It's Not About Us

The true victims in the marriage fight are the kids

Last weekend, The Seattle Times handed Katy Faust a Mother’s Day gift. Not flowers. Not breakfast in bed. A 2,000-word feature on the front page of Local Politics, identifying her West Seattle neighborhood, naming her family’s church, and publishing the Snohomish County venue where she’s scheduled to speak this week, all stitched together for the paper’s readership as the Seattle woman behind a “national effort to end same-sex marriage.”

The reporter, Jim Brunner, called Katy’s husband, Ryan, for comment. Ryan is a Navy chaplain currently deployed in the Pacific. The request reached him by email, somewhere between his ship and home, where his wife and four children were spending Mother’s Day without him.

Katy replied to Brunner directly:

I love how you reached out to my husband, floating somewhere in the Pacific for comment, where he’s defending your right to doxx his wife’s neighborhood, community, and exact speaking location in the pages of our state’s most powerful outlet. I imagine you regard yourself as a hero for doing so.

Political Violence Dog Whistle?

A YouGov poll last September asked Americans across the political spectrum whether violence is ever justified to achieve political goals. Among those who described themselves as very liberal, 25% said yes. Among the very conservative, it was about 2%.

Brunner published Katy’s neighborhood, her church, and her speaking venue anyway. Within 48 hours, Reddit threads were trying to identify her gym, narrow down her exact home address, and reposting her church’s address.

Publishing the home neighborhood, the church, and the speaking venue of a public figure in this climate falls outside the bounds of normal political reporting. The Seattle Times knows that, and ran the piece anyway.

What Brunner refused to show you

If Brunner trusted his readers with the actual case Katy makes, he would have linked to it. He didn’t. The article quotes a few sparse phrases from her speech at last fall’s National Conservatism Conference and never points readers to the speech itself. It names the Greater Than campaign and never links the campaign site. It references the campaign’s trailer and never links the trailer. It spends thousands of words examining the dissenter and almost none examining the dissent.

A reporter confident in his framing shows his readers the opposing argument and trusts them to evaluate it. A reporter who is not confident summarizes the opposing argument into a version its proponents wouldn’t recognize. Brunner chose the second.

Here are the links he wouldn’t print:

• Katy’s NatCon speech: “How Obergefell Commodified Children”

• The Greater Than campaign site

• The Greater Than campaign trailer

• The full research breakdown: “Exposing the Rigged Research of the Same-Sex Parenting Movement”

If our case were as weak as Brunner needed his readers to believe, the strongest possible move would have been to link us and let his readers watch the argument collapse on contact. He didn’t, because he knew what would happen if his readers actually heard us.

The one scientific claim he did make

The article gave one paragraph of scientific evidence and built it around a 2024 review by UCLA and the RAND Corporation. That review surveyed 96 studies on the effects of legalizing same-sex marriage and concluded there was “no reliable evidence” of lasting harm.

What Brunner didn’t tell you about RAND: it was not designed to ask whether children do better with their own mother and father. It was designed to document the benefits to adults of legalizing same-sex marriage. Children were a secondary measurement, not the framing question.

The body of literature Brunner is leaning on traces back to a Cornell roundup that became famous on the eve of the Obergefell decision, claiming 75 of 79 studies showed children of same-sex parents do just as well as their peers. Apply ordinary scientific standards (random sampling, adequate sample size, objective outcome measures, no parental self-reporting) and 75 collapses to 1. Average sample sizes under 40. Participants were recruited through advocacy networks. Outcomes measured by asking same-sex parents to rate their own children.

The few studies that used national datasets tell a different story. Douglas Allen’s 2013 analysis of Canadian census microdata found children in same-sex households were about 65% as likely to graduate high school as children of married opposite-sex parents. Paul Sullins’s 2015 analysis of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey, drawing on more than 200,000 children, found that those with same-sex parents were 2.4 times more likely to have emotional problems than children with married biological parents. When Sullins re-coded an earlier “no difference” study to use actual household composition rather than parental self-identification, the results reversed: higher depression, higher anxiety, lower autonomy, and reported sexual abuse by a parent rising from 0% in unmarried same-sex households to 38% in married same-sex households.

We have laid all of this out in full, with citations and methodology, here, for anyone who wants the long version.

What this is actually about

Bad-faith actors are always going to want to change the conversation to avoid the true argument. While it’s egregious to write what they did and comments to say what they said, forcing us to evaluate safety and take it seriously, let’s not forget who the true victims in this fight are: THE CHILDREN.

LGBT ideologues will do whatever they can to avoid discussing the mother- and father-loss their policies are inflicting on innocent children.

If you know anything about our organization, the foundation of our movement is prioritizing the natural right of children over the desires of adults. Every child has a mother and a father. The claim is biological, not religious or political. A child exists because the gametes of one man combined with the gametes of one woman. Every same-sex “family” is built on the deliberate removal of one of those people from the child’s life. The loss is a precondition, not incidental.

We treat that separation as a tragedy in every other context. Adoption acknowledges it. Divorce acknowledges it. Foster care acknowledges it. The psychological community is unanimous: separating a child from his mother or his father is not a neutral event. There is one context where the rule reverses, and the loss is treated as if it doesn’t exist. That context is when the adults raising the child identify as LGBT.

Obergefell did more than open marriage to new participants. It changed what marriage is for. Across every human culture, marriage was the mechanism that connected a child to her mother and her father. Obergefell repositioned it as a public validation of adult relationships. The cost of that redefinition is paid by the children who were never asked, who cannot vote, who cannot lobby, who cannot sue, and who cannot speak for themselves in the rooms where their futures are being decided.

That is why this campaign exists. The Greater Than campaign makes one claim: a child’s right to her mother and her father is before any adult’s desire to artificially construct a “family” by erasing one of them.

The tide is turning

The reason The Seattle Times put Katy on the front page on Mother’s Day is not that we are a fringe movement no one needs to worry about. They wouldn’t bother. The reason is that the cultural ground is shifting, and the architects of the post-Obergefell regime can feel it.

People are watching surrogacy contracts treat newborns as deliverables. They are watching donor-conceived adults speak publicly about growing up without their biological fathers. They are watching the documented harms accumulate in motherless and fatherless households. They are starting to ask the question Brunner’s article was designed to suppress: when two men or two women decide they want a child, who pays the cost of getting one?

The threats, the doxxing, the front-page hit pieces are what an entrenched ideology does when its assumptions stop holding. The post-Obergefell regime has had a decade of unchallenged authority to redefine what children are owed and to silence anyone who pointed out the obvious: a child should not be deliberately separated from her mother or her father so that adults can artificially construct the “family” they want.

We are done being silent. We expected coverage like this when we started, and we will keep receiving it as long as the case for children threatens the case for adult validation. We are not going anywhere.

We need your help

We know that if we are going to take down this regime, we are going to need your financial support. As more enemies come out of the woodwork, we will need to rise to meet that challenge.

If you believe children should be defended against a regime that treats them as commodities to be cut and pasted into any arrangement adults want, join us.

Give today to help defend children.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

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