A coordinated effort to overturn Obergefell is reviving old arguments in a new form, casting children as “victims” of marriage equality, despite decades of research to the contrary. Protesters rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in support of marriage equality on Nov. 7, 2025, as the justices considered a petition urging them to revisit Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision that established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. (Samuel Corum / Getty Images)

Within a day of Trump’s second inauguration, we witnessed the virtual erasure of the LGBTQ+ community from the White House website, with the scrubbing of words like “lesbian” “bisexual,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” The erasure was soon extended to federal agency websites.

As Alessio Ponzio, an expert on LGBTQ+ history, told NPR’s Morning Edition, this semantic censorship of a community is “an act of violence” that effectively sends the message, “I do not recognize you.”

Joining the loud shouts of we “do not recognize you” coming from the White House, at least five Republican governors rebranded this year‘s Pride Month with monikers such as “Nuclear Family Month” or “Fidelity Month.” Indiana Gov. Mike Braun said he was reclaiming June to instead celebrate the divinely designed family, comprised of “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted or fostered children.” In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey declared June Strong Families Month and proclaimed “fathers are the head of household [who provide] leadership, protection and support …”

Alongside these hostile erasure efforts, a 2026 Gallup Poll reports support for “LGBTQ+ issues” has begun to backslide: Although “most Americans still favor legal same-sex marriages, the 65 percent who do so today is down 6 percentage points from the peak in 2022 and 2023. … The percentage viewing gay or lesbian relations as morally acceptable, 62 percent, has not been lower since 2016.”

The decline in support for marriage equality has been steepest among Republicans: down to 37 percent, from a peak of 55 percent in 2021 and 2022.

Jim Obergefell (center), the lead plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges, embraces fellow plaintiff Luke Barlowe outside the U.S. Supreme Court after oral arguments on April 28, 2015. A decade later, conservative activists and lawmakers are mounting renewed efforts to overturn the landmark marriage equality ruling. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Amidst this calculated erasure and slippage in support, the campaign to overturn the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized marriage between same-sex partners, has picked up steam.

The marriage-equality-effacing crusade was boosted by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that overturned Roe v. Wade—a nearly 50-year-old precedent.

Predicting the cascading harms of Roe’s demise, interim president of the Human Rights Campaign Joni Madison warned we are “one of our most intimately held constitutional rights [is] being stripped away from us: the right to safe, legal abortion … None of our hard-won rights are safe… It [will] encourage power-hungry lawmakers to test the limits of court recognized LGBTQ+ equality—and state legislatures are already coming at us right now.”

Justice Samuel Alito, in writing for the Dobbs majority, stressed the “decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” and “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

But marriage exclusionists appear instead to be listening to Justice Clarence Thomas’ call for a reconsideration of Obergefell, which he claims, is similarly improperly grounded in the constitutionally protected right to privacy.

Writing for Crisis Magazine—self-described as “America’s most trusted source for authentic Catholic perspectives”— Anne Hendershott recently declared the “movement to topple Obergefell … no longer fringe.” Conservatives are increasingly “treat[ing] marriage equality … as a live front in the broader fight over social norms.” While the two most popular state level legislative approaches currently in play in this “live front” do not “overturn anything on their own … they signal a coordinated search for a strategically crafted vehicle that this Court can accept.”

One approach is the legislative adoption of a resolution calling upon the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell. To date, Idaho is the only state where a legislative chamber has formally adopted a resolution explicitly urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell—but they are being considered by a number of other red and purple states. In Michigan, state Sen. Josh Shriver (who calls himself “Michigan’s most conservative state representative”) introduced an anti-Obergefell resolution in 2025, claiming the decision “has defaced the definition of marriage, undermined our God given rights, increased persecution of Christians and confused the American family structure.“

MassResistance is an antiabortion group with a proud history of fighting “sexual radicalism” in Massachusetts. These days, it is guiding states in the effort to call out what it characterizes as an “infamous and illegitimate ruling” that has wreaked “immense social havoc” by redefining marriage “to suit a bizarre special interest.”

Of course, these resolutions are purely symbolic in nature, since the Court does not hear cases by way of legislative requests, but are rather intended to “send an important public message [and] create positive momentum across the country.” 

Other states are considering creating a new category of marriage, known as covenant marriage, which would only be available to heterosexual couples. Louisiana enacted the country’s first covenant marriage law in 1997, followed quickly by Arizona and Arkansas. Tracking the religious adage that “marriage is a covenant, not a contract,” in their first incarnation, by limiting divorce grounds and requiring both pre-marital and pre-divorce counseling, these laws were part of the conservative backlash against liberalized divorce laws.

As law professor Katherine Shaw Spaht put it, they were designed to provide religious and traditional couples with a “safe haven from the post-modern dominant culture.”

LGBTQ+ rights advocates gather outside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27, 2018, to protest Trump administration attacks. The demonstration came as activists warned of growing threats to equality and civil rights. (Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Today, however, covenant marriage bills are being resurrected as part of the “strategically crafted vehicle” for bringing down Obergefell. In short, the intended “safe haven” is a restoration of is heterosexual exclusivity, rather than marital permanence.

Tracking the (ultimately successful) strategy that brought down Roe, the hope is that a case challenging their constitutionality will wind up before the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority which will repudiate Obergefell’s ruling that “laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury” in violation of their constitutional right to privacy and equal protection of the law.

In January 2026, the group Greater Than, whose list of coalition members reads like a “who’s who of Christian nationalist so-called ‘pro-family’ organizations” (as Todd Beeton writes in the Big Think Substack) was launched with the sole aim of taking down Obergefell. Using the tagline “children are greater than equal,” the group embodies Faust’s strategic vision for “reignit[ing] a seemingly settled cultural debate over same-sex marriage” by moving it “away from the rights of adults toward children who are the ‘real victims.’”

Although I would argue that the claimed need to “protect” children from gay parents has long been part of the anti-marriage equality argument, Greater Than’s “real victims” narrative is front and center in its mobilizing outreach pitch. In a complete abnegation of the recognition by “both sides” in Obergefell that “many same-sex provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted,” Greater Than warmly invites those who are “tired of seeing children ignored, victimized, and treated as ‘less than'” as a result of Obergefell’s redefinition of marriage into the fold.

Setting the ugly tone for the “real victim” narrative, in a launch-day interview on American Family Radio, Faust proclaimed that “there is a direct connection between gay marriage and the commodification of children,” who have been downgraded to “functional accessories to be awarded to whatever adult has the money and means to acquire them.”

It is hard to make actual sense out of this claim, but perhaps she is simply pandering to the timeworn stereotype of gay men as “wealthy…quintessential style gurus,” who, thanks to Obergefell, can now upgrade their image by purchasing an adorable child to dangle on an arm as an accessory, much like an expensive watch or statement bracelet.

The “pro-family” pundits on Greater Than’s launch video also package traffic in unsubstantiated claims, which likewise cater to stereotypes, such as:

• When Obergefell redefined marriage to include same-sex couples, it was billed as a win for adult equality. In reality, it created inequality for children. It made our children less than.
• By redefining marriage, you have destroyed the house. You can put together the house and claim it is the same. Children will know the difference. It harms children in virtually way imaginable.
• We’re prioritizing the fantasies of adults, no matter how earnestly these fantasies are felt, over the real needs and the real good of children.
• When you look at social science, it says beyond a shadow of a doubt that children who grow up in a two-parent biological home—mom and dad—those children will do best.
• Marriage policy should be about the children. It’s not about bestowing public policy legitimacy and conferring economic benefits when it comes to adults who have their own idiosyncratic romantic desires.
• The kids aren’t fine. The kids have not been fine for quite some time.

But the kids really are all right. In fact, a recent meta-analysis of the literature on “the effect of parents’ sexual orientation on the child’s developmental wellbeing” makes clear that the kids being raised by same-sex parents are, actually, doing better than fine! Focused on measures such as gender identity, cognitive function, psychological adjustment and the quality of the parent-child relationship, the study determined,

“The overall effect of the parents’ sexual orientation on the child’s developmental well-being was higher in same-sex family structures. That is, same-sex parents positively impacted their children’s overall developmental well-being, compared to heterosexual parents.”

One need not share the Obergefell Court’s reverence for marriage, which it characterized as “essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations” to condemn the push to divest same same-sex couples of the fundamental right to freely choose whom they wish to marry. Doing so, in the words of the Court, “disparage[s] their choices” and denies them “equal dignity in the eyes of the law;” in turn, their children “suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser.”  

We cannot allow this erasure.

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