'Obergefell is next': Katy Faust tells Pray Vote Stand Summit gay marriage is in sights to overturn

'Do children benefit from their own mother and father or is a state-assigned stranger just as good?'

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Monday, September 28, 2026

Katy Faust believes the fight over same-sex marriage is far from over, and she's looking to the U.S. Supreme Court for the next major battle.

The conservative activist and founder of Them Before Us, a group that advocates for children’s rights in debates over marriage and family structure, told attendees at the Family Research Council’s annual Pray Vote Stand Summit that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, should be the next major Supreme Court precedent challenged.

“It took us 49 years to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Faust said during her speech at Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia. “Forty years is too long. Obergefell is not settled law. Obergefell is next.”

Focusing on Obergefell, Faust condemned both surrogacy and gay marriage, maintaining that when the Supreme Court “made husbands and wives optional in marriage, mothers and fathers became optional in parenthood” too. 

“Government has an interest in marriage because that is the one relationship that creates new life and that new life needs protection," she added. “The problem is that two men or two women cannot make a baby. So the law had to accomplish what biology prohibits: making two adults of the same sex parents of a child.

"So over the last 11 years, we have seen a radical overhaul of our understanding of what it means to be a parent. We have scrubbed the words mother and father from our parenthood statutes,” she lamented. 

Faust pointed to a law passed in New York state that replaced “the word mother with gestating parent and father with nongestating parent” as one example of this phenomenon: “Don’t blame [New York Gov.] Kathy Hochul for that. Gay marriage did that,” she said. 

“In the world of gay rights, just saying the word mother and father in parenthood statutes or putting mother and father on a birth certificate looks like discrimination,” Faust lamented. “Some families don’t have a mother and father, don’t you know? But that wasn’t enough. They needed equal access to children. The problem is that biology can never give them equal access to children. So they had to create new pathways to acquire those babies. Biology wouldn’t do it and they felt like adoption was too cumbersome.” 

Faust described marriage as “God’s best delivery system for child protection,” declaring that “We have to take it back.”

She characterized the Obergefell ruling as a declaration that “Mothers and fathers, men and women are optional in the project of the family” as well as a decision from the justices to “overrule Genesis.”

“Eleven years later, Genesis is still winning,” Faust proclaimed.

Faust also outlined what she described as a long-term strategy to challenge Obergefell. She discussed her efforts with a new coalition established by Them Before Us called Greater Than, which works to “retake marriage on behalf of children.”

Faust vowed to challenge the Obergefell decision by creating a “credible judicial strategy to move up the chain as it relates to child-centric policy.” She said the question that will go before the court is: “Do children benefit from their own mother and father or is a state-assigned stranger just as good?”

“The answer will be  'No,'” she declared. “Kids need their mom and dad. Not just from a religious perspective but a natural law perspective based on 100 years of Supreme Court precedents elevating the natural parent-child relationship and based on 400 years of common law going back to the pre-Colonial times. When we make this a matter of child defense, we’re going to play a whole different game.” 

Faust identified another part of her strategy as working to “change public opinion.”

She added, “I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s not enough to overturn bad Supreme Court precedent. You have to convince the American public that it’s good that it has been overturned.” 

Public opinion polling has consistently revealed majority support for same-sex marriage among the American public. Polls from both Gallup and the Public Religion Research Institute earlier this year found that 65% of respondents supported same-sex marriage. The 65% figure marks a decline from the record high of 69% in the Public Religion Research Institute poll and 71% in the Gallup poll. 

By contrast, a July poll from The Economist/YouGov measured support for same-sex marriage at 54%. The Economist/YouGov polls have consistently shown lower support for same-sex marriage, with only a narrow majority (51%) supporting it in May. 

Faust remains optimistic that advocacy alongside popular Catholic and Protestant influencers, including Frank Turek, Allie Beth Stuckey and Abby Johnson, will help change public opinion on same-sex marriage: “We are going to make sure that … all Americans know that natural marriage leads to child protection but gay marriage results in child victimization. And we are not people that [victimize] children; we are people that protect children.” 

At the conclusion of her speech, Faust assured that efforts to overturn Obergefell will include churches. “We have materials coming out for both sides of the tyber — Protestants and Catholics — because we don’t necessarily have a shared tradition but we have a shared obligation, and that is to defend the defenseless.” 

“We are the people that protect the fatherless. We do not manufacture the fatherless,” she maintained.