Our American democracy, as Tocqueville suggested, was born of the marriage between the “spirit of religion” and the “spirit of liberty.” For three centuries, Christian morality was, along with liberty and equality, foundational to American laws and mores—especially as evinced by our peculiar and stern devotion to monogamy. By this morality, there was an “iron triangle” binding together three distinct but morally inseparable goods: offspring, marriage, and sexual congress. As late as 1917, as the Supreme Court then remarked, this “reverent morality” reflected opinion “almost universally held in this country.” Our motto, it seems, was “Liberty, Equality, Matrimony!”

But beginning in the 1920s, this old triangle was successively dismantled in the name of liberty and equality. The revolution occurred in three steps. First came the freedom from offspring, as Americans embraced contraception and the ideal of child-free companionate marriage—a freedom later supplemented by abortion. The second came freedom from marriage, as nonmarital sex and nonmarital childrearing became normative. And third came the freedom from sexual congress, with the widespread approval of artificial reproduction and the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples.

With the general acceptance of Obergefell, this revolution seems nearly complete. Americans now generally approve, if not celebrate, the equal freedom of women and men to choose, à la carte, sexual congress, marriage, and/or offspring. Only abortion engenders significant opposition. Otherwise, the dissenters are a discrete, insular, and shrinking minority.

Mrs. Faust Dissents

But one of these holdouts—Katy Faust—is not yet ready to shrink away. With the help of Stacy Manning, she has written a manifesto that goes well beyond opposition to abortion. In Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement, Faust seeks to vindicate one of the old six links in the triangle: the necessity of marriage to offspring. Children, she contends, have an affirmative right not only to life in the womb, but also to the joint care of mother and father in one common home. That is to say, the young have a right to be conceived, received, and raised by married parents. If a male and female choose to reproduce a child, the two parents should get hitched—and stay hitched.

As such, Faust takes aim at a broad array of now-accepted practices that deprive children of this right, including elective divorce (whether no-fault, low-fault, or otherwise), elective adoption (where one or both natural parents are still able to care for the child), and what some decry as “planned orphanhood” (in which children are produced through sperm donation, egg donation, or surrogacy). 

Faust makes a persuasive case. She provides abundant empirical evidence to show that children are much more likely to flourish when they enjoy the joint care of their natural parents in a common household. More importantly, she supplements this evidence with anecdotes to move the heart as well as the mind.

Faust further argues that people naturally yearn for any relationship with their biological parents. Orphans miss not just parental care, but the sheer parental relationship. Faust relates the painful experiences of many who long just to see their mother’s face, or know their father’s name.

In the interest of kindness and persuasion, Faust carefully circumscribes her criticism. She condemns no one. She is especially keen to acknowledge and honor her father and mother, despite their divorce during her childhood. She is likewise appreciative of the care she later received from a non-parent adult: her mother’s female partner. More generally, she professes respect for the “LGBT community.”

Furthermore, she relies exclusively on secular rather than religious arguments. Though a professed Christian and even a pastor’s wife, Faust says her argument has “nothing to do with religion.” She proceeds from the “simple fact,” both biological and sociological, that “children need both of their parents in order to mature and thrive.”

In addition, she largely limits her objection only to one aspect of the revolution. She has no quarrel with the first wave that liberated sex and marriage from offspring, or with the third wave that liberated reproduction and marriage from copulation. She expressly accepts child-free marriage and tacitly accepts sex-free reproduction—provided the gametes and womb are only those of married parents and no embryos are destroyed. As to the second wave, she voices no criticism of nonmarital sexual activity¸ provided it is strictly sterile. Rather, she seeks to vindicate only one of the six links of the old triangle: if offspring, then marriage.

Too Far and Not Far Enough

Nonetheless, some readers might conclude that, in two respects, Faust fails to properly limit her objection. First, she makes an openly inegalitarian claim. She does not say that children have equal rights. Rather, she seems to set forth a hierarchy whereby children are superior to parents: “Them before us.”

This provocative framing seems neither necessary nor proper to her main argument. As she indicates, parental liberty means inequality for children. The children of marriage-free parents experience downward mobility—even as to the very freedom enjoyed by the parents. The children of divorced and remarried parents often experience profound mistrust, and thus are much less likely to be able to marry at all. Marriage-freedom in the first generation becomes marriage-fear in the second. A Casanova’s son is often a Casanulla: he never gets any casa at all. 

Second, relative to her limited argument, her censure is overbroad. She objects, albeit briefly, to polygamy, polyamory, and so-called gender “transitioning.” But such practices need not deprive children of their parents. If such households are stable, the children can surely enjoy the joint care of mother and father, even if other adults might be involved, or if one or both parents take hormones, swap clothes, change pronouns, etc. If these arrangements are indeed harmful to children, the harm is outside the scope of Faust’s defined argument. 

She likewise overstates the problem of same-sex marriage. To be sure, as she indicates, the redefinition of “marriage” has led to the redefinition of “parent,” along with the mass propagation of specious studies purporting to show that children flourish more when raised by same-sex couples than by their own mother and father. 

Still, Faust might find broader ground by emphatically distinguishing same-sex marriage from same-sex childrearing. Most Americans now accept sterile companionate “marriage” (including same-sex forms thereof) and are coming to accept multiparty forms thereof. But many Americans might still be able to see and acknowledge that a matrimonial marriage (formerly known as “marriage”) is the best place to conceive and receive a child. 

But others, like this reviewer, might find that by accepting too much of the new morality, she improperly limits her argument. The parts of the iron triangle were mutually reinforcing. By rejecting human dominion over human fertility, Christian morality fostered the virtue of receptivity to the child. Conversely, by endorsing parental dominion over fertility, we foster dominion over the child. To dodge children by artificial contraception, or to manufacture them by artificial reproduction, we adults emphatically place “us” before “them” from the moment of conception.

Second, by disavowing any religious argument, she undercuts the reverence that, in turn, seems necessary to this receptivity. The old morality was indeed “reverent.” God was involved—and perhaps for good reason. Thomas Jefferson famously asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” We might likewise ask: Can the rights of any child be secure when we have removed the conviction that this child is the gift of God?

If we are to place “them before us,” or just “them equal to us,” perhaps we must first place “Him before us.”

Despite these limitations, Faust makes a persuasive case that justice for children requires adult fortitude and moderation—so that fertility might be reserved for stable marriages. By depriving children of their parents, in the name of parental liberty and equality, Americans have done grave harm to children. The harm persists, so the opposition must persist.