How a Former Blogger Became the New Leader of America's Anti-Gay Marriage Movement
Katy Faust is the leader of the Greater Than Campaign, a new effort of at least 47 anti-LGBTQ groups to overturn Obergefell.
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In September 2025, the National Conservatism Conference hosted a meeting of America’s biggest right wing players in Washington, D.C. Some notable attendees included the Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) president Kristen Waggoner, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, and U.S. representatives and government officials, including Tulsi Gabbard and Sebastian Gorka.
On the evening of its second day, Katy Faust took the stage: “We, as a country, have to do what no other country has dared. We retake marriage on behalf of children. … A massive coalition spearheaded by my nonprofit … aims to do exactly that,” Faust, the founder of Them Before Us—a 501(c)(3) whose goal is “defending children’s right to their mother and father”—told the crowd.
A video of her speech would later be uploaded to YouTube with the title: “How Obergefell Commodified Children.”
Four months later, and just two months after the Supreme Court rejected a case aimed at overturning Obergefell, Faust launched the Greater Than Campaign, a coalition of at least 47 anti-LGBTQ organizations united to reinvigorate the fight to end gay marriage.
Faust has advocated against gay marriage for over a decade, declaring in 2021 that she and her organization, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, “have a very modest goal of a total global takeover of all conversations around marriage and family.” Since entering the spotlight during the Obergefell v. Hodges case in 2015, she’s pushed her own vision of the anti-marriage equality movement.
“We think that children’s rights should supersede the desires, the agendas, the identities, the feelings of adults, and that requires that everybody, single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile conform to those fundamental rights,” Faust told Uncloseted Media. “When Obergefell passed … we centered something else. We centered adult validation and adult identity.”
While Faust’s rhetoric may sound less overtly hateful than that of others on the far-right, many of her policy goals are similar.
“[Her] rhetoric can be difficult to refute because she uses progressive rights language to advance a regressive, evangelical agenda,” says R.L. Stollar, a child liberation theologian and children’s rights advocate. “It sounds good on the surface, but it’s just sugar-coating. You have to look beneath the rhetoric at her policy ideas to understand the danger.”
Faust has been mentored, employed and thrust into the spotlight by well-connected leaders in America’s far-right Christian and anti-LGBTQ spaces. After facing numerous setbacks, the anti-marriage equality movement has anointed her as its leader and is following her strategies.
“There actually has not been any kind of organization or coordination,” Faust says. “I know you guys think that there’s some big right-wing bogeyman. There really never has been, but this is. This is the organized effort that you guys suspected existed, but really never had.”
“And everybody came together because we all understand that children are being victimized in this culture,” she says, adding that there are actually 100 organizations involved in the campaign and that they “just don’t have everyone listed on the website.”
Early Activism – AskTheBigot
Faust’s activism began in 2012 when she started an anonymous blog called AskTheBigot.
The blog’s stated mission is, in part, “to debunk the perception that those opposing gay marriage do so only because they are hateful, fearful (homophobic) or ignorant.”
In some of her posts, she argues that “opposite-sex parenting is ideal,” calls for Christians not to attend gay weddings because “to attend would certainly give the appearance of endorsement,” and speaks against gender transition.
After being doxxed by pro-LGBTQ bloggers in 2014, Faust decided to continue posting publicly. In a later article called “Thank You for Doxxing Me,” Faust writes that the incident “multiplied [her] platform a hundredfold.”
The Witherspoon Institute
Faust’s profile would be boosted by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank that has been influential in fighting gay marriage since its founding in 2003. Witherspoon’s founder and president helped lead a campaign by the National Organization for Marriage to artificially “raise the costs of identifying with gay marriage” by associating it with pedophilia and threats to children.
In the lead-up to Obergefell v. Hodges, Witherspoon published multiple articles by Faust in their journal, and Faust later said in an interview that she was mentored by the institute’s co-founder Robert George and executive director Ryan Anderson.
At Witherspoon, Faust got a job designing the teen version of CanaVox, a project of the institute that “hosts reading groups to study and discuss the beauty of marriage as one man, one woman, for life.” She also hosted CanaVox’s “Dear Katy” video series, where she answered questions from readers and viewers, advising them to not attend family members’ gay weddings and to teach their kids that “transgenderism is very similar to anorexia.”
When one viewer, Alice, asked about their teenage children’s friends coming out as bisexual, Faust said that “even if teens only experiment with same-sex foreplay, say with kissing, it can rewire their brain to develop a deeper inclination towards same-sex intimate activity. This experimentation is a slippery slope to high-risk sex.”
Faust Gains Notoriety
As Faust rose to greater notoriety, she began to be cited as an expert on the marriage debate. She wrote amicus briefs in cases litigating gay marriage, including Obergefell; got an op-ed in USA Today; and spoke against gay marriage in Australia and at the Taipei Marriage Rally in Taiwan.
ADF, the Christian legal group currently fighting to overturn Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, featured her in a panel and a video after discovering her articles for Witherspoon.
Using this momentum, she founded Them Before Us. Since launching in 2018, the group has submitted amicus briefs in multiple cases, including one opposing LGBTQ-inclusive birth certificates. They’ve also produced media aimed at turning public opinion against gay marriage, including a curriculum for equipping churches to “defend the rights of children.”
The group also pushes for anti-LGBTQ policies in the corporate space. Last year, they published a set of Human Resources guidelines for companies designed to exclude LGBTQ families. They recommend that companies refuse to cover artificial fertilization and gender-affirming care and deny parental benefits to gay couples, claiming that “same-sex couples can not furnish a child with the gender-diverse parenting that maximizes child development and satisfies the child’s longing for maternal and paternal love.”
The group continues to grow, earning over $900,000 in revenue in 2024. This was propelled by large donations from nonprofits like the Servant Foundation and National Christian Charitable Foundation, who fund other Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate groups like ADF and Family Research Council.
Personal Connections
Faust distinguishes herself from other anti-marriage equality activists with her softer rhetoric towards gay people, often crediting her friendlier tone to her own family connections. Her mother and father divorced when she was 10, after which her mother began a long-term relationship with another woman.
In the article that put her on ADF’s radar, Faust introduces herself as “the child of a loving gay parent” and says, “My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life.”
“It’s traumatic because your mother and father are not living in the same house anymore, and you’re only gonna get 50% of each one,” she says. “And thankfully, my mother and her partner had a lot of stability. I didn’t necessarily have that at my father’s house.”
Where Did Greater Than Come From?
Faust began pitching the campaign that would become Greater Than last June, presenting it as an alternative strategy to that of the far-right Christian legal group Liberty Counsel, who unsuccessfully represented Kim Davis last year in an effort to overturn Obergefell.
Unlike Liberty Counsel, Faust’s focus is on turning public opinion against gay marriage and passing state laws that could “create the kind of live issue that the justices could then rule on”—the same strategy used to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“It’s taking a cue from the anti-abortion movement,” says Peter Montgomery, research director at People for the American Way. “They built public support in red states to get laws passed that dramatically restricted or banned women’s access to abortion, knowing that then those laws would be challenged and would give the right-wing court a chance to overturn it.”
When the court declined to take up Liberty Counsel’s case, Faust wrote an op-ed arguing that the effort failed because Davis was the “wrong victim,” and the case was asking the “wrong question.”
“This is a problem that the marriage debate has had for a long time,” Faust says. “The reality is, adults are not victims of bad marriage policy—children are victims of bad marriage policy, and it is their perspective and their voice that needs to be central to the conversation.”
Other far-right groups seem to agree. Faust told the North Carolina Family Policy Council, “When I reached out to major national organizations, state level policy organizations, individual influencers, I’d say 90% said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s do it right now, and let’s do it with all our might.’”
Many members of the Greater Than campaign have expressed extreme anti-LGBTQ views. Focus on the Family is known for promoting conversion therapy and has described same-sex attraction as a “preventable and treatable condition,” and Liberty Counsel has said that gay people are “not controlled by reason,” but rather by “lust.”
“Their message and their mission is not my mission,” Faust says, adding that there’s “no way” she’s going to denounce them. “I am not there to approve of everything that they say, but everybody in that coalition believes that children have a right to their mother and father.”
What Does the Research Say?
One of Faust and Greater Than’s core arguments to overturn Obergefell is that same-sex parenting is harmful because children intuitively long for both motherly and fatherly love, which she claims are impossible for same-sex couples to provide.
“I had been working with kids for 20 years when the gay marriage debate started raging. … I have never yet met a kid that did not care whether or not their mother or father loved them or was in their life. At minimum they were curious,” she says. “That kind of loss or rejection or separation created a lifelong wound that they were still struggling to overcome.”
To prove this, she frequently cites the New Family Structures Study, a 2012 study by sociologist Mark Regnerus that was primarily funded by $700,000 in grants from the Witherspoon Institute.
“Good research is expensive,” says Faust.
The institute’s president at the time wrote that the study was designed to “settle the question in the forum of public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for society” and that he was “confident that the traditional understanding of marriage will be vindicated by this study.”
Since publication, the study’s results have been called into question by researchers. Marc Musick, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas-Austin, conducted a review of the study’s methodology and concluded that it “is fundamentally flawed … and should largely be disregarded.”
Other publications argue that the study’s methodology fails to control for childhood family instability and that most of the negative impacts it associates with same-sex parenting are actually attributable to that instability.
“Why do we cite Regnerus? Because he has really good methodology,” Faust says.
Faust also references work by sociologist Paul Sullins, whose work includes a retracted paper that claimed to demonstrate the success of conversion therapy.
There is a swath of research disputing her arguments: Comprehensive systematic reviews from the U.K. and Australia analyzing data from over 30 years have shown that parents’ sexual orientations are not a significant determining factor for the quality of a child’s development.
“We have already, in our international human rights standards, very clear standards that family means much more than just men and women, just this single type of family,” says Bia Galli, senior policy and advocacy advisor at Ipas, an international reproductive justice organization. “The distortion that if family is not like that, it will cause damage to children—this is complete nonsense and lacks completely scientific evidence.”
Co-opting Children’s Rights
Faust’s definition of children’s rights, which forms a rhetorical basis for Greater Than, is based on four principles: “Protect children’s right to life” by restricting abortion; “protect children’s right to be raised by their mother and father” by restricting same-sex marriage and parenting; “protecting bodies” from gender-affirming health care; and “protecting minds” from sex education in schools.
Faust’s definition differs from the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty ratified by all eligible U.N. member states except for the United States.
“Under this convention … states have to consider [children’s] evolving capacities to make these autonomous decisions about their futures, their sexual and reproductive health for example,” Galli says. “So these types of definitions are completely against those standards from international human rights law. It gives away their autonomy and puts them just under parental authority, even if it conflicts with their own views and opinions.”
Research has shown that gay couples are more likely than straight couples to adopt, and that foster care systems in the U.S. are severely overburdened. Because of this, advocates argue that restricting gay couples from parenting means that fewer children will have stable families.
“When you restrict families to a heterosexual nuclear family, then it cuts off so many avenues of connection and support for children,” says Stollar. “It is robbing them of the opportunity to join or participate in a family that might be very eager to protect and love that child and give them the elements that they need to thrive.”
Stollar says that the Christian far-right in the U.S. has historically opposed children’s rights movements. When Barack Obama pushed for the U.S. to ratify the U.N. convention in 2010, he was blocked by a coalition of Republican senators who signed a resolution opposing the treaty because of its restrictions on corporal punishment and its protections for sex ed and child religious freedom. That resolution was pushed by the Parental Rights Foundation, a right-wing Christian group founded by former ADF president and CEO Michael Farris.
“[The evangelical right] have been very successful and very zealous in opposing ratification of any children’s rights into law in the United States, so that alone causes me to have significant distrust towards [Faust’s] project,” Stollar says.
Stollar says that Faust’s argument works partly because there’s some truth to it in that children are frequently devalued and commercialized. But the solution, he says, isn’t attacking LGBTQ rights or abortion—it’s for children to be given the agency to advocate for their own needs.
“A healthy movement for children’s rights is going to acknowledge that children need two things: They need to be protected, and they also need to be liberated,” he says. “You have to have both. … If they’re just protecting children, which is what I think Faust is trying to do … then protection is gonna be counterproductive.”
Uncloseted Media was unable to reach Faust’s mother for comment. Her mother’s partner declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Spencer Macnaughton.
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This was an excellently reported story. For my full interview with Katy Faust--dropping Wednesday--subscribe to Uncloseted Media's YouTube page or follow "UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton," wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.youtube.com/@UnclosetedMedia
It must be very rewarding to spearhead a group whose primary goal is to make other people miserable. Gay people should have the same rights to seek happiness that everyone else has.