The newly launched effort to overturn same-sex marriage — backed by nearly 50 right-wing groups — is drawing outrage after the coalition posted a video featuring controversial rhetoric. The group argues that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that recognized same-sex couples’ right to marry nationwide, harmed children — and aims to roll those rights back.

The Greater Than campaign’s website promotes claims such as:

“A woman who identifies as a lesbian can be a loving mother, but she cannot be a father. A gay man can be a loving father, but he cannot be a mother. Children need, deserve, and have a right to both.”

“No adult has a right to a non-biologically related child. No child should lose their mother or father so an adult- gay, straight, single or married- can create a baby.”

They also claim that the “legal existence of same-sex marriage requires the redefinition of legal parenthood in a way that makes a child’s mother or father optional in their life.”

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In the video, anti-same-sex marriage activists including Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, said: “It’s a mother and a father that bring forth children into the world, and that’s by design, because children need a mother and a father.”

Lila Rose of Live Action said, “Redefining marriage robs children of the natural right to their mother and father.”

And Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said in the video that same-sex marriage “harms children in virtually every way imaginable.”

Critics blasted the group’ efforts to overturn marriage rights.

Jill Filipovic, who writes about women’s rights, U.S. politics, and foreign affairs, noted, “These are many of the same people who successfully overturned Roe v. Wade. We told you they’d come for same-sex marriage next. They’re coming. The only question is whether they succeed.”

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The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, director of Defending Democracy Together, wrote: “Honestly glad to see all the cards out on the table. 1. People can stop being surprised by how radical and thorough-going the reactionary agenda is. 2) This is a chance to cause some rifts and wedges in Trump/MAGA world.”

Tim Miller of MS NOW and The Bulwark added, “I find it encouraging that these people are coming out of the shadows. Best to know who wants to nullify your family unit.”

“If these people had their way, my sister and I—and millions of other children of LGBTQ parents—wouldn’t exist,” wrote Iowa State Senator Zach Wahls. “Every child deserves a family as loving as the one I grew up in. And those are the same values that Chloe and I are passing on to our son. We’re not going back.”

Jessica Riedl of the Brookings Institution observed, “This video is nonsense on stilts. They are ranting about gay adoption as a reason to ban to gay marriage (separate issues) – and assuming that if gays cannot marry, they will instead raise kids within heterosexual marriages.”

The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell, an MS NOW anchor, warned simply: “They’re coming for gay marriage.”

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As President Donald Trump’s immigration polling numbers deteriorate and criticism of federal agents grows — and following the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minnesota — Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is calling for a national conversation about undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, have lived in the United States for years, and are good neighbors.

Gingrich called on President Donald Trump to “open up a national dialogue,” as he told Fox Business, saying that “this is about dignity,” a quote he took from U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL).

“Americans don’t want to see the police behaving like a mob, Americans don’t want to see people killed in the streets, and Americans don’t want to see the kind of hunting down people in a way that really demeans the process,” he insisted.

“We need a national conversation about what we’re going to do, about people who’ve come here, some of them 20 years ago, who’ve been obeying the law, paying taxes, good neighbors, have kids, go to PTA,” Gingrich said. “Very few Americans want to see the police walk in and pick them up and deport them.”

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“On the other hand, people do not want to give them citizenship,” he claimed. “So there should be some middle ground here on long-term goals.”

Federal agents, he said, “may well need more training and maybe more restraint.”

But Gingrich also claimed that anyone trying to stop them from carrying out the law is “engaged in insurrection.”

According to The Hill, “a growing number of Republicans and conservative commentators are urging the White House to shift course and scale back its aggressive immigration enforcement, especially for law-abiding immigrants with roots in their communities.”

MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, The Hill added, suggested that “if you’ve been in America for a long time, if you’ve been law-abiding, if you’re an asylum-seeker, certainly if you’ve had children that have served in the military, you’re at the front of the line” to return to the U.S. if you’ve been deported.

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Forty-seven right-wing organizations have joined together to try to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that found same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples. The coalition’s focus is to change national public opinion on same-sex marriage by declaring that children are “Greater Than” equality.

“We’re all going to speak with one voice, and it is ‘don’t touch the kids,’” the group’s founder, right-wing activist Katy Faust, told American Family Radio, as People for the American Way reported.

“Faust made it clear that the campaign will continue a long and dishonorable legacy of anti-LGBTQ forces smearing gay people and couples as threats to children,” PFAW added. “She called parenting by same-sex couples a ‘destructive state-sanctioned gaslighting experiment on children.'”

According to The Daily Signal, which was launched by The Heritage Foundation, Faust also said that since the Obergefell ruling, children have been “deprived of the unique love and guidance only a mother and father can provide.”

Contributors to the project are promoting old claims that studies have disproven.

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Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said in the group’s launch video that same-sex marriage “harms children in virtually every way imaginable.”

Colson Center CEO John Stonestreet claimed that social science data reveals that kids “do best when they are raised in a home with married, biological mom and dad.”

Numerous studies have shown that children raised by same-sex parents fare at least as well as children raised by different-sex parents.

A large 2014 study found that children raised by same-sex couples were happier and healthier than their peers raised by different-sex couples.

In 2023, The Guardian reported on a study that also found that “children of same-sex couples fare just as well, if not better, than those of heterosexual couples.”

“The findings chime with several other studies, including three decades of research from Australia that revealed children raised by same-sex parents do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers in heterosexual families.”

Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist wrote that the “Greater Than” campaign “claims loving gay parents are the real threat to kids.”

“While the video has received the bulk of the attention so far, it’s the campaign’s website that actually deserves a closer look. Because surely there’s evidence that children with gay parents suffer, right?” Mehta said. “Nope. There are no studies cited on the website. There’s no proof of any sort offered anywhere.”

He charged: “This is nothing more than repackaged bigotry and finding new ways to express anti-gay hate because the old ways no longer work.”

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