Gay marriage has a hidden cost — and children are paying the price



Ten years ago, a great injustice was done to children.

In Obergefell vs. Hodges, the Supreme Court equated two things that for children will never be equal: Same-sex and opposite-sex marriages. One pairing unites children with two people to whom they have a natural right. The other separates children from one — or both.

Gay marriage hasn’t led to greater love for LGBTQ adults but rather harm to children.

As many of us predicted, gay marriage eroded children’s right to their mother and father. It turns out, when you make husbands and wives legally optional in marriage, mothers and fathers become legally optional in parenthood.

Family redefined, kids sidelined

Since 2015, activists have been arguing state by state that equality requires making parenthood gender-neutral and elevating “social parents” (unrelated adults in the home who have not undergone background checks). Fathers have been legally erased from birth certificates to accommodate “two moms” and vice versa. Activists have insisted on requiring insurance or the government to fund the creation of fatherless and motherless children. Biology and adoption are bypassed in favor of “intent-based” parenthood. Giving same-sex couples equal access to the marital “constellation of benefits” denied children equal access to their own mother and father.

Politicians have followed suit.

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When was the last time you heard a lawmaker say that children need a mom and dad? Odds are, it's been about 10 years. In 2013-14, the phrase “every child deserves a mother and father” appeared in over 30 congressional speeches. By 2023-24, it surfaced fewer than five times.

The message is clear: Redefining marriage redefined the family. Dissent is now discrimination.

Culture followed the court

But it isn't just law and politics. The Supreme Court's decision had a massive impact on culture, especially on kids.

The education establishment went all in on the Court-appointed family makeover. Before 2015, the National Education Association still referred to “mothers” and “fathers” in lesson plans and holiday activities. But after the ruling, it began purging traditional language.

Its 2020 “Checklist to Support LGBTQ Students” advised teachers to replace “mom and dad” with “family” or “caring adult.” GLSEN’s 2016 re-release of Ready, Set, Respect! toolkit conditioned kindergartners and first- and second-graders to believe that a mom and dad, two moms, two dads, or no mom or dad, all are perfectly normal.

What the Court de-gendered in law, teachers now de-gender in the classroom.

Publishers followed the court’s lead — and the money.

In 2021, Americans bought nearly five million LGBTQ-themed fiction books. By 2023, that figure had topped six million, a 173% increase since 2019. Many aimed to normalize motherless and fatherless families to children such as "Heather Has Two Mommies" and "My Two Dads and Me."

We lied to children, using school curriculum and sweet librarians, about the one thing every child longs for instinctually — to be loved by their mother and father.

The culture shift and the legal restructuring contributed to a booming fertility market. Surrogate pregnancies more than doubled from 2.2% in 2011 to 4.7% in 2020. Fertility clinics often direct gay couples to surrogacy grants in the name of “equitable access to parenthood.”

These children did not lose their mothers to tragedy. They lost their mothers to adult “equality.”

Enough is enough

Many good-hearted Americans, even conservatives, supported gay marriage because they felt it was a way to love their LGBTQ neighbors. Some stammered for a response to the question: “How will my gay marriage harm anyone else?!” Others were bullied into silence by accusations that they were “on the wrong side of history.”

After 10 years, we have seen the results. Gay marriage hasn’t led to greater love for LGBTQ adults but rather harm to children.

The truth is, their “marriage” redefined all families, and children across the nation are paying the price. That so-called “right side of history” has turned out to be the side of child victimization.

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About 50 years ago, the Supreme Court made a devastating decision that victimized children. It denied the biological reality that children in the womb are fully human and worthy of life. It took nearly 50 years to overturn the child-victimizing Roe v. Wade.

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court made another devastating decision that victimized children. It denied the biological reality that children come from a man and woman and have a right to that man and woman. It redefined the institution that every society throughout history has employed to unite children to that man and woman.

We can't wait another 50 years to undo this injustice.

A coalition of child defenders is rising — Christians, conservatives, parents, pro-family leaders, ordinary moms and dads, and the children of LGBT parents themselves. We are committed to reclaiming the institution of marriage on behalf of the most vulnerable in the country: children.

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Could Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, face Roe v. Wade's fate?

Last month, Idaho lawmakers overwhelmingly passed House Joint Memorial 1, which declares that the Idaho legislature rejects the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell and formally asks the Supreme Court to "restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman."

The memorial accuses the Supreme Court of adopting a definition of "liberty" that the framers of the Constitution "would not have recognized." Whereas the framers declared in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," the memorial accuses the Supreme Court of declaring in Obergefell that "citizens must seek dignity from the state." The memorial, moreover, accuses the Supreme Court of treating the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment "as a font of substantive rights," therefore "exalt[ing] judges at the expense of the people from whom they derive their authority."

Ultimately, the memorial demands the issue of marriage be returned to the "several states and the people."

What is most interesting about the memorial is that it was crafted to mirror the language of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The question seems not to be if the Supreme Court will hear a direct challenge to Obergefell — but when.

Case in point: In his forceful Obergefell dissent, Thomas condemned the "dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause as a font of substantive rights" while warning that when strayed from the Constitution, "substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority."

Thomas resurrected his argument seven years later when he wrote a concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the landmark Supreme Court case that overturned Roe.

In light of the Dobbs ruling that abortion is not a form of "liberty" protected by substantive due process rights because it is neither "deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition" nor "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Thomas argued that "all of this Court's substantive due process precedents" must be reconsidered, specifically highlighting Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell.

"Substantive due process ... has harmed our country in many ways," Thomas argued. "Accordingly, we should eliminate it from our jurisprudence at the earliest opportunity."

That opportunity may come sooner than later.

While the Idaho memorial does not carry the force and effect of law, according to the Idaho Capitol Sun, it is a shot across the bow that signals a growing willingness to challenge Obergefell and the jurisprudence on which it stands.

The Supreme Court, however, will not revisit the legal question of same-sex marriage until it receives a direct challenge to the Obergefell precedent.

But it is not hard to imagine such a challenge emerging in the near future.

While the Obergefell decision legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, more than 30 states still have state constitutional amendments or statutes banning same-sex marriage. Democrats, concerned about a potential Obergefell reversal, warn that more than 200 million Americans live in states where same-sex marriage would become illegal if Obergefell falls.

Not only is there a legitimate argument that marriage is an issue of state's rights, but Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito have written on the consequences of the Obergefell decision for Christians.

After the Supreme Court chose not to hear a case involving Kim Davis — the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses because of her Christian faith — Thomas and Alito described Davis as "one of the first victims of this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision" and warned that "she will not be the last."

"Due to Obergefell, those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society without running afoul of Obergefell and its effect on other anti-discrimination laws," the duo wrote in 2020.

"It would be one thing if recognition for same-sex marriage had been debated and adopted through the democratic process, with the people deciding not to provide statutory protections for religious liberty under state law," they explained. "But it is quite another when the Court forces that choice upon society through its creation of atextual constitutional rights and its ungenerous interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, leaving those with religious objections in the lurch."

In their eyes, the Supreme Court chose to "privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment" in Obergefell through "undemocratic" means.

The only remedy, according to Thomas and Alito, is future intervention from the Supreme Court.

Still, there are significant differences between abortion and same-sex marriage that would make overturning Obergefell insurmountable.

For example, support for same-sex marriage remains statistically high: About 70% of Americans support it, according to Gallup. Abortion never enjoyed such widespread support. Even more important is that reversing Obergefell would raise the complex legal question of what to do with existing same-sex marriages. Would they be invalidated? Grandfathered in?

Only the Supreme Court's nine justices can answer that question. But if Dobbs proved anything, it's that the Supreme Court is willing to overturn long-standing precedents to correct legal transgressions.

With growing cultural and political backlash against woke ideology, the question seems not to be if the Supreme Court will hear a direct challenge to Obergefell — but when.

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Justice Alito highlights continued 'danger' of Supreme Court's same-sex 'marriage' ruling for religious Americans



For nearly a decade, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has seen his concerns over the possible fallout of the court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges manifest in various ways, both in the public and private spheres.

In a statement Tuesday, the conservative justice renewed his criticism, stressing that the controversial 2015 decision continues to threaten and adversely impact religious Americans — particularly those who remain steadfast in their conviction that marriage is reserved for one man and one woman.

What's the background?

Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee outlasted much of the nation in maintaining that marriage was a union between one man and one woman. Plaintiffs in the four states filed lawsuits, which ultimately culminated in Obergefell v. Hodges, heard by the Supreme Court in 2015.

Liberal justices determined in their 5-4 ruling that the right to marry is guaranteed to non-straight couples by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Alito joined Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in stressing that there was no textual basis in the Constitution or corresponding history for precluding states from developing their own definitions of marriage. The conservative justices also indicated that the majority changed the focus from what the four states were constitutionally required to do to what they supposedly should do.

Extra to indicating that the court's liberal majority adopted a "distinctively postmodern" understanding of liberty and accepted an eudaemonistic concept of marriage — one divorced from any traditional understanding — Alito stressed that the decision "usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter their traditional understanding of marriage."

"It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy," wrote Alito.

"In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women," continued the conservative justice. "The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent."

Alito underscored that "those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools."

Foreseen consequences

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear the case Missouri Department of Corrections v. Jean Finney, concerning whether the Fourteenth Amendment protects jurors from being dismissed on the basis of stereotypes about religious views and whether, again in the context of jury selection, the amendment protects "both religious status and religious belief, religious status only, or neither," reported SCOTUSblog.

Finney, a lesbian employee of the Missouri Department of Corrections, alleged that after starting a non-straight relationship with a co-worker's former spouse, the co-worker made life and work difficult for her. She sued the MDOC, alleging it was responsible for her co-worker's actions.

The New York Times noted that during jury selection, Finney's lawyer grilled potential jurors about whether they attended a "conservative Christian church," particularly one that was not all in on the LGBT agenda. The lawyer proceeded to strike off two jurors on the basis of their responses, prompting concerns about religious discrimination.

Ultimately, the jury — purged of religious Americans with orthodox views — sided with Finney. The MDOC appealed, and the case then got kicked up to the Supreme Court's attention at the request of the Office of the Missouri Attorney General.

Justice Alito's renewed concern

Justice Alito wrote Tuesday that while he reluctantly agreed the court "should not grant certiorari in this case, which is complicated by a state-law procedural issue[,] ... I am concerned that the lower court's reasoning may spread and may be a foretaste of things to come."

The conservative justice noted that "the court below reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is a lesbian."

"That holding exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in Obergefell v. Hodges," continued Alito, "namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be 'labeled as bigots and treated as such' by the government."

Alito cast doubt on whether the Missouri Court of Appeals, which affirmed the religious jurors' dismissals, respected their "fundamental rights," including the right to the free exercise of religion and the right to the equal protection of laws.

"When a court, a quintessential state actor, finds that a person is ineligible to serve on a jury because of his or her religious beliefs, that decision implicates fundamental rights," wrote Alito, adding that state actions that single out the religious for disfavored treatment must survive the most rigorous scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause.

Alito suggested that unless the jurors were somehow incapable of deciding the case "based on the law and the evidence," which the lower courts and Finney's lawyer apparently failed to demonstrate, he would "see no basis for dismissing a juror for cause base on religious beliefs."

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