Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit FDR LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Katie Faust, founder and president of
Them Before Us and spokeswoman for the newly launched Greater
Than campaign, advocating for the US Supreme Court to overturn
Overrafell and prioritize children's rights. And that really is is
what this is all about, Katie, that is your background
putting children's rights first. Thank you so much for joining
us in this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: It's really good to be with you. And I was
honored that the Federalist ran a piece of that I
wrote last week called Obergafel has harmed it children for
far too long, and I just explained, you know, what
was the impact Obergefel really had on kids? Because I
think a lot of people look at that and say, oh,
what was the result of Abergafel Gay people get married now?
But has actually gone far beyond that. There actually have
been some very significant harms, especially for children, that resulted
from that decision, and we're going to say no more.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Indeed, I don't think that people fully understand where
things are today compared to where they were in twenty
fifteen when the Supreme Court, thanks to Anthony Kennedy, in
large part he wrote the the opinion on all of this,
how much things have changed. In fact, you're seeing some
polling here that shows a lot of people have misgivings
about maybe where they stood in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen
as to where they stand today, you know, more than
ten years later. Are you seeing the momentum build on
that front?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah. So I don't know what the
Republican support was for gay marriage when they legalized it
in twenty fifteen, but it peaked in twenty twenty two,
twenty three when it was about fifty one percent, and
since then it has created it has dropped sixteen percent.
So now just among Republicans, we've lost fifteen percent support
for gay marriage over the last two years, and I
think a lot of people would say, well, it's because
the T went too far right, the T in LGBT,
the transgender movement poisoned everything. And now people are looking
upstream and saying this didn't come from nowhere, it came
from the LGB. And so I think we've seen a
lot of LGB trying to separate themselves from the TEA
because they recognize that it is so toxic for their movement.
But I think there's something else here too, and that
is that we were told, I mean, gay marriage was
passed on the line that this has nothing to do
with kids. I mean infertile couples getting married and they
don't have kids, And this is really just about adult dignity.
We just want to visit one another in the hospital,
We just want insurance benefits. I mean, this is just
about making sure that we're not second class citizens. This
is the next step in the evolution of marriage. You know,
first we struck down barriers for interracial marriage. Now we're
striking down barriers for gay marriage. I mean, it was
all adult centric, it was all adult focused. But what
we've seen over the last several years, especially the last
I would say two or three or five. Is so
many pictures of motherless babies in hospitals, on the harryte tests,
of men who may or may not be related, some
of which we already know were convicted sex offenders who
are acquiring children. And a lot of this is happening
under the banner of and certainly with the legal endorsement
of the redefinition of parenthood that was part and parcel
of the redefinition of marriage.
Speaker 1: Some of them are transportation secretaries for the record in
previous administrations. But all of that said, what is interesting
to me is always the politics behind all of this stuff.
Do you think the change over the last few years
in this country in particular from conservatives is they're seeing
the naked power abuse that's going on here. That is
to say, they have witnessed the use of this Supreme
Court ruling for the left to expand and expand into
places they never dreamed it would expand into.
Speaker 2: I think that some of it is they are actually
seeing the very real impacts of defining the most child
centric institution in the world has ever known around something
that has no children involved, and so they are seeing
the effects of what every other country throughout the world
has seen. There has been thirty eight countries across the
globe that have legalized gay marriage. Zero of those countries
have simultaneously reinforced the importance of children's right to their
mother and father. Most of them have significantly weakened. Some
have totally obliterated this expectation that children come from a
man and woman and belong to that man and that woman.
So this was totally predictable, and now we've had ten
years to really take a look at the impact that
has had on children. I think the other thing, too,
is the vibe shift is real, and what shifted it
was a Your emotional manipulation tactics don't work on me anymore.
You have called me so many names. You have called
me racist, you have called me a white supremacist, you
have called me a homophobe, you've called me a transphobe. Like,
it just doesn't work anymore. And I do think that
that was the primary vehicle that gay advocates used to
advance their arguments. They didn't have natural law, they didn't
have social science, they didn't have any constitutional support, they
didn't have common law going back a couple of centuries
in this country. All they had was emotional backstory and
the insistence that you hate gay people if you don't want,
if you do not want to redefine the most child
friendly institution in the world has ever known. And I
think that emotional manipulative tactic it just doesn't work on
as many Americans anymore because we were you know, we
have all just gotten used to being called ugly names
because even when we went along with what they wanted,
they still demanded more. So, I think that the vibe
shit has come in the form of us saying, you
know what, we don't like this. We've never liked it,
and we're not going to pretend like we like it anymore.
You can say whatever you want about me, but the
answer is no.
Speaker 1: It's such a selfish society. It has been for a
while now. I look at what's happening in the culture
in society and I think to myself, it's only getting worse. Although,
as we just talked about, there are some signs that
we truly are prioritizing children. We truly are prioritizing the
family and the traditional family, in fact greater than the
campaign says this. In today's society, children are often treated
as secondary spoken for negotiated over or reshaped to serve
adult priorities greater than works from a different premise. Children's
rights should not be overridden by a adult feelings or desires.
That's a lot of work on the campaign's front. I
know you're up to the challenge, and you've got some
great people who've been working at this for a long time.
But how do you go back decades of indoctrination your feelings,
that's what That's what matters. You know, you're all of
these leftist, woke concepts of your truth as opposed to
the truth. That's very difficult to combat, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yes, I will tell you though. The reason why we're
going to win. We're going to win for a lot
of reasons. But one of the reasons is when you
we often say it, then before us, the victim determines
the policy. So whoever frames themselves as the victim, the
policy is going to wrap around them. So leading up
to twenty fifteen, gay people presented themselves as the victims. Right,
they are being treated as second class citizens. You're saying,
we don't have dignity. Look at all the ways that
I have suffered, and the truth is a lot of
gay people have suffered. I think a lot of I
know plenty. Some of them have honored me by sharing
their story with me. Many of them have personally suffered
in terms of their pure relationships, in terms of their
family relationships, in terms of being victimized by other adults,
and they deserve our empathy and compassion. But when we
get marriage policy wrong, they're not the victims. Children are
the victims. And that's the way we're going to change,
not just law, but we're going to change public opinion.
We are going to reframe the conversation away from adults
that think they're victims if they don't get what they want,
over to children who genuinely are victims when we reorganize
the constellation of marriage and family law around adult validation
rather than their fundamental rights. So it is an emotional battle,
and we are working against people that will say, oh,
but you marginalize me, and you're victimizing me. So what
we're going to do is we're actually going to match
story with story, Like they're going to say, what, I
have this hard life, I have this hard story, and
we're going to say, oh, oh, you want to talk
hard stories. Great, let's look at this child who was
trafficked because of these new parenting laws, these laws that
said they don't have a claim to their own mother
and father. They're items to be awarded to whatever adult
had the money or means to acquire them. Because we
have redefined parenthood laws away from biology and adoption, which
you guys said was discriminatory, and towards de facto parenting
or intent based parenting, which is now needed so you
can have this constitutional benefit to children. We're going to
highlight the children who experienced mother hunger or father hunger
because they were raised in a home with two mothers
or two dads and deprived of the maternal or paternal
love that children crave but also that maximizes their development.
We are going to share the stories. They're already on
the website, the Greater Than campaign dot com website. What
kind of identity struggles do kids deal with when they've
lost their mother or father, often through a commercial arrange,
and a lot of those kids are being raised by
gay couples. We're going to share with you the increased
household risk of children living with unrelated adults, the kind
of neglect they face may be the kind of targeted
abuse that they face, especially when they're in the home
of an unrelated man. Guess what is present in the
home of every child raised by a same sex parent,
unrelated adults. Some of them may have gone through the
process of adopting, a lot of them haven't. And so
we're actually placing children in riskier households in the name
of adult equality. So the whole thing is going to change.
We're going to change not just the question before the courts,
but the question before the culture, and it is around. Actually,
we're going to reframe this around the true victims, the
children who lose their mother or father, so adults can
have the so called equality that they're seeking.
Speaker 3: How many people's health insurances call more than their mortgage?
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Speaker 1: Much has changed since Obergefell versus Hodges in twenty fifteen.
We've been talking all about that, But what are some
of the numbers that we have seen? And with all
of that, what do you think? This is the question
for the justices, but they're not going to answer this
port So I'm asking you, what do you think some
of the justices who sided with this think fifteen sixteen
years excuse me, ten or eleven years later after this
decision and the impact of that decision.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that if we come to the justices
and say should you overturn gay marriage? A lot of
them are going to say no. A couple of them
might say yeah, it was a trash decision that was
built on trash logic and has nothing to do with
the Constitution. But a lot of them may say no
because they're going to say, well, you know, we've got
ten years of precedents, but.
Speaker 1: We're not a shuttled law, rightie. That's what they always say.
It's settled law, and.
Speaker 2: We're not going to come to them and saying should
you overturn gay marriage? We're going to bring to them
cases or challenges that are not asking what do you
think of gay marriage? We're going to bring them cases
that say, do a child's own mother and father benefit
them in ways that a state assigned adult does not.
We're going to change the entire question that they're being asked.
And when you answer the question, actually, a child's own
mother and father matter to them as it relates to
their safety, their investment, their development, their identity, as it
relates to their long term outcomes, and as it correlates
with centuries of common law that places and privileges the
natural parent child relationship above other relationships. Now you've got
a totally different equation before the court. It's not about
how do these adults identify or what is the strength
of their emotional relationship. The question before the court is
do children need their own mother and father? And should
that be elevated and prioritized for the sake of kids?
And if they answer yes, which social science is on
our side and so is common law and so is
natural law, then you're creating an environment where obergerfil is
not going to be able to continue to exist.
Speaker 1: That's a good point, and I want to get to
the science point of things. We were told in twenty twenty,
over and over again by the experts to follow the science,
more to the topic when it came to COVID, more
to the topic at hand right now. We were told
by the experts so called for years that, you know,
changing the sex of a fifteen year old kid, you know,
cutting off their their genitals, and you know, and inducing
them with all kinds of horrible chemicals was a good thing,
a benefit. So I'm a little concerned about people actually
truly following the science. Does that give you any pause
based on where we've been over the last several years
in this country on that front.
Speaker 2: The science was hijacked in this conversation as well. If
any of you guys have ever tried to say kids
need a mom and dad, and I'm a little concerned
about two men or two women raising a child and
I just think that might be bad for them, immediately
you are going to be hit with a link that
says Cornell University has surveyed seventy nine studies of children
raised by same sex households, and seventy five of them
say that those kids fare no different or even better
than kids raised by their heterosexual parents. And so they
did a lot of work leading up to a Bergafel
to create a lot of quote unquote studies that showed
that number one, you know, they argued into Bergaphil, kids
have nothing to do with marriage, but also kids love
it and they need it. Kids have nothing to do
with marriage, but the kids of same sex headed households,
they really need marriage, and they're very, very happy to
have two moms or two dads. So they had the
science all lined up for them as well, just like
the science behind the vaccine and the science behind transgenderism.
They had trash studies that said, hey, kids love having
two moms or two dads if you go to them
before us substack. I looked at all seventy five of
those studies, and interestingly, when you apply the gold standard
of the scientific method that is generally used when you
want to evaluate whether or not a conclusion for a
sociological survey can be extrapolated to the general population, you
want to look for things like, you know, adequate control
groups or finding random participants rather than just asking somebody
to complete a survey, you know, asking somebody that is
already at a gay and lesbian center if they want
to participate in a study that might impact the Supreme
Court's decision on gay marriage. You're going to look at
the actual outcomes of the children. What's their medical record,
what is their academic record. You're not just going to
ask the parents, Hey, do your kids love having gay moms?
They do? Awesome. Looks like the kids fare no different.
And so I looked at like all of those different variables,
and of those seventy five studies that say that kids
spare no different, there is one. There is one study
that pulled from government data that it actually was a
very small sample size, but at least they used robust methodology,
they had adequate control groups. There was one one out
of seventy five. The other seventy five were so obviously
driven by bias that they really cannot be used in
any meaningful way to say kids fare no different. And
this should surprise none of us. Oh, by the way,
there was one other study that was done since those
seventy five were completed, and it also is a good
study from the Netherlands. But now you have to stack
that up against the several robust studies that we have
of children with same sex parents who show they do
not do as well. And on top of that, you
have to contend with the fact that whenever sociologists are
studying anything other than same sex parents, they overwhelmingly agree
on three things. Number one, biology advantages children a child's
own mother and five are the most connected to, invested in,
and protective of them. Number two that parental loss through death, abandonment, divorce,
even reproductive technologies, children are harmed when they lose their
mom or dad. And three that mothers and fathers offer
distinct and complementary benefits to children. And you could thrown
the fourth that unrelated to adults in the home always
increase risk of abuse and neglect. So that is what
sociologists agree on across the board when you're not talking
about same sex parenting. So then how is it that
these studies the science where children are always missing a
biological parent, they're always raised by an unrelated adult, they've
always suffered the trauma of parental loss, and they're always
starved of either the maternal or paternal love that maximizes development.
How are those kids fearing no different? That's the real question,
and the answer is those no different studies are totally
filled with bias. There's no way that you could come
to that conclusion without upending everything else that we know
about human behavior.
Speaker 1: Our guest today is Katie Faust, founder and president of
Them Before US, spokeswoman for the newly launched Greater Than
campaign advocating for the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell
and prioritize children's rights. You mentioned those studies. I want
to talk about the studies that do have the gold standard,
do follow the scientific method, and do find that there
is indeed damage being done. Ten years after the oborga
Fell verdict the ruling, what are they saying on the
topic of same sex marriage and these other arrangements, non
traditional arrangements, if you will.
Speaker 2: Well, The first one to be done was in twenty twelve,
and that was Mark Rignieris's study, the New Family Structure Study,
And it was a bomb that went off because he
did what all the other researchers refused to do. He
went and found these kids as adults, and then he
asked them about their own experiences. It wasn't just gay
father's report that their kids do well in school. Gay
father's report that their kids have great emotional outcomes. Now
they went to the kids that had two moms or
two dads and said, did you have an IEP in school?
Were you ever sexually assaulted? Were you on welfare? Did
you struggle more with any depressive symptoms? And the metrics
were off the charts. You know, when you actually apply
the gold standard method of the scientific method for these
same sex parented studies, that no difference actually becomes massive difference.
You know, we did see higher rates of sexual abuse,
sexual assault, higher rates of academic struggles, mental health challenges,
emotional challenges were definitely off the chart. Substance abuse was
also a big part of it as well well. Then
after that, doctor Paul Solins pulled data from government data
sources and he found that children with same sex parents
had double and triple the rates of emotional problems above
children raised by heterosexual parents. Even things like daily fearfulness
and crying was about four times higher among children with
same sex parents. And then he also corrected a study
that had widely been heralded as showing no difference, and
he said, there was a category error here. You were
accounting some kids as same sex headed households that really
were not in a same sex headed household, and when
he actually categorized them properly, he found that those children
of same sex headed households fared worse. But he also
found that children of married same sex couples did worse
than children of cohabiting same sex couples. Now, we do
not have a we have very very little data now
on the difference between children with cohabiting versus same sex
married couples, because we've only had marriage same sex marriage
for ten years. But when kids were mentioned during the
oral arguments during Obergefel, one of the reasons they said
we need this is the kids with same sex parents.
They need the stability of marriage. And yet doctor Sullen's
found that the children with married same sex parents did
worse than unmarried same sex parents, and he suggested, well,
that's probably because they were more significantly cut off from
their missing parent, whereas the kids with cohabiting same sex parents,
he hypothesized that they probably still had some contact with
their father or their mother that was missing. Maybe that
was more likely the product of a head or sexual breakup,
and so the child still had some kind of a
relationship with the parent that was generally totally excluded in
the married homes. So whenever we actually get good data,
whenever we actually can put our hands on the real
outcomes of kids and not just this ideological smokescreen or
these poor methodologies that allow adults to wish cast on
to children how they hope that they feel, rather than
what they actually experience. The results are damning. And again,
none of this should be a surprise to us. What
gay marriage is, what same sex headed households is. It's
just another variety of broken home. It's just another kind
of broken home. It's just another manifestation of a way
that children lose a relationship with either their mother or
their father or both. And so far in the whole
pantheon of human experience, there's no way for a child
to lose their mother or fother and not be really
significant harm, significantly harmed by it.
Speaker 1: Well, on all of that, let me ask you a
question I think I know the answer to, and a
question I don't know the answer to. The question I
know the answer to because I have, you know, reported
on this. How come the studies that you mentioned that
are you know, they're so telling? They use the gold standard,
as you mentioned, and they're showing absolutely different outcomes for children,
negative outcomes and same sex marriages. How come those are
so buried? We never see those being reported in the
usual arenas, the so called mainstream media, what I like
to call the accomplice media. And I know we're only
ten years out after the fact, but are there any
long term studies The studies you mentioned really dealt with,
you know, the children, a lot of that at the time.
What about the long term impacts of this over ten
fifteen years?
Speaker 2: Good questions, very good questions. So, first of all, a
couple of those are mentioned. You know, it is the
four studies in that Cornell survey, you know, the seventy
five out of seventy nine. Well the other you know,
seventy six, seventy seven, seventy nine that they don't like,
that is Ragnaris, that is doctor Sullens, So they have
to acknowledge them there. But you have these massively strong
studies that are just a handful up against this this
absolute you know, there's just an abundance of garbage studies,
and so it makes it look like all of the
social science is on one side, when the reality is
like anybody can go out and kind of make that
that trash study. But it's very hard to do the
kind of study that Ragnaris or doctor Sullens did, and
that's why it stands up to scrutiny. That's why you
can actually extrapolate to the general population. What studies have
been done since then, very few. There's been a couple
that have come out out of Europe. Like I mentioned,
there was a good one, good By. It actually did
use robust methodology from the Netherlands and it showed on
an academic level that children of lesbians had the same
academic outcomes. So that's one that we do have to
look at and contend with. Most people would say, well,
the lesbians evaluated in that study had us higher socioeconomic status,
so it's probably more of a distinction between rich and poor,
not household structure. But that's a study that really does
deserve some attention in terms of challenging those narratives and anything.
In the United States, there's been virtually nothing. I think
a lot of the research machine shifted as soon as
they got Obergefell. Right, Oh, you're so concerned about outcomes
of children with same sex parents until you get your
legislative win and really that's been it really has hardly
been studied since then. Everybody shift their focus started, you know,
cranking out, in my opinion, ideological material and supposed research
for the question about transgender and transing the kids and
all of that. And now we've seen a lot of
that research also is built on very shifting sands, you know,
So why isn't more being done? Good studies are expensive
and very few institutions are going to fund them because
virtually nobody will publish them. There has been absolute widespread
institutional capture across the social sciences, and so it's hard
to get funding, and it's hard to get approval, and
even if you did get it published somewhere. Ask doctor
rig Nars how that went for him. They absolutely tried
to destroy him, and by God's grace, the university stood
behind him, and that man has been vindicated in terms
of his methodologies. There was just somebody ran his conclusions
through some kind of AI algorithm and in like two
million multiverses. Because there's actually a lot of ways that
you can kind of parse and present data, and so
even if you do get data that's unfavorable, you can
trim and cut and trim and cut and trim and
cut and then present the bit that supports your conclusions.
So somebody did that with Mark Gregniros's data and it
was like, in two million multiverse options, his conclusions held. So,
I mean, it was such a well done study, but
that is hard to do. It's expensive, and even if
you do fund it and publish it, are you able
to withstand the barrage, the attacks not just for you
and your job, but for your family. And most people
don't want to put themselves through that. So the answer is,
we don't know a whole lot about how those kids
have fared since twenty fifteen because no one's studying it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, as an elections correspondent for the Federalist
and covering elections longer than I want to acknowledge, the
mantra is always follow the money. And so I ask
you the same question in these so called seventy five
studies that, according to Cornell corroborate, you know that love
is love, same sex marriages don't have any adverse outcomes
for kids. Who's funding most of these studies?
Speaker 2: That's a great question. I have not done a deep
dive into who is funding them, But the good news
is for them is they're pretty cheap. It's not that
hard to go down to the local LGBTQ center and
you know, have a little poll tab thing like want
to take part in a same sex parenting study? You know,
call this number and then you know complete as something
over the phone or over online, and then you colate
that information. I mean, that's not hard to do and
it's not expensive. So a lot of these I don't
think needed a lot of funding behind them, But because
they conveyed the message that was necessary at the time,
they were treated as something that was legitimate.
Speaker 1: What it means to be a conservative used to be clear,
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Conservativism is at a crossroads, which is why all conservatives
need Conservative Crossroads. Listen today. There is something I think
a lot of Americans have contemplated thought about just trying
to follow all of this, the you know, the cultural
plate tectonics of it all, if you will, not just
from Obergefell, but you know all of these different areas
of the leftist cultural takeover, and that is in the
last several years, if you want to market the last
ten years from Obergefell, you have seen numbers showing, you know,
significant numbers of kids now identifying as gay, or buy
or tran. I think Bill Maher did an excellent piece
on this a while back, showing the numbers of trans
kids in California from the early nineteen nineties until the
early twenty twenties and how that exploded over the years,
and we're all scratching our heads, going, how did that happen?
This is in the same universe that you're dealing with.
But why are we seeing these kinds of numbers that
seem to a lot of Americans as fraudulent.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Well, I think that the trans situation was
definitely obviously a social contagent, which is what Bill Maher
was pointing to. There's no way that you can have
a high concentration of transgender kids in San Francisco, but
why are there virtually none in North Carolina. It's a
total mystery. It's because it's absolutely a social contagion. I
think that with the gay marriage thing and the engineering
of the data around children with same sex parents, I
think a lot of that is just kind of the
trajectory of we are here to advance the next wave
of liberation and equality, and right this is the next step.
After we tore down barriers for interracial marriage, you know,
now we're going to move on and tear down barriers
between same sex marriage. And I personally think a lot
of it is, you know, people that grew up in
the seventies and eighties and nineties that so revered the
civil rights movement. I mean, I remember in social studies,
you know, we all thought, well, those that's what heroes
really look like. Where's our movement, where's our campaign? Where's
our chance to fight for the marginalized and the most vulnerable?
And day marriage served that up on a plate. You know,
this is your chance to also, you know, tear down
the barriers, just like you know what our black brothers
and sisters had to face under Jim Crow. And I
will say, there's an awful lot of black pastors that
are like, uh, no, you don't. You do not get
to co opt our story of civil rights and our
suffering because you cannot have your sexual relationship validated by
the state.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, I agree with you. But what about
intersexual in intersectionality in all radical leftist terms where they're
you know, and that gets you to back to the
point where you were talking about before. Is this nothing
more than just power? Uh? It is to put people
on the left, the Marxist left, into power. They're they're
using this. It's a vehicle to get people elected.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And and then ultimately to change and redefine not only
society but reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and I will say that it's strange that
Marxism always seems to have this component of separating children
from parents. You absolutely can see it in you know,
like Maus Red Youth, you know the Metal Red Book, Yeah,
Little Red Book, and you know, they all sort of
have their own movement. I just especially familiar with China
where you start to now as your father, not your parents.
He's your father, right, He's the one that you rely on.
He's the one you should turn your parents in. But
then there also is this family deconstruction element as well,
of children don't belong to you, they belong to the state.
And this absolutely just goes hand in hand. We understand
that there has been a right. Parental rights have been
under attack. All of us have seen it. We're up
in arms. Governor Glenn Youngin got elected because people are like,
don't you touch my kids. So we understand that parents
have a right to their own children. But we need
to start looking at is actually children have a right
to their own parents as well. There's two sides of
that natural law coin right, that relationship between parents and
child has been privileged by the state going back to
the colonial times, because there is something critical about that
that safeguards against government overreach, and now, in the name
of marriage equality, they are deconstructing that further. They're beginning
by separating children from the parents. But if children don't
have a claim to their own parents in the world
of natural law and in the common law, why on
don ours two parents have a claim to their own children.
Isn't that relationship? So that's two sides of the same coin.
And so this ultimately will weaken parental rights because if
the government can decide who is and is not a parent,
if they have that kind of power, which is exactly
what we have given them in the last ten years.
We used to say, how do you know what a
parent is? A parent is the genetic parent they gave
birth or they're biologically related. We didn't do evaluations on
pregnant women and their husbands because we presumed that that
was a pre political relationship that the state wasn't going
to get involved in unless there was abuse or neglect,
and then the state gets involved, often very hesitantly. But
then we said, okay, there's one other way that we
can recognize that you have a claim to a child,
and that is adoption. If you undergo significant screening and
vetting and background checks to as much as possible replicate
the kind of protectiveness that biological parents naturally have for
their own children. Then you also can be a parent.
But in the world of modern family, both of those
are discriminatory because same sex couples can never both be
biologically related. And many of them felt like it was
undignified to have to adopt a child that is the
son of the woman that they're married to. I mean,
men don't have to do that when their wife gives birth.
Why do I have to do it when my wife
gives birth. Well, the difference is the man is the
biological parent of the child and you are a genetic stranger.
And so what they did is they said, we're going
to create new pathways of child acquisition. So now it's
just not just biology, it's not adoption. We have created
new pathways in the name of adult equality, for unrelated
adults to take possession of infants. It's called intent based
parented or de facto parented. It's actually just state sanctioned trafficking.
But what we're doing here, notice, is a massive power
grab of the state. Now it's not biology that determines
whether you are or not a parent. Now it is
the government that decides when you are or not a parent.
And let me be very clear with you. If the
state can decide who is and is not a parent arbitrarily,
not because of biology, if they can assign that to
an unrelated adult, it is much more easy for them
to unassign you as the biological parents, as the legal
parents of your own biological children. I wrote about this
at First Things in the fall. It's called the end
of natural parenthood, and I looked at nine different statutes
that used to recognize the pre eminence of the natural
parent child relationship, and all nine has been weakened or
gutted because of Obergefel. So this is not just a
threat to the children who become intentionally motherless or fatherless
because of new gay marriage laws. This is a threat
to every parent child relationship. So when I talk about
how significant the impact is that Obergefel has had on law,
people just don't understand. And there are very real children
that are being harmed because of this. But also this
is actually a threat to all of society, to every
parent and every child.
Speaker 1: There are some real horror stories out there as well
about parental rights being taken away because that biological parent
didn't want to see their child mutilated, didn't want to
see their child, you know, with you know, most control.
The parent who then became involved in a same sex relationship,
what have you. The parent wanted more custodial rights and
lost them in the bargain. I mean, as you mentioned before,
these are our stories that are going on. These are
the faces of what's happened over the last ten years
since Obergefell.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of us are familiar with that.
How ideology has encroached on parental rights and it's horrifying.
But when children don't have a right to their own parents,
and that's what Obergerfeld does, it destroys the claim that
children have to their own parents. It regards them as
functional accessories to be awarded to any and every adult.
What Obergefeld did is it removed all the contours of
the natural family in law. You probably have not looked
at a legal document recently, but if in state law
or federal law, you probably are not seeing the words
mother and father. You're probably seeing the words guardian or parent.
Speaker 1: You may be inmated person person yea. In the state
of Wisconsin by the way based on all kinds of
and it's not alone. I mean that's the one that
came out the governor there took the leftist governor. Well,
it took a lot of heat, of course from the
right on something that he should have taken a lot
of heat for the sort of changing terminology that's right.
Speaker 2: And what you cannot name, you cannot defend. And so
you're taking out mother and father. You can't defend a
child's right to their mother and father. You're reducing biology
in terms of its importance. You're elevating intent based parenthood.
Now it's like any way that you acquire a child
is legitimate in a lot of jurisdictions. They've redefined the
word infertility because it's discriminatory. You know, if twelve months
of unprotected heterosexual sex deems you infertile, and then you
can get insurance benefits that will subsidize your IVF coverage
for heterosexuals. But a same sex couple can have as
much unprotected heterosexual sex as they want. They'll never result
in a pregnancy or a life. Word, that's discrimination. So
they've redefined infertility. Now there's no recognition that the procreative
relationship has anything special to offer society or you're not
allowed to say that. It's just any two is helpful,
and you know, that's the stable bond that we're looking for.
And so what they've done is they have stripped the
law of all of the distinctives of the natural family.
That's what they've done. And when that's the problem is
all that's really important, Like mothers and fathers are important
to kids, a biological connection or a minimum and adoption
is important to kids. Not having the insurance companies subsidize
the manufacturing of motherless or fatherless kids, all of that
matters to kids. And so what we've seen here is
the commodification of children. That is what happens when the
only contours of family law is what the adults want.
Male and female aren't part of it. Biology isn't a
part of it. Genuine infertility is not a part of it.
The only guiding principle in parenthood law now is is
the adult happy. That means that children are commodities to
be awarded to any and every adult. So what is
the result of that, Yes, some children are going to
be raised by same sex couples, but also you'll have
twenty one children created by Chinese nationals in California through surrogacy,
fifteen of which are under the age of three. You're
going to have a seventy four year old man who
has six year old twins that he created through IVF
and surrogacy. You're going to have sex offenders and predators
acquiring children and handing them over. Because that's the world
of Obergefel, that is the world of modern family. If
biology doesn't matter, if gender does not matter, if children
don't have a claim to their own mother and father,
if intent and contracts are the only thing that makes
you a parent, then you can mass produce them. Pedophiles
can acquire them. Retirees can raise their own caregivers. All
of that is what you get when you legalize gay marriage.
So you can either believe that children have a right
to their mother and father or you can support gay marriage.
Pick you can't have both.
Speaker 1: Well, isn't it all just the extension of the concept
from the abortion industry that it's just a clump of cells,
just a collection of cells. And that's how they've argued
about the preborn not being you know, living dreams of
the parents. And now they've taken that of course to
children who have been treated this way for some time,
as you mentioned, as commodities for the feelings of parents.
Final question, what's next for Greater Than I know you're
just launching now, but I know there are a lot
of different fronts here. What's next for the campaign?
Speaker 2: Well, we have three goals. The first one is to
create a credible judicial strategy for success, and we do
feel like we have that, And if you are a
policymaker at the state level and would like to be
a part of that, you can come to the campaign
website and email us and we'll give you some ideas
about how you can participate. Number two, we need to
change public opinion, and so thankfully I've got some incredible
influencers on board, from Michael Knowles to Lila Rose, to
Ali Stuckey, to Abby Johnson and Steve Dason, Josh Hammer
and Hidi Saint John and Delana Squire's and I mean
just really some incredible people, Lisa Vivie that are involved
in that effort. And the goal is to help people
understand the very direct connection between gay marriage and child
victimization and natural marriage and child protection. So we are
going to change the way Americans think about marriage. We
are going to communicate this is not primarily about adult
emotional validation, this is about child protection. And then third,
we need to turn the church into a child centric
fighting force. So I've got a wonderful team of Catholics
and Protestants who are going to develop some materials for
Christians so they can understand their job is child protection
and advancing a true definition of marriage is one way
that we Christians are going to do that. So there's
a lot of head in terms of activity, Definitely a
lot of head ahead as it relates to opposition to
what we're working on. But I feel very confident that
when we have this question, when we look at this
issue through the lens of putting kids first, we're going
to see a lot of clarity, both in the culture
and in the courtroom.
Speaker 1: There are no more important battles, no battle that is
more important than the battle for our children and for
their future. Thanks to my guest today, Katie Foust, founder
and president of Them Before US, spokeswoman for the newly
launched Greater Than campaign advocating for the US Supreme Court
to overturn or Burga Fell and prioritize children's rights. You've
been listening to another edition The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm
Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom
and anxious for the fray
Speaker 2: Where I've been out walking