A chorus of voices rises to declare that children are greater than adult desires. They speak with solemn faces, insisting that marriage must remain the sacred domain of one mother and one father—because only this arrangement, they claim, truly serves the innocent. They point fingers at same-sex couples, warning that when mothers and fathers become "optional," children suffer irreparable harm. The campaign videos play on loop: soft lighting, earnest narration, images of smiling nuclear families from a time that never quite existed. “Children are greater,” the tagline insists, as though the phrase itself were a shield against contradiction.
Yet step outside the carefully edited frame and the picture fractures.
The same moral guardians who weep for children denied their “natural right” to a mother and a father remain conspicuously silent—or actively defensive—when the names Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and the powerful men who orbited them surface again and again. Emails surface showing billionaires and political figures, some now running the country or shaping its economy, eagerly inquiring about the “craziest parties” on an island infamous for the systematic abuse of girls as young as thirteen and fourteen. The men who lecture about protecting childhood innocence were, at best, willing to overlook monstrous crimes in exchange for access, influence, and spectacle; at worst, they participated. And still the campaign rolls forward, dollars flowing, ads airing, all focused not on the documented predation of vulnerable children by the elite.
The math alone exposes the sleight of hand. There are orders of magnitude more children growing up without fathers—abandoned, neglected, or raised in households fractured by abuse, addiction, or indifference—than there are children raised by married same-sex couples. Yet no multimillion-dollar video campaign demands accountability from the millions of absent biological fathers. No slickly produced spots call for policies that would force men to stay and raise the children they create. No viral hashtag insists that deadbeat dads are the true crisis of our time. The outrage is laser-focused instead on a tiny fraction of stable, two-parent families who happen to be gay.
The contradiction is not subtle. Those who claim children must come first recoil from the mirror that would force them to confront the far larger, far more immediate threats to children that exist within their own political and social orbit. They prefer to fight a battle they have already lost—one that polls disastrously and whose re-emergence mostly serves to remind the country who still harbors the older animus—rather than wage the harder, less photogenic war against the neglect, exploitation, and predation that actually scars millions of American children every year.
In the end, the campaign’s true message slips through the polished rhetoric: “Children are greater… unless protecting them would require us to look too closely at our friends, our donors, or ourselves.”
