“Love is love” has become a conversation-stopper. Challenge it and you risk being cast as an enemy of affection itself. Yet the claim collapses the moment the question shifts from private emotion to public purpose.

In this conversation with Dave Pellowe, Katy Faust grants the premise that same-sex couples can love and commit as deeply as opposite-sex ones — then insists that is not what marriage law has ever been about. The real stake, she contends, is whether children have a recognised right to the mother and father who created them.

Katy Faust begins by conceding the emotional force of the slogan. Gay couples, she says, have the same capacity to love and commit as heterosexual couples. “You’re totally right. I completely agree.” The disagreement is not about the intensity of adult feelings. It is about what government has a legitimate interest in regulating.

The public purpose of marriage, Faust argues, is to connect men and women when they make babies so that those children grow up with both of the people responsible for their existence. When fathers disappear, children suffer and society absorbs the cost in higher rates of incarceration, poverty, suicide and homelessness. Fatherlessness, she notes, has moved from roughly 5 per cent of out-of-wedlock births in the 1960s to close to 40 per cent overall, and far higher in some communities. In the United States, only about 13 per cent of African-American children reach high-school graduation having lived only with their married mother and father.

Marriage, on this view, is not an official stamp on adult romance. It is the social technology that stacks the odds in a child’s favour by delivering the three staples of a child’s social-emotional diet: mother, father and stability. Once husbands and wives become optional, mothers and fathers become optional. Redefining marriage redefines parenthood.

Faust points to the American experience after the judicial redefinition of marriage. No government institution any longer affirms that children should, wherever possible, be raised by their mother and father. To say so is now treated as discriminatory. If marriage is no longer about children, she asks, what is? The result is the legal normalisation of mother- and fatherlessness.

Dave Pellowe draws the Australian parallel. The Stolen Generations remain a source of national regret precisely because removing children from their parents, even with claimed good intentions, inflicted lasting harm. Today’s policy trajectory risks creating another version of the same injury — this time by treating biological parents as optional in the name of adult equality. Once the law declares that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, the next steps follow: demands that insurance cover surrogacy for male couples, and judicial willingness to place two mothers on a birth certificate because “equality” requires it.

The distinction Faust insists upon is simple and sharp. Same-sex and opposite-sex couples are equal in adult emotion and commitment. They are not equal in what they offer a child. Heterosexual sex produces a unique relationship between a child and its two biological parents. Law that treats the two arrangements as identical erases the child’s interest in that relationship.

There are limitations. The discussion is framed largely in American data and post-Obergefell experience; Australian legal and cultural details receive less granular treatment. Causal claims linking fatherlessness to every major social ill are presented strongly and would benefit from careful empirical scrutiny. Yet the central logic is coherent: if the state’s only interest in marriage is adult feelings, then there is no principled reason to stop at two people, or even at romantic relationships. The moment children drop out of the definition, their claim on their own parents loses institutional protection.

Faust’s case is not that same-sex couples cannot love. It is that love between adults is not the public purpose of the institution, and that redefining the institution has downstream consequences for the next generation. Readers who care about children’s rights more than adult affirmation will find the argument hard to dismiss lightly.