Anniversary of Obergefell: Why marriage remains fundamental to society as ‘pride’ fervor declines

The U.S. Supreme Court legalized so-called gay marriage 11 years ago, but Americans’ support for the issue has rapidly declined in recent years, according to numerous reports and experts.

“I think that support for gay marriage was, in a way, always overstated by the fact of people saying, ‘sure, whatever.’ And I think some of the ‘sure, whatever’ people have moved solidly into the camp: ‘no, we’re done,’ just from seeing the outcome,” writer and speaker Jennifer Roback Morse told The Lion in an interview.

In the early years of the cultural debate, many Americans affirmed the watered-down slogan “love is love,” but that message merely attempted to shield what a rejection of the most basic unit of society would bring, Morse explained.

“A lot of people supported it in goodwill and good faith, and now they’re seeing the consequences of it,” Morse said.

Morse, founder of The Ruth Institute, has been a voice against this fundamental rejection of marriage for decades. She testified before the Rhode Island House in 2013 – two years before SCOTUS’ same-sex marriage decision – and predicted many of the outcomes the country has now seen. She warned of the legal, cultural and familial effects that would come, including the issue of three recognized parents in custody disputes, the elimination of sex specifications in law and an increase in religious discrimination cases.

“Redefining marriage was never solely about adult relationships. It inevitably reshaped law, culture, parenthood, and the rights of children,” she recently wrote in a Substack article.

The cultural shift after Obergefell

The cultural shift since the Obergefell decision came down quickly escalated from acceptance of same-sex marriage to forced celebration of all things LGBTQ, Executive Director at Them Before Us Josh Wood told The Lion. Them Before Us is a children’s advocacy organization, which recently launched the Greater Than Campaign, a grass-roots movement working for the overturn of Obergefell.

“Pride month makes it plain. The media moved from asking for tolerance to demanding celebration, including celebration of arrangements that strip a child from her mother and father and hand her to unrelated adults. That is absurd, and we should say so,” Wood said. “We must reject a regime that asks us to celebrate mother-and-father loss, and the decision that made doing it to children a constitutional right has to fall.”

This cultural shift has also altered laws, many of which now allow birth certificates to list various individuals as parents of a child, without any biological relation. Recently, New York’s Legislature passed a bill that would remove “mother” and “father” terms from state law and instead list “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.”

The T in LGBTQ was a natural step

The transgender movement and all that came with it – namely, the hormonal and surgical mutilation of minors – woke many of these middle ground Americans up to the reality of what Obergefell intended, Morse says. Alliance Defending Freedom Vice President of Appellate Advocacy and senior counsel John J. Bursch told Morse that, within one month of Obergefell, 80% of his cases involved the transgender issue.

“In retrospect, that campaign was planned,” Morse told The Lion. “There’s no question: they knew exactly what they were doing.”

While Obergefell specifically condoned same-sex marriage, the transgender-rights demand was a logical next step because “both rest on the same assumption,” Wood said, explaining how transgenderism claims gender is fluid and same-sex marriage claims the sex of parents is fluid.

“‘Sex assigned at birth’ and ‘parent assigned at birth’ are the same lie manifesting in two different places. Both deny a biological reality about a child because an adult prefers a different one,” he said.

But the real harms of transgender ideology – allowing biological men in women’s spaces that result in unfair sports competitions and sexual assaults in women’s restrooms – have caused American support for the LGBTQ agenda to decline, Wood explained.

Since 2015, Republicans have grown more conservative on the issue as they “became less naive” and realized Obergefell’s effects: “parenthood redefined, mothers and fathers erased from law, children deliberately stripped of their biological parents, and surrogacy turning babies into commodities,” Morse said in a post on X. Additionally, support for gay marriage and transgenderism have both declined significantly among all Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll.

“I think the trans movement’s defeat helped the whole picture, because it proved the progressive agenda was not invincible,” Wood said. “Social media did the rest. Once people saw the harm up close – men in women’s locker rooms and prisons, the Pennsylvania case where a child was acquired and handed to a registered sex offender through surrogacy, women rented for their wombs to facilitate the transaction – it gave them permission to say out loud what they were already thinking.”

A child’s right to a biological mother, father

Obergefell didn’t merely permit same-sex unions but attempted to sever the fundamental tie of marriage and children, Morse explained.

“Marriage has always been a core part of the institutional structure that protects the rights and interests of children, and the fact that we have allowed that to go down the drain so far means that we have children who have been badly damaged,” she said.

The role of a mother and a father are unique and complementary for a child’s development.

“The rule isn’t complicated: men cannot mother, and women cannot father, and children require both,” Them Before Us writes in a recent Substack article.

Boys who grow up without a father face a greater likelihood of crime, violence and incarceration. Girls without a father face greater risk of teen pregnancy, sexual promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases, Morse explains.

Mothers stabilize the home and provide an identity and refuge for their children. Young girls learn the beauty and order of womanhood from their mother’s model. Young boys learn how to treat women through the relationship of his father and mother. Children without mothers anxiously search for an identity because no woman is there to comfort, love and direct, according to the same article.

“A child needs one parent of each sex not because of rigid gender roles, but because half of humanity is female, and children deserve to grow up knowing what that looks like up close.”

Because of these innate, sex-specific roles in a family, same-sex couples who insist on children rob a child of at least one parent, Them Before Us argues.

And since marriage naturally brings children, this “personal decision” produces a significant societal impact.

“These two hold their parental rights against all other competing claimants. This is an intrinsically social, public function of marriage that cannot be privatized,” Morse writes. “We simply cannot escape the fact that marriage is an intrinsically public institution. We can’t avoid making collective decisions about its meaning and purpose.”

‘Greater Than’ campaign

The pro-traditional marriage ‘Greater Than’ campaign stands on the idea that children’s rights are greater than adults’ desires – a direct rebuttal to the equal sign for same-sex marriage in 2015.

“The wind is at our back,” Wood told The Lion. “We launched Greater Than in January knowing we stood against most of the media and half the political establishment, and since then 83 organizations and national leaders have joined to defend children and take back marriage.”

The campaign fights for children’s rights while also demonstrating how same-sex marriage harms kids.

“The kids at the center of all this have no vote, no voice, and no choice, which is precisely why they need ours,” he said.

The goal, although ambitious, is clear.

“You have to have an idea of where you’re going,” said Morse, who is a supporter of Greater Than. “You got to have a clear destination in mind.”

Truth-telling is the best way to continue to win those “middle-ground” Americans over to the side of common sense for marriage and children’s rights, she added.

“We need to say as clearly as possible, as often as possible: ‘every child has the right to come into being as the result of a loving embrace between their mother and father,’” she said. “I think as Christians we need to say it. We need to say that clearly, because that is an appealing vision. That is a vision that is universally possible.”