Marriage Equality is back in conservatives' crosshairs as new coalition targets SCOTUS decision

A newly formed nationwide coalition of conservative organizations is mounting a coordinated campaign to overturn marriage equality in the United States, reviving arguments that advocates say the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a decade ago and reframing them around a familiar and ludicrous claim: that recognizing same-sex marriages harms children.

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The effort was first reported by the conservative outlet The Daily Signal, which until recently was officially affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, the authors of Project 2025.

A coordinated effort to revisit Obergefell

The outlet described a coalition of national and state-based groups organizing to challenge Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry nationwide. According to The Daily Signal, the coalition includes organizations such as Them Before Us, the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, the Colson Center for Biblical Worldview, the Ruth Institute, CatholicVote, and the Christian Medical and Dental Association, alongside a network of state-level family policy groups.

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The campaign debuted alongside a professionally produced video that seeks to recast marriage equality not as a civil rights milestone but as a policy failure that, its speakers argue, privileges adult equality over children’s needs.

“Marriage is actually the most basic institution of human civilization,” one speaker says as the video opens. Another claims that Obergefell was “built as a win for adult equality” but “created inequality for children,” asserting that recognizing same-sex couples under marriage law “made our children less than.”

Across the video, speakers insist that marriage policy should be centered on what they describe as children’s “natural right” to a married, biological mother and father. Redefining marriage, they argue, has made mothers and fathers “optional” in parenting law. Inclusive ideas about family are dismissed as platitudes—“love makes a family”—that, according to the speakers, obscure what they say is real harm.

“You redefine marriage. You have just destroyed the house,” one speaker says. Another contends that social science proves children do best only in homes headed by married, biological parents of different sexes, declaring, “Moms don’t dad and dads don’t mom.”

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The video culminates with a refrain that now anchors the coalition’s message: “Children are greater than equal. And it’s time we fought for their rights.”

If Obergefell were overturned, legal experts note, the Respect for Marriage Act would still require states and the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages lawfully performed elsewhere. But states could stop issuing new marriage licenses to same-sex couples, creating a patchwork system that would once again leave families—and particularly their children—vulnerable to political shifts.

To LGBTQ+ legal advocates, the campaign is less a new legal theory than a recycled political strategy. Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of constitutional law practice at Lambda Legal, said the coalition’s composition and rhetoric are strikingly familiar.

“These are the same opponents of marriage equality that lost the first round,” Loewy told The Advocate in an interview. “There’s nothing about this coalition that is surprising. If you look at who is participating in it, they are the same people who have been funding the anti-marriage movement from the get-go.”

Loewy said the coalition’s renewed focus on children mirrors arguments courts across the country rejected in the years leading up to Obergefell. “This notion that it’s going to be framed around children’s rights is really a retread of the exact same arguments they tried to make when we were challenging marriage exclusions in the first place,” she said. What courts ultimately focused on, she noted, were not hypothetical harms but the real, documented injuries suffered by children whose parents were denied the legal protections of marriage.

“Extremists are choosing division”

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said the coalition’s effort reflects a broader political agenda that is disconnected from the realities facing most Americans.

“Millions of Americans wake up every day focused on the same simple goals: putting food on the table, keeping their families healthy, and exercising their freedoms,” Robinson told The Advocate in a statement. “Instead of meeting those real needs, extremists are choosing division: working overtime to tear communities apart and to use the machinery of government to interfere in the most personal parts of our lives.”

Robinson said the renewed push against marriage equality ignores both settled law and public opinion. “Anyone who cares about equality should be clear-eyed about this agenda,” she said. “The facts are not in dispute: marriage equality is the law of the land, more than two-thirds of Americans support equality, and love is love.”

Yet, Robinson added, opponents of marriage equality continue to focus on controlling family life. “These extremists remain obsessed with dictating who families can be, how people can live, and what kind of love matters,” she said. “They seem threatened by the simple truth that joy, dignity, and love exist in many forms, and that none of them diminish anyone else.”

What the data show about LGBTQ+ families

A broad body of peer-reviewed research spanning more than three decades has found that children raised by gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than those raised by heterosexual parents. A comprehensive review of the scholarly literature conducted by Cornell University identified 79 relevant studies; 75 concluded there were no differences in children’s well-being. The few outlier studies reporting negative outcomes have been widely criticized for methodological flaws, including misclassifying children who experienced family disruption as having been “raised” by same-sex parents.

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A major 2024 report from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that approximately 2.6 million LGBTQ+ adults are parenting children under 18, and that nearly 5 million children in the U.S. are being raised by an LGBTQ parent. The report draws on multiple large federal and population-based datasets, including the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

Far from depicting a marginal or hypothetical population, the Williams Institute found that LGBTQ parents are deeply embedded in the nation’s family landscape. About 14 percent of same-sex couples are parenting children, rising to 18 percent among married same-sex couples, and LGBTQ parents are disproportionately likely to be raising adopted, foster, or stepchildren—children who often come from the child welfare system.

Public opinion also runs counter to the coalition’s goals. A Gallup poll conducted a decade after Obergefell found that roughly 68 percent of U.S. adults support legal recognition of marriage equality. At the same time, the poll showed the largest partisan divide Gallup has recorded on the issue, with support remaining high among Democrats and independents while dropping sharply among Republicans.

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“Protecting children is not a zero-sum game”

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ+ Rights, said the coalition’s rhetoric misrepresents both the Supreme Court’s reasoning and the lived reality of families already raising children.

“As the Supreme Court recognized in Obergefell, children deserve the same legal protections and stability regardless of whether their parents are same-sex or different-sex,” Minter told The Advocate. “This campaign will harm children in same-sex parent families while doing nothing to protect other families.”

“Protecting children is not a zero-sum game—taking rights away from some children will not benefit others,” he added. Minter described the campaign as “a blatant attempt to use children to further an anti-gay agenda.”

Loewy emphasized that while a small number of justices have openly called for reconsidering marriage equality precedents, the legal pathway to overturning Obergefell remains narrow. She pointed to the Supreme Court’s recent refusal to revive former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’s challenge as evidence that not every objection can reopen settled law.

“A person challenging marriage equality has to actually have standing to do it,” Loewy said. “It’s not just, ‘We don’t like this rule. Please revisit it.’”