Meet the Seattle woman behind a national effort to end same-sex marriage

Earlier this year, a national coalition of conservatives unveiled a new campaign to turn back the clock on same-sex marriage.

In a promotional video, supporters of the “Greater Than Campaign” said they want to push the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its landmark 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriages nationwide.

The effort challenges a decade of established legal rights for same-sex couples, rights that continue to enjoy broad public support. In Washington, marriage equality protections go back even further, to a 2012 law upheld by voters.

So it might come as a surprise that one of the leading activists behind the campaign to undo those rights lives in Seattle.

Katy Faust is president and founder of Them Before Us, a conservative nonprofit organization that says its mission is to protect "every child's right to their mother and father."

Little-known locally, Faust has gained prominence in national conservative circles, spearheading the effort to undo Obergefell. She was featured in the kickoff video for the campaign against same-sex marriage alongside leaders of the Heritage Foundation and the Southern Baptist Convention, among others.

Last September, Faust spoke at the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering affiliated with the Christian nationalism movement that also featured U.S. senators and top Trump administration officials.

In her speech, titled "How Obergefell Commodified Children," Faust argued the way to reignite a seemingly settled cultural debate over same-sex marriage is to reframe it — away from the rights of adults and toward children she claims are "the real victims."

She criticized the "black hole of marriage equality," blaming it for a host of ills, including child abuse and trafficking. Christian churches, she argued, should join the fight to overturn Obergefell by disabusing pastors of "the lie" that their highest calling is to be "welcoming and affirming" toward nontraditional marriages.

Faust, a West Seattle resident, declined requests for an interview with The Seattle Times. Paul Guppy, chair of the board of directors for Them Before Us, also refused to discuss the group's work when reached via phone. Guppy is a longtime senior leader at the Washington Policy Center, a Seattle-based conservative think tank.

But Faust has spoken publicly for years about her campaign to undo same-sex marriages, in podcast interviews, blog posts and speeches in the U.S. and abroad.

The goal, as she put it in a 2022 interview with a conservative European magazine, is nothing less than "a global takeover" to make a child-centric, traditional model of marriage and parenting "the dominant idea in every culture in the world."

Her views go beyond just antipathy toward same-sex marriage. She also speaks out frequently against surrogacy, in vitro fertilization and divorce.

In a 2025 podcast interview with a former deputy prime minister of Australia, Faust said young women should prioritize marriage and parenthood over careers.

"If you can, get married early and have children first. And then you need to let your world get smaller. You should not be working to be partner in the law firm in your 20s or 30s," she said.

Her organization, Them Before Us, has grown increasingly well-funded in recent years.

Founded in 2018, the group reported less than $50,000 in revenue for its first three years, according to federal tax filings. That rose to $200,000 in 2022. In 2024, according to its most recent publicly available filing, the organization took in nearly $1 million and paid Faust a salary of $135,000.

Its major donations included $300,000 in 2024 from The Servant Foundation, a Christian nonprofit funded in part by billionaire Hobby Lobby founder David Green. The foundation is known for bankrolling attention-grabbing Super Bowl ads telling viewers Jesus "Gets Us."

Some legal experts and defenders of same-sex marriage say the effort to overturn Obergefell remains a legal and political long shot.

Karen Loewy, senior counsel with Lambda Legal, a pro-LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, said Faust's campaign is recycling previously discredited legal arguments.

“This is very much an ‘everything old is new again’ kind of campaign. It is a lot of the same players, and it is identical messaging those who were against marriage equality were raising two decades ago,” Loewy said.

Indeed, Faust co-wrote an amicus brief for the losing side in the Obergefell case that raised many of the same arguments that the "Greater Than Campaign" is now repackaging.

Faust grew up in Portland, Ore., with parents who divorced when she was 10 years old, according to her online biography. Her mother fell in love with another woman, and Faust has said she grew up with the couple and remains close to her mom. She also has said she considers her mom's partner "a friend" but not her parent, and that her continued relationship with her dad, while rocky, was crucial.

Faust became a Christian in high school and graduated from Minnesota's St. Olaf College, spending a year in Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar. She married Ryan Faust, and the couple eventually settled in Seattle, where he served as a pastor at Grace Church in West Seattle for 14 years. He's now a Navy chaplain, according to his LinkedIn profile. They've raised four children, including a child adopted from China.

In 2012, Faust started writing about her opposition to same-sex marriage on an anonymous blog called "Ask The Bigot." After her identity was unmasked by a pro-LGBTQ+ blogger, she began writing under her real name. The purpose of her blog, she wrote, was to "debunk" the idea that people who oppose same-sex marriage are doing so out of hatred or ignorance.

Faust's influence has only grown in recent years.

Her new push to overturn Obergefell is endorsed by 47 conservative organizations, including some that were behind the decades-long campaign that eventually overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that had guaranteed abortion rights.

In 2022, the conservative majority Supreme Court struck down Roe in its controversial Dobbs decision, leading dozens of states to swiftly ban or restrict abortions. Abortion access remains protected in many Democratic-led states, including Washington.

Some conservatives hope to follow the anti-Roe playbook to eventually eliminate federal protections for same-sex marriage.

In the 2015 Obergefell decision, a 5-4 court majority ruled the right to marriage is a fundamental liberty protected by the Constitution, striking down laws in more than a dozen states that banned same-sex unions.

That decision has so far withstood legal challenges. In November the court refused to take up an appeal from Kim Davis, a former Kentucky court clerk who was ordered to pay $360,000 in damages after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Despite that setback, same-sex marriage foes see an opening to revisit Obergefell on the conservative majority court. Chief Justice John Roberts was among the Obergefell dissenters in 2015. Justice Clarence Thomas has explicitly called for the decision to be reversed, and Justice Samuel Alito has also criticized it as a threat to religious liberty.

Liberty Counsel Chair Matt Staver, whose group represented Davis, declared "it is not a matter of if, but when the Supreme Court will overturn Obergefell."

Faust, writing for a Christian news website, said Davis was simply "the wrong victim" for a case to overturn Obergefell. Instead, a legal challenge should focus on children.

"That's the case a new coalition is preparing," she wrote. "We intend to challenge Obergefell not on the grounds of adult discomfort but on the grounds of child injustice."

Lawmakers in several conservative-leaning states have introduced measures supporting the rollback of legal same-sex marriage. The Idaho state House in March passed a resolution calling on the court to "restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman."

But supporters of same-sex marriage say the anti-Obergefell effort is badly at odds with public opinion.

“Frankly, this campaign just isn’t where the American people are on this issue. A strong bipartisan majority of Americans support the freedom to marry,” said James Dozier, the founder and board president of Centerline Action, a centrist nonprofit group.

Dozier pointed to polling last year that found 72% of U.S. voters support same-sex marriage — including 56% of Republicans.

Christian Santana, staff attorney for the Seattle-based QLaw Foundation, called the attempted new framing of ending same-sex marriage as a children's rights issue "thinly veiled bigotry."

While a reversal on same-sex marriage appears far-fetched now, Santana said abortion rights also were also thought for decades to be firmly established.

"We are living in crazy times, really concerning times," Santana said. "Who would have thought that Roe would have been overturned? There is no guarantee that Obergefell is going to stay."

While Faust and her allies claim same-sex marriage is harming children, scientific research has not backed that up.

A 2024 review of 96 studies on the effects of two decades since same-sex marriages began to be legalized in states found it has benefited LGBTQ+ people and their children. The findings by UCLA and the RAND research organization said there was "no reliable evidence" that it had caused "any lasting negative effects."

Later this week, Faust is scheduled to speak at the annual Lincoln Day fundraising dinner for the Snohomish County Republicans, an event to be emceed by Brandi Kruse, the former TV journalist turned conservative activist and podcaster.

Other speakers for the dinner include state GOP Chair Jim Walsh and Brian Heywood, the Redmond hedge fund manager and initiative financier who is backing a measure headed for the fall ballot that would ban transgender students from participating in girls' sports at K-12 schools.

Steve Mosman, the chair of the Snohomish County Republicans, said in a phone interview that Faust was invited due to her advocacy for kids having the right to a relationship with their biological parents.

But Mosman said the organization has not endorsed the campaign to overturn legal same-sex marriage.

"That whole issue on Obergefell," he said, "we have no opinion."

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(News researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.)

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