This week CatholicVote joined more than thirty national and state organizations in launching Greater Than — a coalition built around a single conviction: the rights and well-being of children are greater than the preferences of adults, and the law should say so.
The coalition's stated goal is ambitious: a sustained, multi-state legal and cultural campaign aimed at reconsidering the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which constitutionalized same-sex marriage. Eleven years on, Greater Than argues, the predicted consequences of that decision — for religious liberty, for parental rights, and most of all for children — have arrived in full.
A three-part strategy
The coalition's white paper, released today, outlines a three-part path forward:
- Reframe marriage policy around the parent-child relationship. Marriage law exists, the coalition argues, not principally to ratify adult relationships but to bind children to the mothers and fathers who brought them into the world.
- Shape public opinion by surfacing the actual outcomes of a decade of redefined marriage — measurable effects on fatherlessness, donor-conceived adults, and the broader marketization of human life.
- Mobilize churches — Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, and Jewish — to advocate jointly for legal change, beginning with state-level reforms and culminating in a renewed federal case.
Why CatholicVote signed on
For Catholics, the question of marriage is not principally political — it is theological and anthropological. The Church has always taught that marriage between a man and a woman, ordered to the procreation and education of children, is part of the order of creation. We did not need a Supreme Court decision to teach us that, and we will not abandon it because of one.
The most vulnerable party in any family is the child. The most overlooked party in the marriage debate has been the child. Greater Than is, finally, a chance to put first things first.
What comes next
Greater Than will operate in three lanes simultaneously: model legislation at the state level; litigation aimed at re-opening the question; and public education through a coordinated content program. CatholicVote will lead the educational arm, with original reporting, our flagship LOOPcast, and material on Zeale, our new media platform.
The road will be long. The cultural inertia in favor of Obergefell is real, and the public mood is more confused than convinced. But the same was once true of the road that led to Dobbs. The work of the Church in public life is, in part, the work of patience — the long fidelity that outlasts a decade or two of bad law.
We are in this for the long haul. And we are in it because — to borrow the coalition's name — every child is greater than every grown-up's preference. Every child deserves the law to remember that.
Kelsey Reinhardt is President and CEO of CatholicVote. Learn more about the campaign at /campaigns/greater-than.