Campaign seeks to place kid’s rights first in gay marriage debate

Katy Faust, the founding father of Them Before Us, has set out a fresh campaign to challenge the legal redefinition of marriage within the US, arguing that the problem is ultimately about children, parenthood and the role of the state.

Speaking to the Coalition for Marriage’s Tony Rucinski, Ms Faust said the Greater Than Alliance was, in her view, “the primary attempt in any country to retake marriage on behalf of kids” after same-sex marriage had been written into national law.

The campaign seeks to make what she called a direct connection between same-sex marriage and a wider shift in how parenthood is known. 

“If you think in gay marriage, moms and dads are optional within the lifetime of a toddler,” she said. “If you think children have a right to their mother and father, profit from their mother and father, long to be known by their mother and father, you can not support gay marriage as policy.”

She highlighted that the talk isn’t centred on opposition to individuals, but on how law defines parenthood. 

Throughout the interview, Ms Faust returned to the argument that marriage shouldn’t be treated chiefly as an expression of adult desire or identity. Instead, she described it as a social institution ordered towards children and their bond with their biological parents.

She explained: “You can and will love your gay family and friends, but you have got to reject the concept that marriage is a vehicle of adult validation. It isn’t. It is and at all times has been the tool that almost every society throughout history has used to unite children to their mother and father in order that they’ll have the most effective shot at being protected and loved, invested in, connected to, discover their identity and maximising their development.”

The Greater Than Alliance brings together around 100 organisations and individuals within the US. The aim, she explained, is to challenge not only same-sex marriage itself but the broader legal and cultural assumptions that sit behind it.

A serious theme within the discussion was adoption. 

Ms Faust rejected the concept that adoption policy should focus totally on meeting a pair’s needs for youngsters, saying: “Adoption doesn’t exist for adults. This isn’t some vehicle to have a DEI win on the registry … You discuss it [adoption] as an industry. I discuss it as an establishment, an establishment that’s centred around the most effective interest of the kid.”

Drawing on her own experience as an adoptive mother, Ms Faust argued that children profit from each maternal and paternal influence. 

Speaking about one among her sons, she said he needed each deep nurture and firm boundaries, adding: “He needed one among each.”

The conversation then widened into questions of parenthood, fertility law and the state’s authority. 

Ms Faust said the deeper issue was whether parenthood is something to be recognised in law or something the state can assign. 

She expounded: “Parenthood ought to be observed, not assigned … If biology doesn’t matter in relation to parenthood, you render children as legal accessories. They at the moment are objects to be assigned to any adult.”

In her view, once the law detaches parenthood from biology, it opens the door to a much wider reordering of family life. 

She warned that the implications stretch well beyond marriage policy alone, affecting adoption, surrogacy and birth registration. 

“If the state has the flexibility to assign parentage to an unrelated adult, they’ve rather more the flexibility to unassign parentage from you, from your individual relationship along with your own child,” she said. 

The interview also touched on the UK. In response to questions from Mr Rucinski, Ms Faust argued that Britain had already shifted significantly by treating parenthood in increasingly legal slightly than biological terms. 

She said that any try to “retake marriage” within the UK must begin by restoring what she called the “natural contours of the family” in law and public language. 

She added: “We will say moms and dads, not guardians, not parents. We are going to say biology matters. We’re going to recognise that in our laws. We are going to say there’s something different a few procreative relationship versus a relationship that centres around adult identity. These things do various things for youngsters.”

While the US and UK differ of their legal frameworks, Ms Faust believes the underlying questions are shared. 

“It all comes back to this child,” she said. “Where do they arrive from? To whom have they got a natural right? What are the conditions that result in their flourishing?”