On Jan. 28, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Them Before Us led the announcement of the “Greater Than” campaign, an effort to repeal marriage equa
SPLC Hatewatch:
On Jan. 28, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Them Before Us led the announcement of the “Greater Than” campaign, an effort to repeal marriage equality. The campaign represents an alliance of at least a dozen anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups and other allied organizations to promote the debunked claim that “gay marriage resulted in child victimization.”1 In recent months, Katy Faust, president and founder of Them Before Us, has pushed a rhetorical strategy to reinvigorate discredited social scientists and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologues that were rejected by courts during the 2010s legal fights over marriage equality. The Greater Than campaign’s reliance on falsehoods derived from anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience and conspiracy theories undermines its claims to represent what’s best for children and families. “We need to change public opinion,” Faust said in a video posted to the campaign website. “No longer are people going to think about marriage just as a vehicle of adult fulfillment or a tool of adult validation. No, natural marriage is about child protection, and gay marriage resulted in child victimization. And we’re going to make sure that everybody understands that those two things go hand in hand.”2
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A marketing strategy to reframe marriage equality
The Greater Than campaign implies that LGBTQ+ people have created a situation in which they are legally treated “greater than” children. On its campaign website, Them Before Us states: “If you are tired of seeing children ignored, victimized, and treated as ‘less than’, it is time to join us in taking a stand.”3 The campaign is a new way to inject the dangerous myth that LGBTQ+ people are harmful to children back into the public consciousness, after opponents of marriage equality lost the public policy fight in 2015 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In a video posted to the Them Before Us Substack, Faust says, “Whatever you want to do in your private life — fine. Don’t touch the kids. But we will not be able to achieve that until we overturn Obergefell.”4 In a Feb. 10 interview with anti-LGBTQ+ speaker and activist Frank Turek, Faust suggested that the campaign was a marketing strategy to shift public opinion. “If we have learned anything from the demise of Roe, it is not enough to overturn bad Supreme Court decisions,” Faust said. “We have to change public opinion.”5
To that end, Faust indicated that she was using hard-right influencers to help shape the narrative. “I have these amazing conservative spokesmen, influencers who are on board with me,” she told Turek. “They’ve been in working group meetings, Steve Deace and Delano Squires and Jack Posobiec and Heidi St. John, among a variety of others. And what are we going to do? […] We are going to train America to help them understand the direct connection between gay marriage and child victimization, and natural marriage and child protection.”6 [...] The three reports were the discredited 2012 “New Family Structures Study” authored by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus; a 2015 study authored by anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Ruth Institute researcher Paul Sullins; and a 2013 study by Canadian economist Douglas Allen, who testified in court in 2014 that “without repentance,” LGBTQ+ people would go to hell.14
Selective amplification of social science that fits the anti-LGBTQ+ ideology while discounting or denying contradictory evidence has been a common strategy of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups for decades. The SPLC has previously reported how anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups use pseudoscience, including studies with faulty or questionable methodologies, to promote public policies and litigation that restrict LGBTQ+ people’s freedoms, access to healthcare and protections from discrimination. Faust wasn’t the first to attempt to revitalize these debunked claims about gay families. In 2024, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Focus on the Family claimed Regnerus provided “reliable data” that lesbian and gay families “are shown to markedly hinder” child development.15 Contrary to hate groups’ claims, a robust body of scientifically sound literature “consistently shows that LGBQ adults are just as capable and efficient at parenting children as their cisgender heterosexual counterparts” and that “children of sexual minority parents, though exposed to unique experiences, perform and develop at similar rates as children with heterosexual parents,” according to the American Psychological Association.16
SPLC’s Hatewatch has a solid report on how anti-LGBTQ+ extremist hate group Greater Than, led by Them Before Us founder Katy Faust, uses pseudoscience-laden arguments à la the discredited Regnerus Study to justify the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges in the name of “child protection.”









