When Katy Faust began writing about the importance of married mothers and fathers for the well-being of children, she didn’t know it would launch her life’s most significant professional work.
It began as an online endeavor in 2012, with an anonymous blog where she posted her thoughts on cultural issues, such as the rising conversation surrounding the legality of same-sex “marriage.”
That was the year sitting President Barack Obama admitted he thought “same-sex couples should be able to get married.” Three years later, much faster than anticipated, the United States legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges. Under a 5–4 ruling based on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s assurance of “due process under the law,” everything changed.
Before the ruling, and soon after she started blogging, a popular gay writer “outed” Faust’s identity online. Her posts arguing for children’s right to a mother and father, which inconveniently countered the pro-gay “marriage” narrative, had gained traction and he did not like it. The writer tracked Faust’s IP address back to the church where her husband pastored, ultimately sharing the church and Faust’s name with his large audience.
Though she had never had a long-term plan for writing on these issues, Faust was not deterred. First, she took it up with her husband and church elders, willing to surrender her online work if they deemed it detrimental to the church. Instead, they urged her to continue speaking out in favor of children’s rights.
Ascribing to the protection of children’s rights always requires sacrifice from adults.
As she did, a fresh crop of related issues emerged as blog commenters challenged her with tough, essential questions she had not considered. Though her initial arguments centered around the harms of gay “marriage” for children, tangential issues like the harms of divorce, single parenthood by choice, surrogacy and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) quickly took stage right.
Faust told me she is thankful for the anonymous online years, as it allowed her to strengthen and articulate her arguments. In 2018, she formed the volunteer-run organization Them Before Us, a small non-profit intended to amplify these issues.
After a few years, the work expanded and required a more strategic plan for the future. In late 2021, she and one other person became paid employees. Today, there are five full-time staff and several part-time contractors, though Faust says they could use at least twenty staff to handle the large amount of work coming in.
“It got to the point where it was very clear that if we’re going to do what we need to do, which is be a global voice for children in both cultural matters and political matters, we needed to get very serious about growth and strategy,” said Faust in an interview with Humanum Review.
That plan went into motion and they’ve been growing ever since.
The Obergefell ruling is what led Faust toward the dream of doing something more than just sharing her own voice and opinion. In 2015, she had submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing against the legalization of same-sex “marriage” based on children’s rights. As the child of divorce and the daughter of a mother in a long-term relationship with another woman, people found her voice compelling. Though she did not intend to center her own experience, a casual remark on her blog propelled her story to the forefront.
“I was just like hey, you can support traditional marriage and believe that gay people have dignity, and you should be the first one to love and serve them, because that’s where I’m at with my mom—she’s amazing, and I love her,” says Faust.
In a USA Today op/ed at that time, Faust articulated her view, writing that the “other side” of the gay “marriage” debate is “populated by those who cannot speak, let alone organize themselves: children.”
But she could speak for them, as an advocate and a victim of the cultural mindset that “all you needs is love” for everything to be okay.
If “all you need is love,” says Faust, “that means moms are optional and you could swap her out for two men and there would be no impact on identity, development, sense of myself being a woman.”
Online commenters and even real-life acquaintances on platforms like Facebook have accused her of bigotry and hatred for gay people. In the early days, she would spend hours crafting social science-based arguments for the importance of traditional marriage, only for “friends” to write her off as a “homophobe” and sign off.
Even those who agreed with her stance feared guilt by association. Some business-owner friends quietly unfriended her on Facebook after she posted a positive Google review, worried online trolls would trace it back to them and sabotage their businesses with fake negative reviews.
She is willing to bear the consequences personally, but it was harder when they weighed on her children. Once, when a friend’s family discovered Faust’s positions, they barred her daughter from visiting their house because she made them feel “unsafe.”
“To me, I can handle it…but when they come for the people you love, it’s just so painful,” she says.
Even though Faust has developed a thick skin over the years, she admits there are still moments when hateful comments stick in her mind for days.
“The only antidote to that is you have to fear something more than you fear the mob, you know, fear something more than you fear the consequences of speaking up and that something cannot be a person,” Faust insists.
According to Faust and many others, children’s rights always trump adult desires. She said as much in a recent podcast interview with Jordan Peterson, one of many high profile interviews she’s done over the years.
“This is a worldview that does not discriminate between single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile. This is a world where if you’re gonna put children first, all adults must conform to those fundamental rights,” said Faust on the Peterson podcast.
A child’s right to his or her biological parents isn’t an opinion concocted out of thin air; it’s defined by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This document establishes the right of a child to preserve his or her biological identity, be cared for by their parents, and not be separated from them “against their will.”
According to the Convention, a child’s best interests are the “primary consideration,” and separating a child from one or both parents is counter to that. But, as Faust rightly noted in 2012, children can’t consent to a “will”—especially as infants.
She’s fighting a battle that the world has long ignored, given the tragic history of child rights. It was less than one hundred years ago that the United States established child labor laws and two hundred years ago that orphanages emerged to care for abandoned or vulnerable children. For most of human history, children have been viewed as sub-human, subject to abandonment, abuse, prostitution and trafficking.
In the book When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity, O.M. Bakke traces the social history of how early Christians were the first to recognize children as individuals with rights—protecting them from abortion, child prostitution, and neglect, while advocating for their moral education and inclusion in the life of the church. Much progress was made thanks to the work of Christians.
The degradation of children’s rights isn’t new—but it has been renamed and revised, sanctioned and encouraged for the twenty-first century. Abortion, surrogacy, and the eugenics of IVF, where “less than” embryos are bypassed for “the better”: these are modern, encouraged forms of child homicide, abuse and depravity. Today, children are exploited, abandoned, orphaned and killed in new and more culturally acceptable ways.
How did we get here? In the second half of the twentieth century, as the modern world embraced secularism, rejected virtue, and bought into subjective morality, children’s rights began to decline. Divorce and single parenthood rose. Fertility technology evolved. Becoming a parent for any reason—without regard to the well-being of children or consideration of their long-term formation—was embraced.
The data tells the destructive toll it took on children. Psychological studies about the impact of parental separation and broken homes were ignored in favor of adult happiness. If happiness was the pinnacle value, nothing else mattered. Children’s stability, identity, biology, and psychology became footnotes to cast aside, rather than the main points to consider when making decisions.
The new era of children’s rights abuses went astray with the breakdown of the natural family. Most people didn’t consider how legalizing gay “marriage” would lead to a watershed of children’s rights’ removal, but with that ruling, the dam was broken and adults again became the most important people in the room.
“For me, this all started with marriage, because that’s where I saw children being directly targeted, dismissed and attacked,” recalls Faust.
After commenters on her original anonymous blog site brought up other questions, about things like divorce, surrogacy and sperm donation, she began to address tangential issues as well.
“There were a lot of situations in those early years where I realized, do I really care about children? Do I really believe that they need both their mother and father?” she reflects. “We were going to forsake and ignore a lot of suffering children if we did not also address cohabitation and polygamy and surrogacy and a proper understanding of adoption and all of the reproductive technologies.”
By the time Obergefell hit, Faust had tackled many issues but turned her attention back to marriage during the Supreme Court hearings. She submitted an amicus brief, wrote an op/ed for USA Today
and got requests to speak on the issue around the world.
Much of this initial work was “response-driven,” without a long-term plan for organizing. Things moved quickly, as few others brought this perspective to such contentious legal and cultural conversations. Though her efforts to stop Obergefell fell short, it only energized her to continue speaking out on behalf of children.
Once gay “marriage,” was legal, a whole variety of deviant behaviors became mainstream. There was talk of polyamorous marriage, an explosion of transgenderism, more access to fertility technology for gay couples and fights with faith-based organizations over their religious liberty.
The “slippery slope” so many social conservatives had argued against aggressively came to fruition. In addition to the aforementioned, we began to see things like “Drag Queen” story hour at public libraries, children’s books devoted to “queer” identities and a destructive uprising of transgender ideology that caused irreversible harm to children and families.
It’s all related, according to Faust. When the foundation of natural law is thwarted through the embrace of gay unions, the fruit of such endeavors is toxic. And it is most harmful to the most vulnerable, children—who have no voice or rights when it comes to their parentage, family structure or surrounding environments.
Them Before Us aims to equip people to stand strong even under the threat of losing friends and social capital—to understand the connection between adult silence and child victimization.
Faust certainly walks the talk, stepping into controversy daily and bravely facing those who call her names, dox her church and unfairly malign her views.
She is here for the long haul, to educate and follow God’s call on her life.
Most people don’t understand that a child’s natural, biological family is a “concrete right to this that is verifiable through natural law,” says Faust. “That right is reinforced through social science, but it’s also recognized in the most widely ratified treaty in the world, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
The United States is one of only two countries that have not signed the treaty.
Even among Them Before Us supporters there are challenges in getting everyone on board. Many followers agree on one issue, but not others. For example, many factions have come together to fight against global surrogacy as of late, but those same supporters may not be aligned with Them Before Us on the harms of IVF for infertile couples.
“It’s hard to have a movement that prioritizes the rights of children in all matters of marriage and family, because quite frankly, you will piss somebody off on every one of those topics,” Faust points out. “Because at some point you will, in one hundred percent of cases, run up against somebody’s self-interest.”
Ascribing to the protection of children’s rights always requires sacrifice from adults. Faust insists that Them Before Us is the only organization that is not going to be hypocritical on the totality of issues that affect children’s rights.
The issue that first sparked her interest in children’s rights was gay “marriage.” Today, many view its legality as a settled matter. With such a landmark decision enshrined in Supreme Court precedent, it’s hard to imagine the country turning back the clock.
But Faust quotes Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who said, “You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.”
In other words, God’s created roles for male and female don’t change even when culture attempts to manipulate them. They will revert back to their original state.
“For a while we’ve been able to suppress it, because we have elevated adult desires above fundamental biological reality,” says Faust. “But ultimately that’s not going to hold because the superiority of the male-female, lifelong relationship is going to emerge.”
Many doubted that Roe v. Wade would ever be overturned as well, but three years ago, we watched as the federal right to abortion was abolished. After suppressing the truth for fifty years that the unborn are human beings with a right to life, natural law prevailed.
Them Before Us is playing the long game to overturn Obergefell, believing it’s only a matter of time before that same natural law works in favor of marriage too.
“Same sex and opposite sex arrangements are absolutely unequal when it comes to the benefits they offer children,” says Faust. “This is what justice demands—there is no justice for children if we get marriage wrong.”
Faust has spent years documenting and collecting stories of children victimized by adults who put their rights aside: children of divorce, the donor-conceived, and those denied a mother or father due to a same-sex relationship, for example. In each of these stories, there are critical identity issues, father or mother hunger, and often an increased risk of abuse or neglect.
“If I am successful, in every country throughout the world and every conversation that takes place in every courtroom deliberation, they will first say, ‘What about the child?’” says Faust. “My goal is that everywhere you go, whether it’s the personal or the political, people will first say, we need to elevate the rights of children.”
Faust is making headway on that goal. In 2021, she published her book, Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement. The organization is now co-producing a million-dollar documentary with Focus on the Family that will be distributed globally. They have created a free church curriculum to resource congregations. Faust and her colleagues publish writing in newspapers and magazines, appear on major podcasts, on conference stages and are seeing fast growth on social media.
Influencing the culture on these topics is important, but changing laws is a more difficult endeavor. Them Before Us has close relationships with family policy institutes in 41 states, and through those, has cultivated good relationships with local lawmakers which have been effective. But with so many child rights issues at stake, there is much more work to do.
“We’ve got incredible people working on this, but the threats to children are overwhelming,” Faust points out. “The advocacy needs are way beyond what we can do right now, so we are just trying our best to responsibly but rapidly scale our operation.”
