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A 2015 ABC Lateline interview revisited: Katy Faust, raised by lesbian mothers, calmly dismantles Australia’s most probing journalist with compelling, child-centred arguments against same-sex marriage.

When Truth Comes to Town

A long, long time ago, all the way back in 2015, actually, a quietly spoken yet courageous ‘mom’ and pastor’s wife from America, Katy Faust, appeared on the ABC’s Lateline. Fast forward to 2026, and Faust is one of the most courageous spokespersons in the world for the rights of children, especially as they relate to the injustice of gay marriage. All this from a woman whose greatest boast is as a ‘mom’ and a wife of a Christian pastor.

When it comes to Katy’s interview on Australia’s tax-funded national broadcaster, though, you have to realise this was still a couple of years before the institution of marriage was redefined. Apparently, we couldn’t be trusted to behave civilly in a plebiscite, let alone a democratically appropriate mechanism such as a referendum. No, our federal politicians sought to change the most important legislation ever essentially by a voluntary, non-binding, postal version of Survey Monkey©.

Stepping into the modern-day lion’s den of our only occasional national broadcaster (which is Australia’s version of CNN, or what the US President pejoratively simply refers to as ‘fake news’), Katy was at the time serving on the academic and testimonial council of the International Children’s Rights Institute. And while Tony Jones is arguably one of the best interviewers in the country, I don’t think even he was prepared for the stellar quality of the rapid-fire answers he was about to receive.

Jones had pre-prepared a number of pointed political and personal questions which most guests would have honestly stumbled over, at least at one point. But in the sovereign providence of God, 12 August 2015 was not going to be one of those times.

What you’re about to read next is a transcript of what took place, and you have to remember that none of these questions was given with prior notice. What you’re going to find is that Mrs Faust’s answers were as concise as they were cogent. And because of the timeless nature of the truth she was presenting, her answers remain as relevant and as true as they were when she first gave them.

So, make yourself a coffee or tea, stop doom-scrolling and be prepared to be blown away by a pastor’s wife schooling one of Australia’s most left-leaning journalists on why gay marriage should never have occurred. Jones’ questions, Katy’s answers and my own (Mark Powell – MP) relatively short commentary follow:

Question 1

TJ        Have you been able to talk to any politicians yet?

KF       We did. My partner in crime, Millie Fontana, who is a resident of Melbourne and also raised by two mothers [as was I], had a chance to talk to a couple of members of parliament yesterday.

MP      Notice how Jones immediately tries to put Katy on the back foot by asking her if anyone has been prepared to even meet with her, let alone listen to and be persuaded by what she has to say. Katy responds, though, that indeed, some members of parliament have been willing to meet with her. What’s more, this is not just an American sticking their nose into our own politics, because she was also joined by the outspoken Aussie opponent to gay marriage, Millie Fontana. Someone who, significantly, was not a Christian, but had precisely the same concerns as Katy has regarding the rights of children. And so Jones presses the point with this follow-up question…

Question 2

TJ        Not the Prime Minister so far?

KF       No. No, he hasn’t called yet.

MP      Sadly Tony Abbott never did, and precisely one month later, on 15 September 2015, he was removed by his own party in favour of Malcolm Turnbull. The reason why that particular phone call was explained by Brendon O’Neill on the ABC’s Q&A just a couple of days later. As the editor for Spiked said:

“The reason Tony Abbott is very defensive on this issue and is umming and aring and shifting from the free vote to the not free vote and all this, is because he clearly has a problem with gay marriage, but he can’t articulate it because we live in a climate in which it’s not acceptable, as we’ve just seen in Sam’s (Dastyari) attack on Katy calling her hateful and saying she’s talking claptrap. It’s not acceptable to express this sentiment in public life. And I think [applause] Tony Abbot is now being described as someone from the dark ages for believing what humanity has believed for thousands of years.

Within the space of a decade something that humanity has believed for thousands of years has suddenly become a form of bigotry, a form of hate, something you’re not allowed to express in public life. That extraordinary shift in intolerance is something I think all liberals, like me, should be worried about. Gay marriage is not a liberal issue, it has a deeply illiberal streak.”

The relevant clip can be viewed below from the 25-minute mark.

Question 3

TJ       Now, how is it that the daughter of lesbian mothers has become a leading opponent of gay marriage? How does that work?

KF       Simply because while I recognise that while my mother was a fantastic mother and most of what I do well as a mother myself, I do because that’s how she parented me, she can’t be a father. Her partner, an incredible woman, both of these women have my heart, cannot be a father either. Children have a right to be in relationship with their mother and father whenever possible, and as a society, we shouldn’t normalise a family structure that requires children to lose one or both parents to be in that household.

MP      This goes to the very essence of the whole issue. Having a child is not the same thing as purchasing a puppy. That is because children are people and not someone’s personal property. What this also means is that as human beings, they also have innate rights, of which one of the most important is the right to be raised by the mother and father who produced them. Becoming a parent carries with it wonderful joys, but also a lifelong responsibility. This is also why the act of procreation has been considered to be so sacred.

Question 4

TJ       Now trying to sway the US Supreme Court to rule against gay marriage, you wrote to Justice Anthony Kennedy before that vote, and you said, “You used to say I’m happy my parents got divorced so I could get to know all you wonderful women.” Now you seem to be saying that was all a lie…?

KF       Well, there’s a lot of pressure on children of gay parents to please their parents, to sort of carry the banner forward for them, and you can read about this not just in conservative publications but even books like Families Like Mine, which was publicised by a pro-gay marriage daughter of gays. And she admitted, and several of the kids in that book admitted, that it’s very difficult to be honest about this because of the political pressure surrounding this topic. There are several children who have contacted me ever since I started writing about this, saying, I agree with you, but I’ll never come out and speak about this publicly, because my relationship with my parents is too tenuous.

MP      This is an incredibly important point which is rarely allowed to be expressed. If you’ve never seen this, watch the following moving presentation by Millie-Fontana, who talks about the heartbreak and trauma from not knowing who her father was because she was donor-conceived and raised by lesbian parents.

Question 5

TJ       Now Katy, did you find God somewhere in this journey towards anti-gay marriage?

KF       Well, I was not raised a Christian, but I did become a Christian in high school.

MP      Yes, Katy is a Christian. But as Millie Fontana—who is not a Christian—pointed out in the above video, you don’t have to be religious to understand that gay marriage creates inequality for children. What Millie Fontana said back in 2015 has proven to be prophetic when she said in a speech, “This is an extremist minority that are pushing, from my opinion, what seems to be extinction of gender in itself. I don’t see gender equality. I see a pitch to get rid of gender altogether.”

While people at the time viewed her prediction as extreme, just over ten years later, I don’t know anyone who disagrees about just how right she was!

Question 6

TJ       And did that change things? I mean, did you decide that homosexuality was against the Scriptures, against God’s will, something of that nature?

KF       Well, it took a long time, honestly, for me to get on board with what Biblical sexuality says because there’s a very fierce protectiveness, I think, all children have for their parents, but what I was delighted to find when I read Scripture, is that God has an incredible heart for the orphan, and that He’s very concerned for the plight of children.

And that lines up very much with where we need to go in this discussion, which is focusing on the rights of children primarily as opposed to emphasising the desires of adults, which tend to take centre-stage when we’re talking about this issue.

MP      Katy is clever in how she pivots on the question here because rather than saying what the Bible is against, she reaffirms what God is for. And it’s not without significance that so often in the Bible He calls Himself the Father of the fatherless and defender of widows – i.e. Psalm 68:5.

Question 7

TJ       After your parents divorced—because you originally had a father and a mother—they divorced. Your father, you say, went off with other women… Why have you focused your main criticism on the homosexual part of the equation and not your father?

KF       Well, I think that I’m pretty fair in my statements to say that whether you’re heterosexual or homosexual, children have rights. And the onus needs to be on adults to conform to the rights of children, rather than children fitting into an adult’s lifestyle.

And certainly, I don’t think that homosexuals are responsible by any means for the crisis that we face in America when it comes to family structure these days. Absolutely, heterosexuals have led the way on that charge.

I got into this discussion primarily because what I heard from the gay lobby was that children don’t care who’s raising them, right? That children are just fine if it’s two men or two women, and the reality is that anybody who’s talked to a child who has lost a parent, whether through divorce, abandonment, third-party reproduction or death, kids absolutely care. Family structure matters to children.

And so I heard the LGBT lobby say it doesn’t matter, they [children] don’t care, and I think that that’s reality.

MP      Once again, especially if you’ve skipped over it and haven’t watched the above speech by Millie Fontana. Children do care whether they are being raised by both of their biological parents. As Katy rightly says, “They absolutely do!”

Question 8

TJ       You were also motivated politically when President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, and you set up an anonymous blog called “Ask the Bigot”. Why did you do that, why did you call it that to start with, and what happened when you did it?

KF       Yes, well, you know, strangely the URL wasn’t taken for that web name, not sure why..

But it was kind of born in an angry moment. I’m not really a confrontational person, but what happened when Obama ‘evolved’ is, to me, it felt like the media was free to play the bigot card. So now everybody who doesn’t support gay marriage is a bigot, right? Because either you’re isolated and you don’t know any gay people, or you’re indoctrinated, or you’re homophobic, or you’re the equivalent of a racist.

And they were not giving any attention to people who had a genuine argument, a well-founded, secular, convincing argument for supporting traditional marriage. And so I started blogging anonymously…

MP      Ten years after same-sex marriage was introduced, and we’ve seen an increasing intolerance and hatred towards people of faith, particularly those who are Jews but also Christians. There were warning signs of this happening even at the time. Just take, for instance, the bombing of the Australian Christian Lobby’s office in Canberra, and the AFP’s seeming reluctance to prosecute.

Even the ABC’s Media Watch covered the mainstream media deception with the fake “Stop the Fags” posters being put up around Melbourne. Don’t know what I’m referring to? Then take a look at this post.

Question 9

TJ       I was going to make that point… you started blogging anonymously, what happened? Why did you go public, as it were?

KF       I didn’t. I was ‘outed’ by a gay blogger who felt like I needed to be held accountable for my stance. And the truth is that I would not have filed a brief with the Supreme Court—I wouldn’t be having this interview with you today—because I never intended to be involved in the legal fight. But because I was outed in the name of love and tolerance, I am talking with you today.

MP      Well, that one certainly backfired, didn’t — God 1 vs Gay Blogger 0.

Question 10

TJ       So just going to that Supreme Court decision, in June, Justice Kennedy authored — the same man you wrote to — authored the Supreme Court’s decision in favour of same-sex marriage. He began in agreement with you, saying that no union is more profound than marriage. But he said of the gay people who had petitioned the court, it would be to misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they respect it so much, respect it so deeply, that they seek to find its fulfilment for themselves. And now, obviously, the court agreed that their dignity was the critical thing here. Why do you disagree with that position?

KF       Well, because they have dignity, right? Single parents have dignity. People who have never been married have dignity. You don’t gain dignity by government bestowing that on you. You just have it. The question is not whether or not they have dignity, and the question is not even really whether or not they have the capacity to love and commit the way heterosexuals do — they do. They absolutely do!

The question is, what is government’s interest in marriage? It’s really not about affirming the connections that we have with one another; it has to do with the product of those unions, and there’s something distinct about the product of a union between heterosexuals. What’s distinct is that they make babies. And those babes have rights, and those babies deserve protection.

MP      This is another brilliant response because it highlights by what standard ethical decisions are made. If it is merely whatever the most popular opinion of the day is — well, it’s unreliable since it changes as often as the election promises of politicians. Without some kind of objective criterion to assess it, though, the slogan “love is love” is as practically useful as saying, “cat food is cat food”. That’s all well and good if the food the cat wants to eat is good, but what if a cat consumes something like ‘chocolate’? (Hint: it never ends well.) In the same way, though, ‘love is love’ without a boundary opens an immoral Pandora’s box of every kind of sexual depravity.

We Cannot Be Silent!

All I can say, especially after Katy’s answer to that last question, is ‘BOOM’, as my children like to say. There was something about this whole interview that reminded me of Jesus’ promise in the Gospels when He sends out the twelve on mission:

“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard; you will be handed over to the local councils and be flogged in the synagogues. On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles.

But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” (Matthew 10:16-20)

More and more and more Christians in the West are being hated by the very culture that they were responsible for creating. As Stephen McAlpine wisely writes, we are the ‘bad guys’ now. But the example of Katy Faust’s performance on Lateline is a great reminder and encouragement for us all.

Don’t be silent or afraid to speak, for it is especially in those times of opposition when the LORD shines through as our gracious and all-powerful redeemer. Or as Katy Faust herself has recently written, “We are done being silent.”

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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.