When a society decides that adult romantic preferences override a child’s need for his or her own mother and father, the consequences do not remain theoretical. Katie Faust, founder of Them Before Us, contends that the 2015 Obergefell decision did not simply expand marriage; it opened the door to commercial surrogacy on a scale that treats children as acquired goods and mothers as rented biological functions.

In this conversation with Seth Gruber she examines the social-science data on family structure, the elevated risks associated with unrelated adults in the home, and the ideological pressure that, in her view, forces researchers and institutions to deny what the evidence has long shown. The episode is worth attention because the same arguments are now shaping policy debates well beyond the United States

Katie Faust’s central claim is straightforward: children possess a pre-political right to their mother and father, grounded in natural law, common-law tradition, Supreme Court precedent and decades of social-science research. Same-sex marriage, she argues, required the law to treat two men or two women as the equivalent of a child’s own parents. That legal fiction, she says, has accelerated commercial surrogacy and third-party reproduction—what she calls “big fertility.”

She is careful to frame the safety argument around relatedness rather than sexual orientation alone. Biological fathers living with their own children are statistically the safest men in a child’s life. Unrelated men—whether a mother’s boyfriend, a stepfather, or a same-sex partner—are associated with markedly higher rates of abuse and more severe forms of abuse. Faust notes that this pattern holds across heterosexual and same-sex households; the common factor is the presence of an unrelated adult. She criticises the base-rate fallacy used by some advocates (including, in her view, Tim Tebow) who cite the absolute number of biological-father abusers while ignoring the far higher rate among non-biological men.

Faust also points to the instrumentalising logic inherent in surrogacy. When adults purchase eggs, rent wombs and selectively reduce pregnancies, women and children become means rather than ends. She recounts public statements by high-profile same-sex parents who chose egg donors for aesthetic reasons and insisted on caesarean deliveries because they did not want children “coming out of a vagina.” These examples, she suggests, illustrate a broader objectification that can extend beyond the reproductive marketplace.

On the research side, Faust observes that sociologists across the political spectrum once agreed that children fare best with their married biological parents in a low-conflict home. Once same-sex parenting entered the debate, that consensus fractured. She attributes the shift less to new evidence than to social and professional pressure: researchers who maintain the older findings risk isolation, while those who declare “love is all that matters” retain acceptance. The result, in her phrase, is that “sodomy changes science.”

The conversation is not purely diagnostic. Faust and Gruber argue that persuasion alone will not reverse the trend. Those who treat children as objects, they contend, respond to power rather than argument. Christians and conservatives are therefore urged to prioritise the defence of children’s rights over personal comfort, even at the cost of social friction. Faust’s Greater Than campaign and Them Before Us organisation are presented as practical vehicles for that work.

Limitations are worth noting. The episode relies heavily on Faust’s interpretation of existing studies and selected case examples; listeners should verify the specific statistics and source papers independently. The discussion is conducted within a Christian framework and assumes the moral priority of children’s rights over adult autonomy—an assumption not shared by all participants in the broader debate. Reputational claims about individuals and media outlets should also be checked against primary sources before republication.

What remains valuable is the insistence that family structure is measurable, that relatedness carries protective weight, and that legal equality of adult relationships does not automatically produce equal outcomes for children. Those points survive even if one rejects Faust’s theological framing.