even if you did get it published somewhere, ask Dr. Regneris how that went for him. They absolutely tried to destroy him. And by God's grace, the university stood behind him. And that man has been vindicated in terms of his methodologies. There was just somebody ran his conclusions through some kind of AI algorithm and in like 2 million multiverses, because there's actually a lot of ways that you can kind of parse and present data. And so even if you do get data that's unfavorable, you can trim and cut and trim and cut and trim and cut, cut, and then present the bit that supports your conclusions. So somebody did that with Mark Regneris's data and it was like in, in 2 million multiverse options, his conclusions held. So I mean, it was such a well done study, but that is hard to do. It's expensive. And even if you do fund it and publish it, are you able to withstand the barrage, the attacks, not just for you and your job, but for your family? And most people don't want to put themselves in through that. So the answer is we don't know A whole lot about how those kids have fared since 2015 because no one's studying it.
- [30:51]
B
Yeah, well, you know, as an elections correspondent for the Federalist and covering elections longer than I want to acknowledge, the, the mantra is always follow the money. And so I ask you the same question in these so called 75 studies that according to Cornell, corroborate, you know, that, that love is love, same sex, mar don't have any adverse outcomes for, for kids. Who, who's funding most of these studies?
- [31:23]
A
That's a great question. I haven't, I have not done a deep dive into who is funding them. But the good news is for them is they're pretty cheap. It's not that hard to go down to the local LGBTQ center and you know, have a little pull tab thing like want to take part in a same sex parenting study? You know, call this number and then, you know, complete as something over the phone or over online and then you collate that information. Information. I mean, that's not hard to do and it's not expensive. So a lot of these I don't think needed a lot of funding behind them, but because they conveyed the message that was necessary at the time, they were treated as something that was legitimate.
- [32:04]
B
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- [34:41]
A
Oh, yeah. Well, I think that the trans situation was definitely, obviously a social contagion, which is what Bill Maher was pointing to. There's no way that you can have a high concentration of transgender kids in San Francisco, but why are there virtually none in North North Carolina? It's a total mystery. It's because it's absolutely a social contagion. I think that with the gay marriage thing and the engineering of the data around children with same sex parents, I think a lot of that is just kind of the trajectory of we are here to advance the next wave of liberation and equality and right. This is the next step after we tore down barriers for interracial marriage. You know, now we're going to move on and tear down barriers between same sex marriage. And I, I personally think a lot of it is, you know, people that grew up in the 70s and 80s and 90s that so revered the civil rights movement. I mean, I remember in social studies, you know, we all thought, well, those, that's what heroes really look like. Where's our movement? Where's our campaign? Where's our chance to fight for the marginalized and most vulnerable? And gay marriage served that up on a plate. You know, this is your chance to also, you know, tear down the barriers, just like, you know, what our black brothers and sisters had to face under Jim Crow. And I will say there's an awful lot of black pastors that are like, ah, no, you don't. Yes, you do not get to co opt our story of civil rights and our suffering because you cannot have your sexual relationship validated by the state.
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B
Like, oh, no, no, I, I agree with you, but what about intersexual, inter intersectionality and all of these sorts of radical leftist terms where they're, you know, and that gets you to back to the point we were talking about before. Is this nothing more than just power? It is to put people in on the left, the Marxist left in, into power. They're using this. It's a vehicle to get people elected and then ultimately to change and redefine not only society, but reality.
- [36:45]
A
Yeah, well, and I will say that it's strange that Marxism always seems to have this component of separating children from parents. You absolutely can see it in Mao's Red Youth. You know the Little Red Book. Yeah, little Red Book. And you know, they all sort of have their own movement. I'm just especially familiar with China, where you start to see Mao as your father, not your parents. He's your father. Right. He's the one that you rely on. He's one. You should. You should turn your parents in. But then there also is this family deconstruction element as well of children don't belong to you, they belong to the state. And this absolutely just goes hand in hand. We understand that there has been a right. Parental rights have been under attack. All of us have seen it. We're up in arms. Governor Glenn Youngkin got elected because people are like, don't you touch my kids. So we understand that parents have a right to their own children, but we need to start looking at is actually children have a right to their own parents as well. There's two sides of that natural law coin, right? That relationship between parents and child has been privileged by the state going back to. Back to the colonial times because there is something critical about that that safeguards against government overreach. And now in the name of marriage equality, they are deconstructing that further. They're beginning by separating children from the parents. But if children don't have a claim to their own parents in the world of natural law and in the common law, why on earth do parents have a claim to their own children? Isn't that relationship. So that's two sides of the same coin. And so there. This ultimately will weaken parental rights because if the government can decide who is and is not a parent, if they have that kind of power, which is exactly what we have given them in the last 10 years. We have. We used to say, how do you know what a parent is? A parent is the genetic parent. They gave birth or they're biologically related. We didn't do evaluations on pregnant women and their husbands because we presumed that that was a pre political relationship that the state wasn't going to get involved in unless there was abuse or neglect. And then the state gets involved, often very hesitantly. But then we said, okay, there's one other way that we can recognize that you have a claim to a child and that is adoption. If you undergo significant screening and Vetting and background checks to as much as possible replicate the kind of protectiveness that biological parents naturally have for their own children, then you also can be a parent. But in the world of modern family, both of those are discriminatory because same sex couples can never both be biologically related. And many of them felt like it was undignified to have to adopt a child that is the son of the woman that they're married to. I mean, men don't have to do that when their wife gives birth. I have to do it when my wife gives birth. Well, the difference is the man is the biological parent of the child and you are a genetic stranger. And so what they did is they said, we're going to create new pathways of child acquisition. So now it's just not just biology, it's not adoption. We have created new pathways in the name of adult equality for unrelated adults to take possession of infants. It's called intent based parenthood or de facto parenthood. It's actually just state, state sanctioned trafficking. But what we're doing here notice is a massive power grab of the state. Now, it's not biology that determines whether you are or not a parent. Now it is the government that decides when you are an or not a parent. And let me be very clear with you. If the state can decide who is and is not a parent arbitrarily, not because of biology, if they can assign that to an unrelated adult, it is much more easy for them to unassign you as the biological parents, as the legal parents of your own biological children. I wrote about this at First Things in the fall. It's called the end of Natural Parenthood. And I looked at nine different statutes that used to recognize the preeminence of the natural parent child relationship. And all nine have been weakened or gutted because of Obergefell. So this is not just a threat to the children who become intentionally motherless or fatherless because of new gay marriage laws. This is a threat to every parent child relationship. So when I talk about how significant the impact is that Obergefell has had on law, people just don't understand. And there are very real children that are being harmed because of this. But also this is actually a threat to all of society, to every parent and every child.
- [41:40]
B
There are some real horror stories out there as well about parental rights being taken away because that biological parent didn't want to see their child mutilated, didn't want to see their child, you know, with, you know, most control, the, the parent who then became involved in A same sex relationship, what have you. The, the parent wanted, wanted more custodial rights and, and lost them in the bargain. I mean, as you mentioned before, these are, are stories that are going on. These are the, the faces of what's happened over the last 10 years since Oberge fell.
- [42:19]
A
I think a lot of us are familiar with that, how ideology has encroached on parental rights. And it's horrifying. But when children don't have a right to their own parents, and that's what Obergefell does, it destroys the claim that children have to their own parents. It regards them as functional accessories to be awarded to any and every adult. What Obergefell did is it removed all the contours of the natural family. In law, you probably have not looked at a legal document recently. But if in, in state law or federal law, you probably are not seeing the words mother and father, you're probably seeing the words guardian or parent. You may.
- [42:57]
B
Or inseminated person.
- [42:59]
A
Inseminated person, yeah.
- [43:00]
B
The state of Wisconsin, by the way, based on all kinds of. And it's not alone. I mean that's just, that's the one that came out. The governor there took, the leftist governor took a lot of heat, of course, from the right on something that he should have taken a lot of heat for the sort of changing terminology.
- [43:17]
A
That's right. And what you cannot name, you cannot defend. And so you're taking out mother and father. You can't defend a child's right to their mother and father. You're reducing biology in terms of its importance. You're elevating intent based on based parenthood. Now it's like any way that you acquire a child is legitimate. In a lot of jurisdictions they've redefined the word infertility because it's discriminatory. You know, if 12 months of unprotected heterosexual sex deems you infertile and then you can get insurance benefits that will subsidize your IVF coverage for heterosexuals. But a same sex couple can have as much unprotected heterosexual sex as they want and they'll never result in a pregnancy or a life where that's discrimination. So they've redefined infertility. Now there's no recognition that the procreative relationship has anything special to offer society. Right. You're not allowed to say that. It's just any two is helpful. And you know, that's the stable bond that we're looking for. And so what they've done is they have stripped the law of all of the distinctives of the natural family. That's what they've done. And, and when that's the problem is all that's really important. Like mothers and fathers are important to kids. A biological connection, or at minimum an adoption is important to kids. Kids not having the insurance companies subsidize the manufacturing of motherless or fatherless kids. All of that matters to kids. And so what we've seen here is the commodification of children. That is what happens when the only contours of family law is what the adults want. Male and female aren't a part of it, biology isn't a part of it, genuine infertility is not a part of it. The only guiding principle in parenthood law now is, is, is the adult happy? That means that children are commodities to be awarded to any and every adult. So what is the result of that? Yes, some children are going to be raised by same sex couples, but Also you'll have 21 children created by Chinese nationals in California through surrogacy, 15 of which are under the age of three. You're going to have a 74 year old man who has six year old twins that he created through IVF surrogacy. You're going to have sex offenders and predators acquiring children and handing them over. Because that's the world of Obergefell, that is the world of modern family. If biology doesn't matter, if gender does not matter, if children don't have a claim to their own mother and father, if intent and contracts are the only thing that makes you a parent, then you can mass produce them. Pedophiles can acquire them, retirees can raise their own caregivers. All of that is what you get when you legalize gay marriage. So you can either believe that children have a right to their mother and father or you can support gay marriage. Pick. You can't have both.
- [46:10]
B
Well, isn't it all just the extension of the concept from the abortion industry that it's just a clump of cells, just a collection of cells. And that's how they've argued about the, the preborn not being, you know, living dreams of, of the parents. And now they've taken that, of course, to children who have been treated this way for, for some time, as you mentioned, as commodities for the feelings of parents. Final question. What's next for greater than. I know you're just launching now, but I know there are a lot of different fronts here. What' what's next for the campaign?
- [46:57]
A
Well, we have three goals. The first one is to create a credible judicial strategy for success. And we do feel like we have that. And if you are a policymaker at the state level and would like to be a part of that, you can come to the campaign website and email us and we'll give you some ideas about how you can participate. Number two, we need to change public opinion. And so thankfully, I've got some incredible influencers on board, from Michael Nolan to Lila Rose to Ali Stuckey to Abby Johnson and Steve Dace and Josh hammer and Heidi St. John and Delano Squires and I mean, just really some incredible people, Lisa Bevere, that are involved in that effort. And the goal is to help people understand the very direct connection between gay marriage and child victimization and natural marriage and child protection. So we are going to change the way Americans think about marriage. We are going to communicate this is not primarily about adult emotional validation. This is about child protection. And then third, we need to turn the church into a child centric fighting force. So I've got a wonderful team of Catholics and Protestants who are going to develop some materials for Christians so they can understand their job is child protection. And advancing a true definition of marriage is one way that we Christians are going to do that. So there's a lot ahead in terms of activity, definitely a lot of head ahead as it relates to opposition to what we're working on. But I feel very confident that when we have this question, when we look at this issue through the lens of putting kids first, we're going to see a lot of clarity both in the culture and in the courtroom.
- [48:44]
B
There are no more important battles, no battle that is more important than the battle for our children and for their future. Thanks to my guest today, Katie Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us, spokeswoman for the newly launched Greater Than Campaign, advocating for the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell and prioritize children's rights. You've been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour More. I'm Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fr. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you feeling those winter blues? Well, do not worry. They've got you covered with ways to boost your mood, add a little sweetness to your day with big savings on all your favorite sweets. Shop in store or online and save on items like Gummy Savers, Five Flavors, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Sour Patch, Watermelon, M M's Party Size Stand Up Bags and Ferrero Rocher mixed variety squares. Offer ends February 24th. Fourth restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Are you a fraud paying American? 1 in 4 tax paying Americans has been a victim of identity fraud. With Lifelock. If your identity is stolen, they fix it guaranteed or your money back. Last year, billions in refunds were stolen. Could be from your salary, overtime or second job gone. But this year you don't need to stay a victim because because this tax season, fraud paying American is something no American should have to claim. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com iheart Terms apply. Does your dessert game need a makeover? Scoop it or swirl it. That's the sound of an ice cream shop on your countertop. The Ninja Creami helps you turn almost anything into ice cream, from sweet and indulgent to protein packed and locale. No skimping on flavor. Reward yourself. Hit your macros. Do dessert your way. No sacrifice, no stress. Just flawless ice cream. However you love it. Treat, repeat. Pretty sweet. Get your Ninja Creami today.