Eight years of Obergefell proves children are the victims of marriage equality
Story by Katy Faust, Washington Examiner, 7/2/23
Eight years ago this week, five Supreme Court justices redefined marriage for the entire country in the name of “equality.” Remember those ubiquitous blue and yellow “=” bumper stickers? Those hesitant to abandon the traditional definition of marriage were told that opening up the institution was just about same-sex couples wanting to visit one another in the hospital, have access to the same inheritance laws, and get the same tax breaks as heterosexuals. The impression was that no one else would be affected by this radical redefinition of marriage.
But as many of us predicted, gay marriage did indeed affect someone else. And while you have likely heard of the impact Obergefell has had on religious bakers and florists, the greatest victims of marriage equality are children who have been subjected to inequality. Like every other country that has made husbands and wives optional in marriage, fathers and mothers are quickly becoming optional in parenthood. Marriage equality, in this sense, has made it so that for adults to be truly equal, children must lose their mother or father.
Pro-abortion giant NARAL made clear that children must sacrifice their actual rights in service of the less-than-decade-old “right” to marry:
Consider this statement. “To grow our families however and whenever we want. Because…equality” (emphasis added).
In the name of growing families according to the wants of adults, NARAL has been violating children’s right to life for more than half a century through its support for unfettered abortion.
Now, as a result of this Obergefell, growing families according to the wants of adults also means violating children’s right to their mother or father. Adults cannot be equal if they cannot create families “however” they want, according to NARAL. And for same-sex couples, that means creating families that will always be missing a mother or father.
This isn’t a new development. The erasure of a child’s mother or father ensued shortly after Obergefell and has taken various forms. Court decisions have mandated state-sanctioned birth certificate falsification that insists children have “two moms,” legally erasing the identity of a child’s father from his or her earliest moments.
Bills such as the Uniform Parentage Act, which deemed using the word “mother” and “father” to be unconstitutional, are yet another example.
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s support for commercial surrogacy, which always denies children one, two, or three of their mothers, was in service of “fairness and equality” for “LGBTQ+ New Yorkers.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has attempted to mandate government-subsidized children who would always be raised in a motherless or fatherless home.
And California is debating Senate Bill 729, which may mandate insurance coverage of third parties, someone else’s sperm, egg, womb, or embryo, thereby cutting children off from one or both biological parents. Bill co-author state Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Democrat, noted that this legislation “is critical to achieving full-lived equality for LGBTQ+ people.”
Open-hearted people bought the equality argument, believing that maybe the government should “get out of people’s bedrooms.” But as more disturbing scenarios of gay couples customizing lab-created babies, lesbians suing IVF clinics for implanting the wrong child, and “gay poly throuples” raising children find their way into our news feeds, some people seem to be reconsidering their stance. A recent Gallup poll noted that, for the first time in decades, support for the morality of same-sex relationships has declined to 64%, down from 71%.
To quote another popular leftist bumper sticker, it’s now obvious that equality for adults in the form of gay marriage and children’s right to their mother and father cannot “COEXIST.” And it seems the general public is starting to take notice.
Katy Faust is president of the children’s rights nonprofit Them Before Us and author of Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement and the upcoming book Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City. Follow her at @Advo_Katy.