Katy Faust, the founder of Them Before Us, has set out a fresh campaign to challenge the legal redefinition of marriage in the US, arguing that the issue is ultimately about children, parenthood and the role of the state.
Speaking to the Coalition for Marriage’s Tony Rucinski, Ms Faust said the Greater Than Alliance was, in her view, “the first attempt in any country to retake marriage on behalf of children” after same-sex marriage had been written into national law.
The campaign seeks to make what she called a direct connection between same-sex marriage and a wider shift in how parenthood is understood.
“If you believe in gay marriage, mothers and fathers are optional in the life of a child,” she said. “If you believe children have a right to their mother and father, benefit from their mother and father, long to be known by their mother and father, you cannot support gay marriage as policy.”
She highlighted that the debate is not centred on opposition to individuals, but on how law defines parenthood.
Throughout the interview, Ms Faust returned to the argument that marriage should not be treated chiefly as an expression of adult desire or identity. Instead, she described it as a social institution ordered towards children and their bond with their biological parents.
She explained: “You can and should love your gay family and friends, but you have to reject the idea that marriage is a vehicle of adult validation. It is not. It is and always has been the tool that nearly every society throughout history has used to unite children to their mother and father so that they can have the best shot at being safe and loved, invested in, connected to, discover their identity and maximising their development.”
The Greater Than Alliance brings together around 100 organisations and individuals in the US. The aim, she explained, is to challenge not only same-sex marriage itself but the wider legal and cultural assumptions that sit behind it.
A major theme in the discussion was adoption.
Ms Faust rejected the idea that adoption policy should focus primarily on meeting a couple’s needs for children, saying: “Adoption doesn’t exist for adults. This is not some vehicle to have a DEI win on the registry … You talk about it [adoption] as an industry. I talk about it as an institution, an institution that is centred around the best interest of the child.”
Drawing on her own experience as an adoptive mother, Ms Faust argued that children benefit from both maternal and paternal influence.
Speaking about one of her sons, she said he needed both deep nurture and firm boundaries, adding: “He needed one of each.”
The conversation then widened into questions of parenthood, fertility law and the state’s authority.
Ms Faust said the deeper issue was whether parenthood is something to be recognised in law or something the state can assign.
She expounded: “Parenthood should be observed, not assigned … If biology does not matter when it comes to parenthood, you render children as legal accessories. They are now objects to be assigned to any adult.”
In her view, once the law detaches parenthood from biology, it opens the door to a much broader reordering of family life.
She warned that the implications stretch well beyond marriage policy alone, affecting adoption, surrogacy and birth registration.
“If the state has the ability to assign parentage to an unrelated adult, they have much more the ability to unassign parentage from you, from your own relationship with your own child,” she said.
The interview also touched on the UK. In response to questions from Mr Rucinski, Ms Faust argued that Britain had already shifted significantly by treating parenthood in increasingly legal rather than biological terms.
She said that any attempt to “retake marriage” in the UK must begin by restoring what she called the “natural contours of the family” in law and public language.
She added: “We will say mothers and fathers, not guardians, not parents. We are going to say biology matters. We're going to recognise that in our laws. We are going to say there's something different about a procreative relationship versus a relationship that centres around adult identity. These things do different things for children.”
While the US and UK differ in their legal frameworks, Ms Faust believes the underlying questions are shared.
“It all comes back to this child,” she said. “Where do they come from? To whom do they have a natural right? What are the conditions that lead to their flourishing?”
