Adapted from Katy Faust’s National Conservative Conference speech in Sept. 2025.

In July, 21 children were rescued in Arcadia, California — 15 of them under the age of three. All were the legal children of Silvia Zhang and Xuan Guojun, a man who had held multiple positions within the Chinese government. The children — manufactured through surrogacy — were being raised in a hotel-like mansion complete with a reception desk greeting a steady stream of unidentified visitors.

Gay marriage did that.

Just last month, six-year-old twin boys were removed from the home of a 74-year-old single man who had acquired them through IVF and surrogacy. One of the boys — nonverbal and autistic — was sometimes confined in a cage-like upstairs loft.

Gay marriage did that.

In 2015, Marisa and Terrah Pavan had a daughter via an anonymous sperm donor and sued the state of Arkansas for the right to have both women listed on the child’s birth certificate. The U.S. Supreme Court granted their petition, legally erasing the child’s father.

Gay marriage did that.

This summer, a video of two men kissing their surrogate-born son each month of his first year went viral. Then came the reveal: one of the men, Brandon Keith Mitchell, is a convicted sex offender.

Gay marriage did that.

A just society does not force the weak to sacrifice for the strong. Yet that is what Justice Kennedy’s “constellation of benefits” has wrought.

The Legal Earthquake of Obergefell

While there had been some planetary migration over the last few decades due to no-fault divorce and the rise of reproductive technologies, the familial legal solar system had largely remained stable.

But Obergefell shifted the center of gravity by swapping the life-sustaining sun anchored in a procreative understanding of marriage, with a version of family that exalted adult identity above biological reality. The ruling prohibited any distinction between heterosexual and homosexual couples.

Thus, in the name of constitutional rights, the law had to accomplish what biology prohibits: making two adults of the same sex parents of a child. That required a total realignment of every planet in the marriage and family solar system.

The Two Pathways to Parenthood — And How They Were Undone

Historically, the right to take custody of an infant has been recognized through only two pathways: biology and adoption.

The first pathway exists because, whether due to natural law or evolutionary biology, biological parents are statistically the safest, most connected to, most protective of, and most invested in their children. In contrast, unrelated adults dramatically increase the risk of abuse and neglect. Sociologist Brad Wilcox puts it plainly: The most dangerous place for a child in America is in the home of an unrelated man left to care for them alone. Biology is a child’s first safeguard.

The second pathway — adoption — exists because a just society seeks to heal the wound of orphanhood by placing children into safe, loving families. Through extensive screening, background checks, and vetting, the state attempts to replicate the natural protections of biological parenthood.

Two pathways. One based on nature. One based on justice. Both centered on the child.

But in the orbit of gay marriage, both of those child-centered pathways — biology and adoption — have been deemed discriminatory. The answer has been to end “natural parenthood.”

The biological pathway is oppressive because two men or two women can never both be biologically related to the child. The adoption pathway is offensive because requiring background checks and home studies made some same-sex couples feel “lesser than” and “unequal.”

So a new planet was added to the legal universe: intent-based parenthood. 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.

From ‘Parenthood’ to ‘Infertility’: Redefining Everything

But in the engineered solar system of “marriage equality,” it wasn’t enough to invent a dangerous new pathway to parenthood. The natural fertility of heterosexual couples was discriminatory. After all, making a motherless or fatherless child is very expensive.

So infertility had to be redefined.

No longer is it “the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months of regular, unprotected sex.” Now, in some jurisdictions, you can be declared “infertile” as a single man, a single woman, or a same-sex couple. Your insurance premiums and tax dollars now subsidize commercial mother- and father-loss.

Gay marriage did that.

But on the gravity-free rainbow orb, redefining parenthood and redefining infertility wasn’t enough. Now, the very words “mother” and “father” felt like hate speech. So the masculine and feminine were stripped from parenthood laws. Mother and father could be replaced by Parent one and Parent two on birth certificates or Parent A and Parent B in adoption. Observable human truths, erased in the name of human rights.

Gay marriage did that.

But it’s not just the laws — it’s the lawmakers.

When was the last time you heard a national politician say, “Children deserve a mother and a father?” It’s been about ten years, hasn’t it? Back in 2013/14, that phrase appeared in thirty-two floor speeches. The 113th Congress knew children:

• come from a man and a woman
• crave the love of that man and woman
• are safest, most loved, and most secure when raised by that man and woman
• discover their identity through that man and woman
• and have a natural right to that man and woman.

By the 118th Congress? Under five mentions. Today, few politicians dare even speak the most self-evident truth about children.

Gay marriage did that.

But this isn’t just a problem for the children being contracted into existence. It’s not just a problem for the babies being designed, sold, and trafficked from conception. It’s not just a problem for the children who lose their mother, their father, or both in the name of gay rights.

It’s your problem. It’s your children’s problem.

Because biology is a relentless bigot towards homosexual couples, it had to be downgraded in law. Thus, in the last decade, the preeminence of the natural parent-child relationship has been eroded, or outright inverted in a variety of statutes. Here are just a few examples:

• The presumption of paternity — that a woman’s husband is presumed to be the father of her child — binds children to their own fathers in nearly 100 percent of cases. But in Obergefell’s orbit, the presumption of parenthood, now applied to same-sex couples, separates children from their mother or father in 100 percent of cases.
• The law once presumed that a baby naturally belonged with the birth mother, which is why no state allowed her to transfer parental rights to adoptive parents before birth. But in our new legal orbit, we now have pre-birth orders that allow surrogate mothers to legally orphan their children in the second or third trimester, no longer recognizing anything special about the maternal bond.
• Historically, it was difficult to sever a child from their own mother or father — even in cases of abuse or neglect — because the law recognized a pre-political bond between parent and child. Not anymore. Today, parental rights must be surrendered before conception if the child’s gametes are to be sold on the open market.

For decades and even centuries, common law recognized and privileged the natural bond between parent and child. Today, that foundation is being systematically dismantled in the name of “non-discrimination.”

The state now routinely determines who is and is not a parent, even if they are not biologically related. Even if given adults have not undergone adoption screening, parenthood can now be awarded based on a state-enforced contract.

Let the reader understand: The moment the state has the power to assign parenthood to strangers, it can unassign it from you.

Your legal relationship to the children you’ve begotten is weaker than it was a decade ago. Turns out the answer to the question, “How does my gay marriage affect you?” is … in the worst way possible.

Make no mistake, gay marriage did that.

Children Are Not Products

Children are not commodities. Not your child. Not any child.

They are not items to be designed, purchased, and awarded — not to 74-year-old single men, not to sex offenders, not to Chinese Communist Party officials, and not even to sweet heterosexual couples browsing the cryo-bank catalog.

Children are human beings — with natural, fundamental rights.

The first is the right to life.

The second is the right to be known and loved by both their mother and their father.

For centuries and across cultures, marriage has been the mechanism to secure that right.

But in every one of the 38 countries that have legalized gay marriage, the pattern is the same: Make husbands and wives optional in marriage, and mothers and fathers become optional in parenthood.

The problem is, to a child, their mother and father are never optional.

• Not for their identity,
• Not for their development,
• Not for their safety,
• And not for their rights.

The last ten years have made one thing unmistakably clear:

We can either recognize gay marriage or recognize a child’s right to their mother and father.

We can’t do both.

The Path Forward: Retaking Marriage

If we want a just and thriving society, for every parent and every child, we must defend the party that can’t speak for itself: the children.

That means we must do what no one else has dared:

We must retake marriage, on behalf of the kids.

This is not about targeting lesbians or gays. They are our brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, and friends. This is about defending children from a legal regime that has victimized and commodified them.

A massive coalition spearheaded by my non-profit Them Before Us aims to do exactly that.

Our effort has three focus areas.

1. We must re-establish the preeminence of the parent/child relationship through policy and strategic court cases.

We need to force the Supreme Court to choose: natural parenthood or state-assigned parenthood. They cannot have both.

2. We must change public opinion.

But that won’t happen until we change the victim. This time, it’s not adults seeking insurance benefits or hospital visitations, all of which could have been secured through other legal means.

No, if we are to retake legal marriage, we highlight the real victims, the children:

• starved of maternal or paternal love
• acquired by predators
• mass produced
• trafficked across borders
• struggling with identity confusion
• subjected to risky households

3. We must transform the church into a child-centered fighting force.

This is the church’s inheritance. For 2,000 years, wherever Christianity has spread, children’s rights and well-being have advanced.

From:

• ending foot binding in China,
• to confronting female genital mutilation in the Islamic world,
• to enacting child labor laws in the UK,
• to rejecting abortion and infanticide worldwide

The legacy of the global church is that we offend adults to protect children.

This requires disabusing pastors, priests, parishioners, and entire denominations of the lie that their highest calling is to be “welcoming and affirming” to adults.

No, child protection is, and always has been, one manifestation of our pure and undefiled religion before God. Christians are commanded to defend the fatherless, not manufacture them.

Our coalition to challenge gay marriage is asking the Church, the culture, and the courts: What will you place at the center of the familial universe?

For millennia, marriage, one man and one woman, has been the sun. Around it revolved the rights of children, the structure of the family, and the laws that protected both.

When we replaced that life-creating union with the black hole of “marriage equality,” it consumed biological reality, reproductive safeguards, motherhood, fatherhood, and the very nature of the human child.

For the sake of the least of these, we must either restore the heavens or answer for the hell we’ve unleashed on children.

This article was originally published in the Them Before Us Substack.