Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage Harms Children and Society

by Glenn T. Stanton | July 15, 2025 | Family

As June marked the 10th anniversary of the legal de-sexing of marriage through the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision, all citizens of good will should consider how this ruling has impacted humanity through children.

We must recognize that the case for same-sex marriage was always about the same-sex family. No one who advocated for this radical redefinition of marriage and family ever considered this was just about adults. It was always about the kinds of homes children in same-sex families would grow up in and how redefining marriage would change family itself.

The journal First Things has a very helpful, short essay explaining just how de-sexing marriage and family by removing the essential male/female binary has harmed children. It is authored by John Bursch, vice president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom and argued against Obergefell before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015.

Bursch explains, “Marriage, as I argued, has always served a vital function: binding children to their biological mothers and fathers whenever possible. The government’s interest in marriage has never been about adult companionship.”

This is because “the state’s interest in marriage has always been about creating a stable environment in which children can know and be raised by the two people who co-created them.”

That biological, emotional and societal connection serves as the foundation for all civilizations, as Aristotle long ago explained, is not a private preference, but a public good. Obergefell radically transformed marriage and the family into an adult-centric institution based on peculiar adult sexual desires and feelings, claiming it as a fundamental constitutional right. Bursch holds this “effectively eras[ed] the longstanding understanding of marriage as child-centered.”

An examination of the Latin root of the word matrimony or mātrimōnium establishes this ancient and universal meaning of marriage. Mater-monium is the recognition of and provision for the maternal needs, protection and care of mother and child by the father. This is what marriage has been across human history and diverse cultures for profound reasons.

In contrast, Bursch notes,

Most significantly, children are increasingly being brought into the world through practices that intentionally separate them from one or both biological parents, such as anonymous sperm or egg donation and commercial surrogacy. In other words, the law, influenced by Obergefell’s logic, now often prioritizes the desires of adults over the needs of children to know their mother and father.

Every child that same-sex families include are intentionally, by design, denied the very mother or father whose DNA and maternal or paternal parentage these children share, simply to meet experimental adult wishes. Further, these separations a created through the exchange of money. This is always unjust.

Bursch adds, “A just society must be willing to ask hard questions: not only, ‘What do adults want?’ but, “What do children need?” Modern society frequently focuses on the wrong question. We must confront the reality that children need their mother and father, together, whenever possible.”

Bursch ends his important essay with this essential and prophetic observation: “Obergefell may be the law, but it is not the end of the conversation.”

He compels us “to advocate for an understanding of marriage that serves the common good, one that remembers that every child begins with a mother and a father, and that society has an obligation to support that connection wherever possible.”

This is precisely why Focus on the Family will continue to work hard, and encourage others, to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges – so that marriage and family are returned to the rightful understanding of being about mothers, fathers and their children.

Afterall, there is no tomorrow for humanity without this essential societal good.

Image from Shutterstock.