The absolute rule,” Katy Faust told a gay father on a 2025 podcast, “is you and your husband shouldn’t have children.”
In late January 2026, Faust turned that conviction into a movement. Forty-seven anti-LGBTQ+ Christian organizations launched a campaign to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide a decade ago. They call themselves Greater Than. The website frames the whole thing as a defense of children’s “right” to a mother and father. The organizations behind it have spent decades arguing something cruder.
The Sales Pitch
Faust heads Them Before Us, the advocacy group anchoring the Greater Than campaign. “It dawned on us: has anybody really, really put together an effort to overturn this?” she told The Christian Post in 2025. “We can pull in a lot of other wonderful, faithful, grounded, virtuous, clear-eyed organizations into the mix.”
The campaign launched with a slick video in late January 2026. Marriage, the YouTube speakers declare, is “the most basic institution of human civilization.” Obergefell was “built as a win for adult equality” but “created inequality for children.” Recognizing same-sex couples has “made our children less than.” Then comes the promise: “Children are greater than equal. And it’s time we fought for their rights.”
“Very Close to Both of Them”
Faust’s press release announcing Greater Than carried her declaration: “The legal result of so-called adult equality has been the commodification of children. Ask the children who have been starved of maternal or paternal love, acquired by predators, mass produced, trafficked across borders, struggling with identity confusion, or subjected to risky households if they feel ‘equal’ now.”
At the 2025 National Conservatism Conference, Faust went further: “If an adult can assemble sperm, egg, and womb, and ‘intend’ to parent the child, they get the baby. Biologically related or not. Pedophile or not. Retiree or not. Foreign national or not. Intent-based parentage is child trafficking disguised as constitutional rights. Gay marriage did that.”
That claim — that legal same-sex marriage created a pipeline for child trafficking — has no basis in any law enforcement data, any court finding, or any peer-reviewed study. Faust offered none. What she offered was a punchline.
“The last 10 years have made one thing unmistakably clear,” she continued. “We can either recognize gay marriage, or we can recognize a child’s right to the mother and father. We can’t do both.”
Two months before the NatCon speech, the Australian podcast Uncomfortable Conversations tested that choice against someone living inside it.
The Father
Host Josh Szeps is an openly gay father. His children were born through surrogacy and IVF using his partner’s sister’s eggs. Over two hours, Faust made her case to a man whose family she would unmake.
Szeps didn’t flinch. “I have a family that I wouldn’t be able to have in your regime,” he replied. He pressed her on the false choice at the center of the argument: no child of a same-sex couple was diverted from the biological two-parent household Faust describes as ideal. That household was never on offer. “There is no universe in which children who would otherwise be brought up in a heterosexual family with biological parents are not getting that and getting something else,” he said. “We stepped in and created life who are enjoying a flourishing family. That flourishing family, you can argue, is suboptimal in comparison to the fantasy that you’re creating in your brain. That fantasy family wasn’t on the cards.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics concluded after reviewing more than 60 studies that “children’s optimal development seems to be influenced more by the nature of the relationships and interactions within the family unit than by the particular structural form it takes.” The Australian and Canadian psychological associations reached the same finding independently.
Faust objected that the data “doesn’t tell the whole story.”
“Well, no,” Szeps answered. “It’s fundamentally a moral conviction of yours, which means it’s basically a religious conviction.”
On the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch, Faust’s strategy came into sharper focus: “I am spearheading a national coalition where we are going to retake marriage on behalf of children, and we are going to bring the kind of cases that represent the right victim: children.” Faust waved off previous legal challenges, including Kim Davis’s, the Kentucky county clerk jailed in 2015 for refusing to sign same-sex marriage licenses as asking “the wrong questions.” The correct one, she said, is: “Do kids need their own mother and father? And if they say, ‘Yes, children have been victimized because of gay marriage,’ then I guess [LGBTQ+ couples] don’t get the full constellation of benefits that were promised.”
In her book Them Before Us, the argument covers all same-sex families: “Whenever you see a picture of a kid with same-sex parents, you’re looking at a picture of a child missing a parent.” Same-sex couples, she wrote, are “incapable of providing the gender-specific parenting and biological identity exclusive to the parent missing from the picture.”
The name “Ask the Bigot” is Faust’s own. She started as an anonymous blogger under that handle in 2012, after President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage. A gay blogger subsequently identified her, published the name of her husband’s church, and threatened to “destroy” them. Church elders, as Faust tells it, gave her a choice: stop, or go big. She went big on January 28, 2026. Forty-seven organizations answered. Not all of them bother with the children’s-rights framing.
The Gap in the Law
Last November, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case seeking to overturn Obergefell. Lambda Legal reports no active challenge pending before the Court. Seventy percent of Americans still support marriage equality.
But that number conceals a crack. Republican support dropped to 41 percent in the most recent Gallup poll — its lowest mark since 2016, a 14-point fall from the 2021 peak. The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, has made overturning Obergefell a denominational priority. And Justice Clarence Thomas, in his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health concurrence, wrote that the Court should “reconsider” all substantive due process precedents. He named Obergefell explicitly. A decision, he said, with “no basis in the Constitution.”
Kate Shaw, a constitutional law professor at Penn’s Carey Law School, told Newsweek that a state could create a live dispute by passing or enforcing a law limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples “in clear violation of Obergefell.” Sam Marcosson, who teaches law at the University of Louisville, predicted opponents “are almost certain to try to find a better vehicle, try to find a case that presents the issue more squarely.” States, he said, “will try to enact statutes or policies that do, in fact, infringe on the rights of same-sex couples to give the court the opportunity, if they want to, to revisit the issue.”
That process has already started. In January 2025, the Idaho House passed a resolution urging the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell and “restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.” The vote was 46 to 24. North Dakota’s House followed with a similar measure. Michigan, Montana, and South Dakota introduced near-identical resolutions. Four more states floated bills to create “covenant marriage,” a new legal category reserved for opposite-sex couples. None of these carry the force of law. They don’t need to. They signal to the Court that sympathetic legislatures stand ready the moment a ruling gives them room.
No court has accepted Faust’s “children’s rights” argument. No major pediatric or psychological association supports it. The American Academy of Pediatrics, representing 67,000 pediatricians, says children’s well-being is shaped by the quality of family relationships, not by who the parents are or who they love.
If Obergefell falls, the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act would still require states to recognize existing marriages performed elsewhere — but wouldn’t compel them to issue new licenses. That gap is where Greater Than’s 14 state-level affiliates come in.
The Machinery Behind the Message
Five of the coalition’s organizations — the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, Citizens for Renewing America, and CatholicVote — double as partners in Project 2025, the blueprint for remaking the federal government. That overlap isn’t incidental. Project 2025 calls for stripping “sexual orientation and gender identity from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation.” Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation’s president, wrote the foreword himself. In it, he equates transgender identity with pornography and calls for imprisoning “the people who produce and distribute it.”
Start with Tony Perkins. He runs the Family Research Council, the religious right’s lobbying arm on the Hill and a core Project 2025 advisor. Back in 1996, while managing a Louisiana state senate campaign, Perkins paid $82,500 for access to former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s phone bank and mailing list. The FEC fined the campaign $3,000 for botching the disclosure. That was three decades ago. Since then, Perkins has built FRC’s entire operation around a single false claim: that gay men are predators. The group’s own website has stated it flatly: “While activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. … It is a homosexual problem.”
Then there’s the American Family Association and its nearly 200 radio stations, all of which now carry Greater Than’s messaging. The group was founded in 1977 as the National Federation for Decency and has spent decades recycling fabricated science that equates homosexuality with criminality and child abuse. Bryan Fischer, its former director of issues analysis, put it bluntly: “We should discriminate against unnatural and aberrant sexual behavior, whether pedophilia, bestiality, or homosexuality.” GPAHE identified the organization as part of the far-right network behind Project 2025, embedded in the Civics Alliance coalition run by the National Association of Scholars.
Focus on the Family grew out of the Colorado Springs empire built by the late James Dobson, who died last August. Dobson co-founded both the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom — two of the most powerful anti-LGBTQ+ legal and lobbying outfits in the country. He also pushed HIV/AIDS disinformation so reckless that Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called it “reprehensible” and “homophobic” in a public rebuke in 1989. Dobson’s rhetoric only sharpened. “Homosexuals are not monogamous,” he told The Daily Oklahoman in 2004. “They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.” Focus on the Family’s lobbying arm, the Family Policy Alliance, sits on Project 2025’s advisory board and opposes surrogacy and reproductive care for LGBTQ+ families.
Russell Vought, who founded Citizens for Renewing America, now runs the Office of Management and Budget — the office that controls the federal checkbook. He’s a self-described Christian nationalist. He wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the President. His organization drafted executive orders designed for the first 180 days and flagged Christian nationalism as a top policy priority. Greater Than’s own press release lists Citizens for Renewing America’s Eric Teetsel as a campaign partner.
CatholicVote rounds out the five. In 2024, one of its employees was sentenced to two years in federal prison for death threats against Human Rights Campaign staffers and a transgender Maryland state legislator. The group’s president, Brian Burch — who had publicly criticized Pope Francis for allowing priests to bless same-sex couples — was confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican in August 2025, on a party-line vote. He now represents the United States at the Holy See.
And finally, the Colson Center for Biblical Worldview. Chuck Colson — the Nixon aide who served seven months for his participation in the Watergate scandal before remaking himself as an evangelical power broker — founded it. After his death, the center hosted the “Preserve Freedom, Reject Coercion” statement opposing all LGBT nondiscrimination protections. Its current president, John Stonestreet, has labeled LGBTQ+ content accessible to children “sexual propaganda.” The center works with Alliance Defending Freedom, Focus on the Family, and the Heritage Foundation — all of which also anchor the Project 2025 network. Faust’s own organization sits alongside every one of them.
The Megaphones
Litigation needs political cover. Even if the Court overturns Obergefell, the ruling is meaningless without legislators willing to act on it and a public willing to look the other way. Greater Than’s roster of national allies supplies exactly that: broadcasters, podcasters, and pastors whose audiences number in the millions.
The most important is David Barton. Out of Aledo, Texas — a town of 5,000 about twenty miles west of Fort Worth — Barton operates WallBuilders, which GPAHE describes as a Christian nationalist “bill mill.” Since the 1980s, he has churned out model legislation designed to inject his theology into state and federal government. GPAHE reports that “Barton supplies the theological framework that transformed two wealthy oilmen into Christian nationalist revolutionaries…gives the billionaires moral permission to use government power for religious ends.” His 2012 book The Jefferson Lies claimed Thomas Jefferson was an evangelical Christian. His own publisher, Thomas Nelson, yanked it from shelves within months. “There were historical details, matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all,” a senior vice president told World magazine. The History News Network’s readers voted it the least credible history book in print. Didn’t matter. Barton kept his audience. House Speaker Mike Johnson calls him “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do.” Barton has gone further than opposing same-sex marriage. He has declared that gay people cannot be Christians at all.
Steve Deace is louder. He broadcasts daily on Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV. After a school shooting in Minneapolis last August, Deace opened his show not with grief but with what People For the American Way called “a furiously anti-trans rant.” “This tranny madness needs to be completely eradicated from every social institution and polite conversation in the United States of America,” he declared. “It will be criminalized, it will be punished.” BlazeTV ran the clip under the headline: “How the ‘tranny madness’ must be eradicated.”
Allie Beth Stuckey, another BlazeTV fixture, hosts the podcast Relatable and is a regular at Turning Point USA rallies. Her 2024 book Toxic Empathy lays out the theological case against gay marriage: “Yes, Scripture does clearly and unequivocally condemn homosexuality as sin, despite baseless claims to the contrary.” Media Matters reported she “bluntly says she doesn’t care about being labeled a blatant homophobe.”
The rest of the national allies follow suit. Jennifer Roback Morse’s Ruth Institute had its payment processor terminated in 2017 — the company cited affiliation with a product that “promotes hate, violence, harassment, and/or abuse.” That same year, Morse told a room full of teenagers that transgender identity “has nothing to do with either psychology or medicine…you need to see that so you stop feeling sorry for these people.”
The Danbury Institute, conceived in February 2024, vows to “vehemently oppose all efforts to lure children into promiscuity, homosexuality, or transgenderism” and brackets “LGBTQ+ emphases” alongside “sex and slave trafficking” as attacks on children. Four months after it launched, Donald Trump addressed the group by video: “You’re going to have a comeback like just about no other group.” Six months after that, they joined Greater Than.
Abby Johnson spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention. She attended Trump’s rally on January 6, 2021. “Maybe don’t talk about Jesus while waving your gay flag,” she tweeted that September. She posted vomit emojis over photographs of transgender people. Catholic University’s Black Student Alliance condemned her for “amplifying hate speech disguised as Catholic teachings.” Now she lends that convention-circuit celebrity to the campaign against same-sex marriage.
In 2017, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood drafted the Nashville Statement. A hundred and fifty evangelical leaders put their names to it, declaring that any approval of homosexuality or transgender identity constitutes a betrayal of Christian faith. Nashville’s own mayor disavowed the document, saying the city “rejects discrimination.” The statement matters to the coalition’s legal strategy because it provides the doctrine and scaffolding that groups like Alliance Defending Freedom translate into constitutional argument: if same-sex marriage is a theological wrong, the logic goes, government recognition of it burdens religious exercise. The Council, Johnson, and the Danbury Institute all signed on to Greater Than.
From Alaska to Wisconsin
While the national organizations supply the ideology, the state affiliates supply the courtrooms and boots on the ground. Fourteen family policy groups, from the Alaska Family Council to the Wisconsin Family Council, signed on. Most are affiliates of Focus on the Family’s Family Policy Alliance, which already coordinates legislative strategy across statehouses. They’re not there for advocacy. They’re there to file cases — in jurisdictions where the judges are friendly and the facts can be built to order.
Fourteen state-level affiliates. The infrastructure to do exactly what Marcosson predicted: test cases framed around Faust’s “children’s rights” argument, filed in friendly courts, engineered to hand the justices the question Thomas already invited.
The coalition’s logo is a yellow greater-than symbol on a blue field — a deliberate echo of the Human Rights Campaign’s iconic equals sign. One says equal. The other says no.
Faust called herself “The Bigot,” a name she hid behind a decade ago when she dared her critics to say it to her face. Not so in 2026: The 47 organizations behind her just removed the quotation marks.
