Southern Baptist influencer Al Mohler is part of a new national campaign to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, alleging gay rights are bad for children.
The “Greater Than” campaign announced this week says it is “a coalition of parents, students, researchers, think tanks, influencers and citizens who are willing to state the self-evident but costly truth: Children need, deserve, and have a right to their mother and father. Marriage is and always has been the most effective tool to secure that right.”
The 2015 court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was not about children but about the rights of same-sex couples to have legal protections. The court ruling was the culmination of several cases that had worked through lower courts, some focusing on the terminal illnesses and subsequent deaths of same-sex partners — when the surviving partners were not allowed hospital access or death certificate access.
The 2015 court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was not about children but about the rights of same-sex couples to have legal protections.
What Obergefell did was wipe away the patchwork of state laws on same-sex marriage and legal rights and create a national standard. Conservatives — especially evangelicals — have fought the last decade to overturn the court ruling and have not succeeded. Last year, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting adopted a resolution calling for the overturn of Obergefell, among a constellation of other conservative policy items.
Publicity for the “Greater Than” campaign says the movement is about “justice and protecting the vulnerable.”
“We simply recognize that the truly vulnerable are children — those harmed when their rights are sacrificed in service of adult desires,” the group’s website says. “We are willing to fight for them, personally and politically, because they cannot fight for themselves.”
The campaign has three goals:
- “A judicial and policy strategy that centers children’s needs.”
- “Changing public opinion so Americans understand the link between natural marriage and child protection.”
- “A church transformed into a child-centered fighting force.”
In a promotional video, Mohler declares marriage equality “harms children in virtually every way imaginable.”
The campaign’s name — “Greater Than” — is a way of one-upping the common language of “marriage equality” for full inclusion. The tagline says, “Children are greater than equal.”
The campaign’s logo features the mathematical symbol for “greater than” in yellow on a blue background — in direct contrast to the Human Rights Campaign’s logo, which is an equals sign in yellow on a blue background.
The new campaign was organized by a coalition of 47 groups, many related to Focus on the Family. It includes Family Research Council, American Family Association, Colson Center for Christian Worldview, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and the Danbury Institute.
While assertions that same-sex marriage harms children are common among evangelicals, there is no scientific research documenting that view. Instead, “numerous studies have shown that the children of female same-sex couples fare as well or better than children of different-sex couples, and numerous studies show the same for male same-sex couples,” according to Daniel Villarreal of LGBTQ Nation.
National research published by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law shows only 18% of LGBTQ people, about 2.57 million adults, are parenting children under the age of 18 in their households. The study also found about 14% of same-sex couples (167,000 couples) and almost one in five married same-sex couples (18% or 119,000 couples) are parenting minors in their homes.
“Among parents, same-sex couples adopt (21%), foster (4%) and have stepchildren (17%) at significantly higher rates than different-sex couples (3%, 0.4%, 6%). Approximately 35,000 same-sex couples parenting minors have adopted, and 6,000 are fostering children. Notably, 24% of married same-sex couples have adopted a child compared to 3% of married different-sex couples.”
Blocking adoptions by same-sex couples has been a key policy priority of evangelicals in America too.
Last November, the Supreme Court declined to take a case that sought to overturn Obergefell.
Brian Henderson
Brian Henderson, executive director of Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, said he has a message for Mohler: “Before passing judgment, he should spend time with same-sex parents who are married, raising thriving children, providing stability, love and opportunity — often succeeding where many heterosexual couples have failed. If ‘greater than’ means anything at all, it would be Al Mohler and those who share his views setting aside ideology long enough to actually sit with the families AWAB knows and confront the reality that their narratives don’t hold up against lived experience.”
Hemant Mehta, who writes on Substack at “The Friendly Atheist,” challenged the hypocrisy of the new campaign.
“How can you possibly emphasize the harm of same-sex marriage to kids when the hypocrisy would be front and center? Hell, the Christian denominations many of these supporters belong to are hotbeds of sexual abuse where pastors have used their power to go after women. How can you say same-sex parents are automatically harming their kids when there are countless examples of wonderful, loving parents who provide far more for their children than so many straight couples?
“Incredibly, there doesn’t even appear to be anything on the website that explains what a mother or father specifically need to do for their kids that two same-sex parents can’t provide assuming they have the same resources. That’s because none of this is actually about the children. This is nothing more than repackaged bigotry and finding new ways to express anti-gay hate because the old ways no longer work.”