June 26 marks the 10th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that radically redefined the ageless and cross-cultural definition of marriage and the family. Both are no longer about bringing together the two complementary halves of humanity — male and female — in an essential, cooperative, life-producing union. Marriage and family are now “inclusive,” and that’s the problem.
Obergefell embarked us on yet another vast, untested experiment with marriage — and it is not going well.
Of course, the push for “gay marriage” was never just about marriage. It was always about de-sexing the family and society. If the essential qualities of male and female are optional for marriage and the family, both become effectively meaningless everywhere else. They are mere preferences.
This happened more quickly than anyone imagined. No one should miss the fact that there was no daylight whatsoever between the nationalization of gay marriage and the launch of the “trans” revolution — literally.
Bruce Jenner infamously appeared as “Caitlyn” on the July 2015 cover of Vanity Fair magazine hours before Obergefell was handed down. These two developments are ideologically and consecutively linked like railway cars. (Never mind that Jenner is now apostate to the “trans” movement for admitting in 2023 that “transgender women” aren’t really women. What was once radical quickly becomes retrograde because the boundaries keep radicalizing.)
Gay “marriage” was never about “marriage equality.” It was always about redefinition. The terribly clever term “marriage equality” was a strategic messaging development to win sympathy for a novel idea that the petitioners in Obergefell admitted no society had permitted before 2001. This sympathy is precisely what swayed Justice Kennedy, the sole deciding vote in a highly contested decision. He authored the majority opinion, breathlessly expressing a wholly new understanding of marriage:
The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation.
So-called gay marriage was always about redefining and de-sexing the family, which Justice Kennedy so cleverly did with his assumptive leap that marriage is about “two persons” and not the male-female union he earlier admitted “has existed for millennia and across civilizations … [s]ince the dawn of history.”
This is the first reason why citizens must call for the overturning of Obergefell. It deconstructs and neuters our understanding of humanity. This is precisely what happens when a society shifts its conception of the irreplaceable human institution of the family to say its most essential dynamic parts — male and female — are now no longer required because members of the same sex will work just as well. Of course, they cannot, but that logical impossibility is exactly what Obergefell demands.
The second reason Obergefell should be overturned is that it says children have no fundamental right to be loved and cared for by their own mother and father. This is a fundamental human injustice. Every same-sex family, by definition and design, denies every child it contains the maternal or paternal love they naturally seek and require. But Obergefell says the right of adults to form sexless families is more real than the child’s right to his own mother or father. This turns nature on its head by elevating the experimental wants of adults above the natural needs of children. That is never moral.
Third, Obergefell fails to protect women by dismissing the essential quality and character of the feminine. It does this by requiring all of us to consent to an impossibility. We must all admit, or object to no effect, that a family headed by two males does everything and meets every need that a woman as wife and mother can. This effectively negates the meaningfulness of the feminine. (The lesbian family does the same to the masculine.) That is why it was no leap at all for men to start invading women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, dorms, and sporting competitions on the heels of Obergefell. This move ushered in “misogyny on steroids,” as liberal author Kara Dansky puts it in her book The Abolition of Sex. Anyone who doesn’t get this doesn’t get queer theory.
Fourth, Obergefell is based on bad law. As Justice Clarence Thomas so properly explained in his dissent to the majority opinion in Obergefell, “The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built.” He noted a fact that is indisputable: “[T]he majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a ‘liberty’ that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect.”
The Constitution provides no right to so radically change and redefine an essential human institution that predates any human law. Justice Thomas was correct in stating, “By straying from the text of the Constitution, substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority.” Obergefell, just like Roe v. Wade before it, is radically bad law because it is extra-constitutional.
Thomas’ prediction that “the majority’s inversion of the original meaning of liberty will likely cause collateral damage to other aspects of our constitutional order that protect liberty” came true faster than he or anyone else imagined. Ask any woman who has had to endure the indignity of sharing a winner’s platform, locker room, or jail cell with a man.
When we say men and women don’t matter for marriage and the family, we say they have no objective meaning at all. That is exactly what Obergefell has wrought and why it must be overturned.