For over a decade, champions of biblical, natural, and evidence-based marriage and family have tirelessly fought against the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that sought to redefine marriage nationwide to include same-sex unions. In 2025, excitement surged when Kim Davis’s case reached the Supreme Court — explicitly urging the justices to overturn Obergefell and restore marriage policy to the states. Yet, in November, the court quietly declined to take on the case, leaving the precedent untouched. Undeterred, dedicated advocates have only grown fiercer, charging forward with fresh resolve.

This month, a coalition of 47 conservative organizations launched the “Greater Than” campaign to harness that momentum for a return to natural marriage. Spearheaded by Them Before Us founder Katy Faust, the movement insists that children’s needs must always outweigh adult desires, ambitions, and the judicial redefinition of marriage imposed by Obergefell.

The coalition includes Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, Live Action, the Colson Center for Biblical Worldview, the Ruth Institute, the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, and groups from states like Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and many more.

“America’s children are being treated as less than,” the campaign’s website reads. “Less than adults’ ambitions. Less than political agendas. Less than the so-called ideals of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom.’ Their needs, their rights, their safety, their development — sometimes even their very existence — have been treated as secondary.” The Obergefell ruling did not only legally redefine marriage; it redefined parenthood. “Once husbands and wives became optional, mothers and fathers became replaceable. But for a child, their mother and father are never optional, they are essential. Children need both a mother and a father to provide stability, guidance, and the unique love only a man and woman can give. No adult desire or ideology can change that.”

Those who seek to redefine marriage often frame their agenda as advancing “equality.” The Greater Than movement, however, sees it differently. As Live Action President Lila Rose said in the campaign’s launch video, this so-called “equality” for adults, in reality, “created inequality for children. It made our children less than.”

During an interview with FRC President Tony Perkins on Wednesday’s edition of “Washington Watch,” Faust explained how this campaign “is going to do what no other country that has legalized gay marriage has even attempted, which is retake it in the name of child protection.” Too many people still miss a vital reality, she said: “Obergefell actually victimized children.” The moment “we made husbands and wives optional in marriage, mothers and fathers became optional in parenthood law. The problem is that, for children, their mother and father are never optional. It always leaves a lifelong wound. It always destabilizes their existence. It hampers their identity formation. It hinders their development.”

And yet, the harm extends beyond emotional and psychological scars. Faust pointed to how broken or misaligned homes statistically heighten children’s risks of “abuse and neglect.” Replacing “mother and father” with vague terms like “guardians” or “parents” on legal documents has “adulterated” birth certificates, she argued — all “so adults can say that they’re a parent when they’re not biological and they’re not adoptive.” This mindset bleeds into controversies around in vitro fertilization (IVF), where “we have redefined infertility so that single or same-sex couples can have their motherless and fatherless children subsidized by insurance companies.”

Faust spoke decisively: “We have eliminated all of the contours of the family, so the only thing left is what an adult wants. And very often what they want is the acquisition of a child that does not belong to them. We have 10 years of receipts of how gay marriage has victimized children, and the Greater Than campaign stands together and says, ‘No more.’”

Perkins agreed that prioritizing children “should be fundamental” — especially given decades of social science making “it very clear that children do best when they’re in a home with their mother and father who are married. And it’s not two parents, it’s not two adults. It is a mother and a father.” After years of “experimenting with family,” he asked, “at what point does America wake up?”

“I hope they wake up today,” Faust stressed. Through the campaign, “we’re going to make it very evident that there is a direct connection between gay marriage and child victimization.” At the same time, it seeks to “elevate the rights of children to be known and loved by their own mother and father.” This one household structure — where children are raised by their married biological mother and father — shields them from countless social ills, from homelessness and suicide to teen pregnancy, high school dropouts, incarceration, and gang involvement. “There is something about this one household, a child’s own mother and father loving them and raising them together in a permanent relationship, that benefits children and society in a way that adult desires” simply do not.

As Faust went on to assert, “We need to get back to the place where we are elevating and promoting the one family structure where children have their mother and father in the home, and we want to tell the court that they need to make a choice. They can either have gay marriage or they can protect children’s rights to their mother and father. But they can’t do both.”

“And if we don’t choose the kids,” Perkins concluded, “there is a high societal price to pay” — a price that, if ignored much longer, America may no longer be able to bear.