Eleven years ago, on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges and ruled that marriage no longer required a husband and a wife. For more than a decade since, we were told the question was settled, that history had spoken, and that anyone who still believed children need a mother and a father was standing on the wrong side of it.
We were not standing on the wrong side. And for the first time in years, the country is beginning to see it. According to Gallup’s May 2026 Values and Beliefs survey, support for same-sex marriage among Republicans has fallen from 55% to just 37% in only four years. Something is stirring in the American conscience.
I witnessed that stirring up close this month. I stood before the Fresno County Board of Supervisors and asked them to do something our culture now treats as radical: to honor the family of one husband, one wife, and their children. They did, making Fresno the first county in California to recognize June as Traditional Nuclear Family Month. The resolution passed on a 3-2 vote after an hour of impassioned public comment, with local outlets reporting residents on both sides making their case. I told the board that even here, even in this month, we can choose to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.
But a candle is only honest if we are honest about the darkness it answers. My friend Katy Faust has spent these eleven years telling a truth most of our neighbors would rather not hear. In 2015, as one of six young people raised in LGBT households, she joined an amicus brief begging the Supreme Court to see that redefining marriage would not merely expand the freedom of adults. It would quietly strip children of their right to be known and loved by the mother and father who gave them life.
“Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.”
Psalm 127:3 (ESV)
She was right, and the mechanism is no mystery. Marriage law and parenthood law are bound together, so the moment we made mothers and fathers optional in marriage, we made them optional in parenthood. The ancient presumption that a married woman’s husband is the father of her child, which for centuries tied babies to both biological parents, has been inverted. In the arrangements this new regime requires, a child is severed from at least one biological parent by design, every single time. Sperm, egg, and womb are assembled by contract, and a newborn is sent home with whoever signed it. A child made in the image of God is not an accessory, and a growing chorus of Americans is finding the courage to say so.
Katy now leads the nonprofit Them Before Us and the Greater Than coalition, more than one hundred advocates, scholars, and pastors united by one plain conviction, in her words: “Every child has a natural right to the man and woman who created them.” That is the same conviction that moved a county board in the Central Valley just days ago. One candle, and then another, and then another.
Eleven years ago, the Court got it wrong. The hope of this anniversary is that more and more of our neighbors are willing to say so out loud, and to take up the harder work of building a culture that puts children before the desires of adults. Will you stand with us as we do?
