FOR a decade, the cultural elite insisted the war was over. They claimed that the redefinition of marriage was a settled consensus and that history moved in only one direction. They argued that anyone who clung to the biological reality of the mother-father bond was a relic, to be treated as morally suspect. We were expected to retreat to our private spheres, grateful for whatever scraps of religious liberty the new orthodoxies deigned to leave us.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the brave new world. Reality refused to co-operate.
The experiment of the last decade, the attempt to sever marriage from biology and parenthood from gender, has run into the wall of human nature. Now, from the grassroots of America to the strategy rooms of the White House, a counter-movement is beginning. It is an open challenge to reclaim marriage, not just as a religious preference but as the indispensable foundation of a free and secure society.
The central lie of the new order (whether you date it from the Cameron government’s decision in the UK in 2013 or the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling in 2015) was that you could redefine marriage without redefining parenthood. We were told that marriage was simply a ‘love contract’ between consenting adults and that children would be fine regardless of the family structure, provided there was ‘love’.
The social science paints a different picture. Even mainstream policy analysis increasingly links family instability to poorer outcomes for children and wider social costs, including work from the US Brookings Institution.
When the law makes mothers and fathers optional in marriage, it makes them optional in the lives of children. It transforms the child from a subject with rights into an object of adult design. It turns parenthood into a commodity and the family into a mere lifestyle choice.
The pushback is not being led by the old guard of political strategists. It is being led by those living with the fallout of the sexual revolution. The Greater Than movement, spearheaded by Katy Faust and her organisation Them Before Us, has completely upended the debate. Their premise is blunt and irrefutable: children’s rights are more important than adults’ desires. You can see the power of this framing at their campaign hub here and in their detailed manifesto here.
It argues that every child has a natural right to be known and loved by his or her own mother and father. Listen to donor-conceived adults describing identity questions and missing medical and family history at https://thembeforeus.com/stories/ and you hear the human cost of our policy choices. When we sanction laws or technologies that intentionally deprive a child of that right (whether through commercial surrogacy, anonymous sperm donation or no-fault divorce) we are committing an injustice.
The elites might be able to ignore conservative philosophers, but they cannot ignore the hard data suggesting their ‘permanent’ victory is fragile.
Even the New York Times is now running the argument that the trendline has shifted. In an opinion piece by psychologists Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Eli J. Finkel, the newspaper argued that anti-gay bias has risen again since 2020, with particular concern about trends among younger adults. The underlying analysis is publicly available as a PsyArXiv preprint, which is the cleaner thing to cite if anyone objects to paywalls.
A crack has appeared in what the establishment insisted was an unbreakable moral consensus. Gallup reported the share of Americans saying gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable fell from 71 per cent in 2022 to 64 per cent in 2023, and remained at 64 per cent in 2024. That is a meaningful cooling after years of steady liberalisation. You can review the numbers here and here.
The point is not that America has turned overnight. The point is that the institutional enforcement of the new dogma is losing traction. The slogan ‘love is love’ is no longer enough to silence the obvious questions about what children actually need. Child-centred arguments are no longer automatically taboo.
While the moral argument is being won in the culture, the strategic argument is being won in the halls of power. For the first time in decades, the American state has recognised that the family is not just a social unit but a security asset.
The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), released by the White House in December, represents a seismic shift in government thinking. It explicitly links the ‘spiritual and cultural health’ of the nation to its ability to project power and defend itself. Early in the document, it states that national security ‘cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children’.
This is the national security corollary of the culture war. It acknowledges that a nation with a collapsing birth rate and a fragmented social fabric cannot compete with rising authoritarian powers. Low fertility, a shrinking workforce and the fiscal strain of welfare dependency directly reduce the state’s capacity to act. The state can subsidise and regulate, but it cannot replicate the relational work of parenthood at scale. The biological mother-father family is the most reliable engine for producing stable citizens at scale.
If the NSS provides the diagnosis, the Heritage Foundation has provided the cure. Its ground-breaking report, Saving America by Saving the Family, identifies a primary antagonist: the welfare state functioning as a substitute spouse.
They use the term ‘bureaugamy’ to describe how policy design has usurped the role of the father. For 60 years the state has expanded to fill the gap left by family breakdown, but in doing so, it has created perverse incentives that penalise marriage. Effectively, the welfare system functions as a substitute spouse, rendering the father obsolete.
The Heritage plan is to dismantle this structure and restructure incentives to make marriage the economically viable norm again. You can find the report landing page here and a summary of its application for the UK via the Coalition for Marriage here.
This is also showing up in finance. The ‘Trump Accounts’ proposal in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would seed $1,000 (£730) for children born in 2025-2028 with a valid social security number, invested in low-cost index funds, with some major employers matching contributions for their employees.
Where does this leave us? While America wakes up, Britain is still hitting the snooze button. We led the charge into this mess with the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, creating a legal framework that detached marriage from its biological roots two years before the Americans followed suit.
But the winds crossing the Atlantic are strong. The Coalition for Marriage has rightly warned that 2026 could be the tipping point where deaths outnumber births in Britain. This is the issue the West keeps trying to dodge. If you dissolve the family, you do not get freedom. You get a vacuum that the state and the market rush to fill.
We need to adopt the Greater Than standard here and then get serious about policy, not just rhetoric. Start by removing every couple penalty in the benefits system, because the state should not charge the poor for doing the right thing. Then front-load support to the early years, so we are not quietly incentivising delay and outsourcing. Finally, stop pretending the state can replace fathers. Welfare design should reward work, responsibility, and family formation rather than entrench a substitute-spouse model, which is exactly the target of the Heritage Foundation ‘bureaugamy’ critique and its package of pro-marriage, pro-work reforms. We also need to challenge the commodification of children in commercial surrogacy because if children are rights-bearing persons they cannot be treated as products.
The evidence is in. The experiment of ‘adult-first’ equality has failed. It has failed our children, it has strained our treasury, and it has weakened our security. A growing American coalition is arguing that national renewal is impossible without rebuilding marriage.
It is time for us to do the same. The revolt against the settlements of 2013 and 2015 has begun. The only question now is whether we have the courage to join it.
