Hobby Lobby is funding the latest push to end marriage equality

Read more at LGBTQ Nation.

Earlier this year, a group of 47 anti-LGBTQ+ organizations launched a new campaign to end marriage equality in the U.S., demanding that the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. The campaign, called “Greater Than” – a response to the push for equality by claiming that straight people are “greater than” queer people – immediately got the media’s attention.

Now the Seattle Times has revealed that a key organization behind the Greater Than campaign is being funded by the conservative Christian business Hobby Lobby, the same business that got the Supreme Court to rule in 2014 that for-profit corporations don’t have to pay for employees’ health care that covers contraception if that contraception goes against the corporation’s religious beliefs.

Katy Faust is the founder and president of Them Before Us, an organization devoted to ending marriage rights for same-sex couples in the U.S. Faust’s mother is a lesbian who came out after marrying Faust’s father, and her parents divorced when she was 10. She converted to Christianity a few years later, when she was in high school.

Faust insists that she didn’t devote her life to attacking LGBTQ+ rights out of some kind of resentment towards her mother, although she now says she no longer considers her mother a parent.

The Seattle Times notes that Faust has been campaigning against marriage rights since at least 2012, when she started a blog called “Ask The Bigot,” a website she claimed would “debunk” the notion that marriage rights opponents are bigots.

She advocated for ending marriage rights over the years, but saw an opportunity for a renewed push after the Supreme Court overturned federal reproductive rights protections guaranteed in Roe v. Wade in 2022. The Court effectively let states decide whether abortion would be legal, and many of them immediately banned it, something people like Faust hope to see happen for same-sex marriage.

And the recent push is getting more funding. Them Before Us was founded in 2018, and its IRS reports show that it received less than $50,000 in revenue for its first few years of operation before Roe was overturned. In 2022, though, it received $200,000. In 2024, that became nearly $1 million, and Faust collected a salary of $135,000.

Them Before Us’s 2024 filings show a $300,000 donation from The Servant Foundation, a Christian organization funded by Hobby Lobby’s founder, David Green, and his family. It’s the same organization behind those “He Gets Us” ads about Jesus that ran during the 2024 and 2025 Super Bowls.

Them Before Us – referring to how children’s interests should come before adults’ – is attempting to refocus the debate on marriage rights around children in order to capitalize on the recent moral panic around “groomers,” a push from the right that started in the early 2020s to associate LGBTQ+ people with child sex abuse once again.

Faust claims that marriage equality has made children’s lives worse, contrary to what social science says on the matterShe said in a March Uncloseted Media interview that there is no “right to adopt” but that children “have a natural right to be known and loved by their mother and father.”

Faust herself has adopted a child who is from China.

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