Conservatives Attempt to Reframe Debate Over Same-Sex Marriage Ruling

The Greater Than campaign argues same-sex marriage harms children and the family unit.

The Supreme Court in Washington on Feb. 2, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

A growing coalition of parents, activist groups, and others is organizing to put pressure on the Supreme Court to overrule its 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The Greater Than campaign, which launched on Jan. 28, recasts the effort to repeal same-sex marriage as a push to restore the right of children to live in homes with a mother and a father.

Katy Faust, the social activist who runs Greater Than, said on the campaign’s website that restoring marriage as an institution that protects children requires helping Americans to see the natural link between traditional marriage and child protection.

“[This requires] a judicial and policy strategy that centers children’s needs,” she said.

The Obergefell Ruling

The move came months after the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit seeking to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Obergefell holds that the 14th Amendment requires all states to grant licenses for same-sex marriages and recognize same-sex marriages carried out in other states.

Conservatives were hopeful last year when the Supreme Court reviewed an appeal by Kim Davis, a former clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, who, a decade ago, would not sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples.

In November 2025, the court rejected Davis’s challenge to Obergefell without comment.

Opponents of same-sex marriage had held out hope because three Supreme Court justices who dissented in Obergefell still serve on the high court.

In his 2015 dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts said policy-based arguments for same-sex marriage might have been “compelling,” but the legal arguments were not.

Roberts described the court majority as “five lawyers” who shut down the debate, “stealing this issue from the people.”

Faust told The Epoch Times that the decision has led to sweeping changes to the law and society.

“Obergefell is one of the biggest catalysts of child harm that we have seen in law,” Faust said.

Proponents, on the other hand, say Obergefell supports equality and has had a positive effect on society by allowing gay people to participate in the institution of marriage.

Christy Mallory, interim executive director of the Williams Institute at the University of California–Los Angeles School of Law, previously said, “Marriage equality has significantly benefited the lives and well-being of same-sex couples, their families, and the communities where they live.”

A June 2025 report by the Williams Institute states that more than 591,000 same-sex couples have gotten married since Obergefell and that almost 300,000 children younger than 18 in the United States are now being raised by married same-sex couples.

Tough Fight Ahead

Before the Greater Than campaign launched, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel John Bursch told The Epoch Times that Obergefell was not followed by the same kind of grassroots effort that followed Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion nationwide. Unlike Obergefell, Roe was overturned in 2022, which returned authority to individual states to regulate abortion.

Bursch is a former solicitor general of Michigan and represented conservative states before the Supreme Court in 2015, when the justices heard oral arguments in Obergefell.

It will take many years of that same kind of hard work to persuade people that the one man-one woman definition of marriage is best for children and families before the Supreme Court “will have the appetite to revisit Obergefell,” Bursch said.

Congress also codified the Obergefell decision in 2022, underscoring the importance of public opinion.

Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver, who represented Davis and whose group is a member of Greater Than, said he remains optimistic.

He said it is “just a matter of time before Obergefell gets overturned.”

Staver told The Epoch Times that Obergefell’s holding that having a mom and a dad is totally irrelevant to the well-being of children “goes against everything that we know, from empirical studies to just common sense.”

According to Gallup, support for the conservative position on marriage has been declining since the 1990s and lost majority support in about 2011. Analysts have pointed to multiple reasons for changing opinions in recent years.

A 2018 study by Hye-Yon Lee and Diana C. Mutz suggests that public support for same-sex marriage has increased because Americans are interacting more with gay people, religiosity is declining, and education levels are increasing.

Authors in the Annual Review of Sociology reviewed a long list of studies and said in 2019 that it was unclear whether changes in public attitudes on the issue “typically precede laws or vice versa.”

Robert Weissberg, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois, was more skeptical, even though he said he supports overturning Obergefell “in the abstract sense.” He told The Epoch Times that he views the cause as “hopeless” because it is politically infeasible.

“The left has weaponized stigma,” and gay people have become a very important political constituency, he said.

National Association of Scholars President Peter W. Wood, former anthropology professor at Boston University, said it may be difficult to “unwind norms that have been established” but that taking away gay marriage “is the right thing to do for ... society to survive.” The association takes no position on the Greater Than campaign, according to him.

Scientific Evidence

A spokesperson for GLAAD, formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, dismissed the Greater Than campaign as “failed,” telling The Epoch Times that it is “filled with verifiable lies.”

An oft-cited Cornell University meta-analysis from 2015 states that 75 out of 79 studies concluded that children of gay or lesbian parents end up no worse than other children.

Its authors defended the 75 studies, saying that despite small sample sizes and the lack of a control group, they provide “the best available knowledge about child adjustment.”

Faust said in a Substack article about the meta-analysis that the 75 “no difference” studies have methodological flaws such as small sample sizes that in any other domain of social science would disqualify them.

The few studies that actually employ robust methodology show that those “no difference” conclusions turn into “massive detrimental differences,” she told The Epoch Times.

Faust said that a 2015 report by the Rev. Paul Sullins, a retired sociology professor at the Catholic University of America, found that once category errors were corrected in some of the studies, the children deemed “indistinguishable” demonstrated clear disadvantages.

Sam Dorman contributed to this report.