I’ll never forget where I was when the push alert came through on my phone.
As I sat in the lobbyist bullpen in Kentucky’s Capitol annex, the New York Times alert notified readers that the Obama administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a law from the 1990s that defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman and allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
The push to redefine marriage had been gaining steam long before this event. Still, in February 2011, it was no guarantee that same-sex marriage was inevitable, despite gains by gay-rights activists nationwide. The news that the Obama administration would no longer defend DOMA, however, was a significant symbolic shift in giving presidential-level imprimatur to the plausibility of same-sex marriage someday gaining federal recognition.
I vividly recall reading this notification and thinking, A society that refuses to recognize the truth of marriage is a society at odds with history, common sense, and God’s will for the family. This development is at odds with a flourishing society.
2011: Entering the Fray
In 2011, I’d recently started my first “real” job out of seminary. It took me all over Kentucky to talk with pastors, lobby legislators, mobilize churches, and write editorials on socially conservative causes that Christians care about—usually the sanctity of life, religious liberty, and marriage. I almost became the pastor of a church in northern Kentucky, but I sensed that the Lord had called me to advocate for causes that Christians care about and were under increasing attack in the culture.
I was drawn to the arguments of individuals like Robert P. George and his young acolytes Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis (all three would eventually become my mentors and good friends). Together they wrote a well-regarded essay defending marriage on a philosophical basis (later, the essay became a book). Their arguments reflect and confirm what Scripture teaches: Marriage is the institution where a man and a woman come together as husband and wife to be father and mother to their children. It’s complementary, exclusive, and permanent (Gen. 1:26–28; 2:18–24).
As a Christian, I believe that what Christianity teaches about marriage is a public truth that even non-Christians can understand and find compelling. Call it “natural law” or “creation order,” the basic idea is that marriage is a fixed and ontological institution that political majorities or court rulings cannot simply rewrite.
But marriage was under unceasing attack from cultural elites, LGBT+ activists, and organizations like the Human Rights Campaign. Marriage needed to be defended, and—possessed as I am with the constitution that likes to stand “athwart” society when society is going in the wrong direction—the cause of defending marriage became my cause, so much so that the earliest part of my career was almost singularly devoted to defending it.
2012: Continuing the Fight
In 2012, I was offered a job at the Heritage Foundation, working alongside Anderson in the think tank’s religion and civil society department. The marriage battle was in full throttle, and our efforts went toward that. There were countless editorials, coalition meetings, and media prep sessions—as well as meetings to develop talking points and rebuttals to the onslaught of attacks waged against marriage in the culture.
We reeled in defeat from the 2012 presidential election that also saw several state referendums approving same-sex marriage. One of the talking points quickly became the unstoppable momentum of same-sex marriage. It became a cause célèbre of elite culture. Those of us who followed the debate professionally could read the polls. More and more Americans, especially younger Americans, were in favor of same-sex marriage.
The conservative intellectual George Will even said the opposition to same-sex marriage was literally dying out from old age. That led Anderson and me to write an essay for National Review titled “Not Dead Yet.” Our message was simple: No matter what direction the culture goes, truths of nature persist even if they become unpopular.
Here were two millennials risking their early career credibility and reputation in the broader culture by standing against the elites in the intelligentsia, all the powerful institutions of society, and what seemed to be the arc of history. Anderson took more blows than I did, like ridicule on CNN and vandalism against his home. Ad nauseam, we read that opponents of same-sex marriage were “on the wrong side of history.” Critics alleged that society would one day view opponents of same-sex marriage the same way it now views racists.
The New York Times even profiled some friends and me. While the reporter did a fine job describing our cause, the article’s subtext was clear: We were a dying breed, similar to some exotic and almost extinct zoo animal that spectators peer at in bewilderment.
2013–15: Anticipating the Inevitable
Then came the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision in 2013, which dispensed with the Defense of Marriage Act and declared the federal definition of marriage (the union of a man and a woman) a violation of the Constitution.
We were all waiting for the other shoe to drop—full, nationwide same-sex marriage guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. At the time, this move seemed all but inevitable (even if we didn’t want to say it out loud).
That day came on June 26, 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in the Obergefell decision and extended same-sex marriage nationwide. I believed then, as I do now, that the court lawlessly imposed its definition of marriage on all 50 states.
2015–25: Learning from Obergefell
Since it’s June 2025, the month of Obergefell’s 10th anniversary, what can we learn a decade after the ruling?
The rest of this essay could focus on the litany of religious liberty conflicts that opponents said would happen (and did). But I’m less interested in writing a “We told you so” postmortem than I am in what evangelicals and conservatives can learn 10 years after the fallout of same-sex marriage. I’m now 40. I entered these debates when I was around 25. Let’s look backward at the blessings and hardships of life’s struggles in contending for what Russell Kirk calls the “permanent things.”
Consider five lessons.
1. Foxhole friendships are essential.
It would’ve been almost impossible to wage the battle we did alone. Standing against powerful crowds, with invectives and accusations of causing suicides made against you, requires that others have your back.
After the Windsor decision, a friend hosted a gathering of marriage activists so we could nurse our wounds and encourage one another. Someone casually joked, “I hope a bomb doesn’t go off in this room, because if it did, there would be no one else left to defend marriage on the national stage.” While this comment was said in jest, the point was real: The number of individuals and organizations invested in the fight was few. It was a lonely battle.
But in the Lord’s kindness, he forged friendships through those fights that stood the test of time. I can think of friends like Anderson, now president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Eric Teetsel, CEO of the Center for Renewing America; and Denny Burk, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and professor of biblical studies and ethics at Boyce College. We’re all older now, with a lot of life and other battles under our belts. But the experiences of that long season of trial gave us a sense of camaraderie and solidarity that persists even today. The older I get, the more I value the consistency of individuals whose values don’t change with time.
2. Truth is unchanging.
Truth is a fixed reality. Genesis’s account of marriage is still true. What Jesus upheld as a New Covenant institution anchored in creation order is binding (Matt. 19:4–6). What Paul teaches about marriage being a picture of the gospel (Eph. 5:21–33) remains authoritative. Marriage is the union of one man and one woman. God is the creator of marriage. By his authority alone we rightly name same-sex marriage for what it is: a sinful counterfeit. No crowd, vote, or court ruling can say otherwise. Though it sounds scandalous given the routine nature of same-sex marriage, I tell each of my ethics classes, “Same-sex marriage does not exist.”
Marriage is an ontological reality. Two men and two women may engage in sexual activity or live together. But that relationship will never be marital by nature. Because truth, by nature, must be unchanging. None of us in those early fights has any ounce of regret in contending for the truth about marriage.
3. Witnessing to the truth is intrinsically valuable.
If we knew we’d lose, why continue in the fight? Because witnessing to the truth is worthwhile for its own sake. When you believe you possess the truth, it doesn’t matter what the culture says. Giving yourself wholeheartedly to something true, good, and beautiful is an end in itself by which no greater measure of worth or satisfaction can result.
4. Take the long view.
It was easy to be disappointed at what transpired from 2011 to 2015. Yes, we “lost” by the culture’s standards. But we aren’t playing by the standards of modernity. None of the individuals I can think of who engaged in these fights is a defeatist or short-term thinker. We’re playing by the standards of Holy Scripture, reason, and history.
A quote attributed to John Randolph expresses it best: “Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries.” 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.
5. Promoting a positive is better than opposing a negative.
In hindsight, we were always at a rhetorical disadvantage in our argumentation. Critics depicted us as arguing against something while proponents were arguing for something. We were dealing with philosophical arguments, invoking ideas like “comprehensive union” and using words like “conjugal” or “basic goods,” while same-sex marriage proponents had poll-tested phrases like “love wins.” Yes, we’d talk about how same-sex marriage would introduce an adult-centered paradigm of marriage away from a child-centered paradigm. But at the time, the raw utilitarianism of “If you do not want a same-sex marriage, don’t get one” won out.
There’s a valuable lesson for Christians and conservatives when waging intellectual combat in the culture war: Don’t merely defend ideas. Defend people. This is one reason I’m encouraged by the burgeoning “children’s rights movement” that’s pushing back against same-sex marriage, IVF, and surrogacy by focusing more on the needs of children rather than the desires of adults. As I’ll show below, this avenue is where I think evangelicals are best poised to go on the offense in the coming decades.
2025 and Beyond: Exposing Obergefell’s Weaknesses
Secular wins are neither inevitable nor unstoppable nor permanent.
I’m deeply aware there’s virtually no political will to overturn Obergefell and the legislation that followed it in 2022, the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. Common wisdom in 2025 would make us believe that same-sex marriage is commonplace and unquestionable. But there are small glimmers of hope that Americans are waking up to reality. More and more people are paying attention to the decline of marriage and family in America. Our country’s declining fertility rate is close to a national emergency.
Perhaps someday we’ll wake up from the dogmatic slumbers of the sexual revolution and return to God’s vision for marriage. That will require us to revisit where our culture and its laws departed from a holistic account of family. If critics are right that same-sex marriage obscures the norms that make marriage intelligible, it’ll require a wholesale reevaluation of the missteps that brought us to where we are now.
In the meantime, I want to make a provocative suggestion: We should still overturn Obergefell. Regardless of how long it takes, we shouldn’t stop arguing against same-sex marriage.
What’s startling is the data suggesting same-sex marriage is losing support in some segments of America. While same-sex marriage is viewed favorably by a substantial majority, political scientist Ryan Burge has data showing a decline in support. According to Burge, 84 percent of young Catholics supported the idea in 2018. That figure in 2022 was 70 percent. The same age group among evangelicals went from 55 percent to 47 percent. Leaving aside questions of how self-proclaimed evangelicals could support an institution that Scripture condemns, the data speaks for itself: Support for same-sex marriage among professing Christians is stagnant.
Why would support for same-sex marriage weaken?
First, the LGBT+ movement’s aggression has hurt its cause for “inclusion” and “tolerance.” Advocates billed same-sex marriage as an institution that would expand the canopy of love. However, coercive activists sought to make active supporters out of everyone. Dissent wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t enough to be silent; everyone had to vocally affirm same-sex marriage. And if you didn’t, you’d be brought to heel in the form of onerous legal challenges threatening your religious liberty. There are now too many instances to document of how LGBT+ activists have aggressively targeted Christian institutions to make them sacrifice their convictions to operate in the marketplace.
Second, the LGB movement quickly saw the “T” emerge as its latest cause and required individuals to disbelieve what their eyes told them was true: Men cannot become women, and vice versa. The zaniest elements of the transgender movement proved too much for even a highly tolerant society like the United States. “Love wins” turned into “Here, kid, take these hormones.” When nature is aggressively suppressed, it has a way of striking back.
Third, the LGBT+ movement aimed itself at children. Whether encouraging young children to explore their gender identity, arguing for the inclusion of children at pride parades, or mass-marketing itself to children at stores like Target, the LGBT+ movement breached the sacred barrier of childhood innocence.
We can rightly infer that individuals have seen the onslaught of the LGBT+ movement and reacted negatively to its predatory and in-your-face behavior.
Today: Arguing for Obergefell’s Overturn
Same-sex marriage lies about the nature of marriage and is unjust to children. So we should still want to overturn it.
It’s common on social media to see gay and lesbian parents glamorize their adopted children. We’ve all seen the videos and pictures: Two gay men, for example, flaunt children they could never have produced on their own. The sight of children transacted as commodities—fulfilling the desires of adults, instead of the best interests of the children—causes a visceral reaction.
Despite whatever ideology we imbibe, we all know that moms and dads bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise. That’s the ideal. Of course, we’re all aware of situations where, for one reason or another, single parenting exists. While not the ideal, that’s a separate conversation from law and culture promoting family arrangements where motherless or fatherless children are the intention. We should call it what it is: Same-sex couples using adoption, IVF, or surrogacy now purposefully—and permanently—place children in homes that deliberately deprive children of either maternal love or paternal love. The classical definition of justice is giving to each what’s due to him or her. If children are owed a mother and father, then same-sex marriage represents a social injustice of profound magnitude.
When Pete Buttigieg and his “husband” sit in a hospital bed holding their children, as though they birthed the children themselves, we notice something is missing: a mother.
If you’re anything like me, the sight of gay and lesbian couples and small children cosplaying in idyllic family settings is proving to be too much. It’s a fight against God’s design. Nature tells us you need a man and woman to reproduce, and only the institution fitted to the pattern of reproduction is worthy of being called a marriage. The only way gay and lesbian couples have children is by using technology that still requires male and female gametes. Nature and nature’s God remain unbeaten.
The children’s rights movement is the best way to combat same-sex marriage. One of the most rhetorically powerful cards is to argue that children have a God-given and natural right to a mother and father, ideally their biological mother and father. Same-sex marriage denies this truth. Arguing on behalf of the needs of children will likely be more effective than protracted debates on natural law theory (as important as that is). Arguing in defense of abstract ideas is less effective than arguing in defense of people, particularly children. While Christians should never downplay the grave immorality of homosexuality, we’ll be more successful—given how American culture reasons—defending children than arguing that homosexuality is wrong (though it is).
We should never forget that society and law must reflect the truth. The further both depart from the truth, the larger the blast radius becomes. Should Western civilizations abandon the moral order rooted in divine revelation and the natural law, they’ll eventually unravel, succumbing to moral degeneracy, deepening social fragmentation, and finally to disorder and lawlessness. Same-sex marriage, though now routine, is part and parcel of that moral lawlessness.
Without a transcendent and coherent source of truth to guide human conduct and constrain vice, society loses its coherence. What remains is the raw contest of wills untethered from any enduring vision of the good. The law of consequences tells us that society will awaken to its error or weaken beyond repair.
G. K. Chesterton is said to have quipped, “The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle—and not lose it.” After all, in the long term, we believe we’ll be on the right side of history because we’re on the right side of truth. Victory is God’s. As it is in every age, our task is to bear witness to the truth.
This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition on June 1, 2025.
