Hobby Lobby funding campaign of lies and junk science to eliminate same-sex marriage

Hobby Lobby (first pic) is funding the efforts of Katy Faust (second pic) and her 'Greater Than Campaign' to eliminate marriage for gay couples. Faust and her group have been using lies, junk science, and social media to falsely claim that gay marriage puts children in danger.

Two bits of information have become public about Katy Faust and her "Greater Than Campaign." Faust's "Greater Than Campaign" is a coalition of 47 religious right and conservative groups whose goal is to get the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell decision which legalized gay marriage in 2015

From The Seattle Times by way of LGBTQNation comes the revelation of who is funding the campaign:

 . . . 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.

 . . . 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.

And according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Faust is attempting to reshape the argument of gay marriage by pushing a false notion that it is derived from a selfish desire of gays which puts the rights of children in danger:

The Greater Than campaign implies that LGBTQ+ people have created a situation in which they are legally treated “greater than” children. On its campaign website, Them Before Us states: “If you are tired of seeing children ignored, victimized, and treated as ‘less than’, it is time to join us in taking a stand.”

 The campaign is a new way to inject the dangerous myth that LGBTQ+ people are harmful to children back into the public consciousness, after opponents of marriage equality lost the public policy fight in 2015 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In a video posted to the Them Before Us Substack, Faust says, “Whatever you want to do in your private life — fine. Don’t touch the kids. 

SPLC said that Faust calls it a "marketing strategy" in which she is enlisting the help of far-right media influencers:

“If we have learned anything from the demise of Roe, it is not enough to overturn bad Supreme Court decisions,” Faust said. “We have to change public opinion.”  To that end, Faust indicated that she was using hard-right influencers to help shape the narrative. 

“I have these amazing conservative spokesmen, influencers who are on board with me." . . . "They’ve been in working group meetings, Steve Deace and Delano Squires and Jack Posobiec and Heidi St. John, among a variety of others. And what are we going to do? […] We are going to train America to help them understand the direct connection between gay marriage and child victimization, and natural marriage and child protection.”

SPLC also pointed out how Faust and her group are trying to resurrect already refuted and disproven studies against not only gay marriage but also gay couples raising children:

In December 2025, Them Before Us published a blog post claiming the social scientific consensus that there is no statistically significant difference in health or emotional outcomes between children raised by lesbian and gay and straight parents “wasn’t built on science at all.” 

The group claimed that dozens of studies of lesbian and gay families suffered from “researcher bias” and their authors were engaging in “little more than advocacy with footnotes.” The accusation was ironic, since these practices are a well-documented hallmark of far-right pseudoscientific propaganda. 

The group claimed that studies of lesbian and gay parents and their children before Obergefell were too flawed to have any meaning. However, the group picked out three studies published before the case that supported its claims and represented the “gold standard” of scientific methodology.

 The three reports were the discredited 2012 “New Family Structures Study” authored by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus; a 2015 study authored by anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Ruth Institute researcher Paul Sullins; and a 2013 study by Canadian economist Douglas Allen, who testified in court in 2014 that “without repentance,” LGBTQ+ people would go to hell.

 Selective amplification of social science that fits the anti-LGBTQ+ ideology while discounting or denying contradictory evidence has been a common strategy of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups for decades. The SPLC has previously reported how anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups use pseudoscience, including studies with faulty or questionable methodologies, to promote public policies and litigation that restrict LGBTQ+ people’s freedoms, access to healthcare and protections from discrimination.

 . . . Contrary to hate groups’ claims, a robust body of scientifically sound literature “consistently shows that LGBQ adults are just as capable and efficient at parenting children as their cisgender heterosexual counterparts” and that “children of sexual minority parents, though exposed to unique experiences, perform and develop at similar rates as children with heterosexual parents,” according to the American Psychological Association.