Obergefell: A Decade of Redefinition

Marriage wasn't the only casualty

How did we get here?

It has been ten years since the Supreme Court of the United States imposed homosexual marriage on the nation through the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. While the legal argument twisted both due process and equal protection beyond recognition, the real driver behind Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion wasn’t law but sentimentality. His reasoning leaned heavily on emotional appeal, citing “dignitary wounds” and focusing on Mr. Obergefell’s personal story. In Kennedy’s words, “by statute, they [Obergefell and his dying partner] must remain strangers even in death,” a “state-imposed tragedy” which would be “hurtful for the rest of time.”

There was barely a mention of the needs of children, family structure, or the vast historical and anthropological weight behind man-woman marriage. No acknowledgment of the massive social transformation this ruling would unleash. Sex had long been separated from marriage in the popular imagination, but this ruling now distanced marriage from procreation. This was not about what is best for society but about the feelings and desires of adults.

You may remember the glib patter which was repeated to anyone who warned against tinkering with so profound an institution as marriage: If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get one, or love is love. Justice Kennedy himself assured the nation that legalizing homosexual marriage presented “no risk of harm” to anyone. Today, advocates of the decision happily report that life goes on. See? Everything is just fine. But they wilfully ignore how sin metastasizes. When a society blesses what God calls abominable, there will be consequences—deep, far-reaching ones.

And a lot of the warnings have come true.

The clash with religious freedom was immediate. Despite Kennedy’s assurance that those with any objections would not be punished for their stance, persecution came fast. Just days after the ruling, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis was fined and jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples. In Colorado, baker Jack Phillips has been hounded for years by activists weaponizing the law to punish him for his convictions. You can probably think of other instances.

And the ripple effects haven’t stopped at marriage. As Jennifer Roback Morse has rightly pointed out: “If the sex of the body doesn’t matter for marriage, it doesn’t matter on the sporting field, or in the locker room or in the prisons.” The transgender delusion flows directly from the same ideological well. If gender doesn’t matter in one of the most foundational human institutions, why should it matter anywhere else?

Meanwhile, Justice Kennedy’s insistence that homosexuals would benefit from the “stability” that marriage brings has not panned out. When Elton John and David Furnish dismissed their adultery as an “open marriage”, it’s clear the image of a “Modern Family” with clean-cut gay dads living out traditional values was always a PR fantasy. Instead, the moral expectations of marriage continue to be diluted. And far too many Christians and conservatives have made peace with the new normal.

Consider also journalist Glenn Greenwald. Once celebrated on the left, he is now embraced by many on the MAGA right, largely for his role in breaking Edward Snowden’s surveillance story and defending free speech. But after footage surfaced of him engaged in debauchery with a male prostitute, the outrage was not over the sin—but over the invasion of his privacy. He himself stated that he is “not ashamed of anything” he does in his personal life. Very few condemned the sin or the fact that Greenwald, who adopted children with his late “husband”, is raising those children in a profoundly broken home.

Which brings us to the voiceless victims of this sexual revolution: children. By redefining marriage around the wishes of adults rather than what children deserve, the state has blessed unions that are sterile by design. This, in turn, has fueled demands for taxpayer-funded fertility services and commercial surrogacy—treating children not as gifts to be received, but as products to be acquired, often at the cost of severing them from one or both biological parents.

A screenshot from Today’s story about two men procuring a child using a surrogate mother.

At the same time, the culture’s obsession with affirming every sexual identity has twisted adoption policies beyond recognition. In one horrifying case, a same-sex couple who had adopted children was later convicted of trafficking them to pedophiles—something they had even boasted about. Meanwhile, faithful Christian foster parents have lost children for refusing to affirm a child’s self-declared transgender identity.

This is the crack in the door that we should be aiming to prise wide open: the needs of children. If you start with what is needed to form a healthy child and work back from there, you will arrive at a God’s design for family: a married mother and father who stay together for life. Andrew Walker, a Southern Baptist professor who joined the fight against the redefinition of marriage back in 2011, acknowledged how much was lost in the Obergefell decision. But he believes that the children’s rights movement is gaining momentum. I could point to the backlash against boys playing in girls’ sports, and the recent Supreme Court decision allowing Michigan parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ curriculum, as evidence that he may be on to something.

Of course, marriage was damaged in no-fault divorce, the rise of single parenting and other changes. But genderless marriage has taken it to a whole new level. While activists downplayed the slippery slope–“they just want to be married”– it’s obvious to anyone who observes with honesty that messing with marriage has cost society greatly. Marriage has only one definition. Expanding it has opened the door to all kinds of evil. It could be that Americans are starting to see this, with support for same-sex marriage reportedly waning.

Nevertheless, Dr. Walker believes that reality will always “testify to truth of marriage as it was meant to be.” We are playing a long game. As he says, it is the devil’s weakness to always be hurrying. “The present tense is a cruel master. Christians should never calibrate their moral concerns based on favorability or popularity. History is full of unpredictable contingencies. I believe history will vindicate our arguments when all is said and written.”

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