Katy Faust, the anti-marriage-equality activist who has organized a new religious-right coalition to overturn the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, has been making the rounds of right-wing podcasts and revealing more details about the coalition’s strategy since last week’s campaign launch.
Faust told far-right Christian nationalist podcaster Steve Deace, who she identified as part of the campaign’s influencer network, that the launch was “a real success.” The fact that Faust has chosen to partner with Deace, who has repeatedly called for violence against his political opponents, surely says something about the win-at-all-costs values she is bringing to the campaign.
So does the fact that the campaign’s website falsely implies that former President Barack Obama is backing the campaign. The website features a photo of Obama alongside anti-equality advocates Charlie Kirk, Allie Beth Stuckey, and Seth Dillon, and quotes Obama saying, “We know that children benefit not just from loving mothers and loving fathers, but from strong and loving marriages as well.” The quote comes from a 2010 event promoting responsible fatherhood; Obama has been a supporter of marriage equality since 2012.
Central to Faust’s argument is her claim that children are terribly harmed by any family configuration other than being raised by their forever-married biological father and mother. That is certainly a contested claim, to say the least. Even the conservative Washington Times recognized that the research is not as one-sided as Faust pretends, linking to a Cornell University review showing that 75 out of 79 studies “concluded that children of gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than other children.”
Faust says she supports the dignity and equality of LGBTQ people—except for marriage—but she is partnering with groups that have a long record of demeaning LGBTQ people and opposing every advance toward legal equality. And she herself uses language that evokes historic smears of LGBTQ people as predators, saying the campaign’s message will be, “Don’t touch the kids.”
“We have ten years of receipts of how gay marriage has victimized children,” she told the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. She talked about “the carnage that has been inflicted on children” by marriage equality, and claimed, “There is a direct connection between gay marriage and child victimization.”
Central to the campaign’s messaging is that gay couples, single people who want to be parents, and some infertile married couples are just being selfish when they choose to parent or use IVF technology in ways that deprive children of what Faust calls a fundamental right to their mother and father. In a “just society” grounded in a “biblical worldview,” Faust told American Family Radio host Jenna Ellis, some of those adults will just have to live with not getting what they want. In an interview with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Faust sneered at gay couples’ “acquisition of a child that doesn’t belong to them.”
The campaign’s “Greater Than” name and logo (a direct aim at the Human Rights Campaign’s well-known equal sign) points to a messaging strategy grounded in the idea that children’s interests in being raised by their biological parents in traditional married-forever families trumps selfish adult “desires” and longings.”
During her appearances and interviews, Faust has identified a three-prong campaign strategy that is also outlined on the campaign’s website.
- A judicial strategy focused on the supposed harm to children caused by marriage equality. “The real question before the court is not ‘does gay marriage provide some kind of inconvenience for Christian adults,’” she says, “The question before the court needs to be ‘do children need, benefit from, and have a right to their own mother and father.” This strategy will rely on “courageous” legislators to pass laws that will allow the campaign to bring their question before the courts, the way anti-abortion activists worked with state legislators to pass anti-abortion laws designed to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. “We’ve got options for legislators,” Faust one interviewer. Presumably this will include state laws permitting or requiring discrimination against same-sex couples.
- A public relations campaign to change public opinion, which is currently solidly in favor of marriage equality. This effort will rely on getting the public to “understand the threat that gay marriage poses to children,” Faust says. This effort is starting with Christian conservatives and Republicans to get them on the same page, and will then turn to the “influenceable middle.” The message to them—and to the courts—will be that “you can’t support gay marriage and believe children need their mother and father.”
- A campaign to turn churches into “a child-centered fighting force.” To mobilize churches in a campaign against marriage equality, Faust says, the campaign will develop materials for both Protestants and Catholics.
Faust heads her own anti-marriage-equality group, Them Before Us, which is also the name of the weekend show she hosts on American Family Radio, the network of the Christian nationalist American Family Association. AFA and Them Before Us are listed as “core allies” of the campaign, along with Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the Colson Center. In her interview with Ellis, Faust said that the campaign has already grown from the 47 groups identified at the launch.
In an interview with Luke Martin on the UnBelievable podcast, Faust discussed her belief in male “headship” in church and family, saying that “egalitarian mindsets in essence make men optional in the two places where human formation takes place the most seriously and dramatically.” She described what she called “self-evident” gender roles of women as nurturers and men as protectors and other differences between men and women as “the biological design of our species.”
Faust decried the “feminization” of universities and the law, saying “in both of those spheres, when women become the heads, what you see is a deprioritization of truth and justice and an elevation of ‘can’t we all just get along.’”
Faust told Martin that sexual fulfillment has become the top “cultural god,” adding that “when sex becomes a God, children are the required sacrifice.” She mocked women who leave unhappy marriages where there is no abuse. “You have to get yourself a new God,” she said, adding that “the Christian, the biblical narrative” is the only overarching narrative that will lead to flourishing for children and adults.
In the same interview, Faust revealed that her parents divorced when she was growing up and that her mother entered what is now a 40-year relationship with another woman. Faust said she loves them both “so much” and considers her mother’s partner a friend. Faust is married to a pastor; she gave birth to three children and then adopted a fourth from China.
“And then the gay marriage debate arrived on the door of my state,” she said, and she began her anti-marriage-equality work as an anonymous blogger before starting her nonprofit in 2018.