The National Register commentary by Jennifer Roback Morse (June 26, 2026) exposes, with painful clarity, the inevitable fruits of the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which redefined marriage to accommodate same-sex unions. The article documents a social media exchange between Katy Faust of the children’s rights group Them Before Us and University of Arizona women’s coach Becky Burke, who announced she and her female partner are expecting a baby via donor sperm. Morse catalogues the predictable sufferings of donor-conceived children: hunger for paternal love, identity confusion, self-worth struggles, and the cultural gaslighting that tells them their fatherlessness is the price of a new “civil right.” Coach Burke’s response, as Morse notes, offers “not one word” about these concerns, focusing exclusively on “representation,” “visibility,” and the feelings of adults in the “gay community.” The article frames this as a pattern: advocates of genderless marriage systematically redirect discussion from concrete harms to children toward the emotional gratification of adults, dismissing all opposition as mere hatred.
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this episode is not an isolated cultural skirmish but a manifest consequence of the systematic rebellion against the Divine Law established by Christ the King. The entire trajectory of the Sexual Revolution, of which Obergefell is a milestone, is a direct assault on the sacrament of matrimony and the divine institution of the family. The Catholic Church has always taught, with the infallible voice of the Council of Trent, that marriage is a sacrament ordained by God for the procreation and education of children and the mutual help of the spouses, and that its essential properties are unity and indissolubility. The attempt to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples is not a mere legal adjustment but a blasphemous distortion of a divine institution, condemned repeatedly by the Magisterium. As Pope Pius XI declared in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), the reign of Christ extends over all human societies, and no human authority can legitimately contravene the divine positive law. The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX (1864) explicitly condemns the proposition that “the Church has not the power of establishing diriment impediments of marriage” (proposition 68) and that marriage is merely a civil contract dissoluble by the state (propositions 65-67). The modernist rejection of these truths, which culminated in the post-conciliar embrace of “theology of the body” distortions and the practical acceptance of irregular unions, is a formal defection from the Catholic faith.
The linguistic and rhetorical strategies employed by Coach Burke, as documented by Morse, reveal the theological bankruptcy of the genderless marriage ideology. Burke’s statement is a textbook example of what the Catholic tradition calls argumentum ad passiones—an appeal to emotion in place of reason—combined with the modernist dogma of “representation” and “visibility” as ultimate values. Her language is saturated with the therapeutic jargon of self-actualization: “Representation matters. Visibility matters.” This is the language of the cult of man, which Pope Pius XI identified as the root error of laicism and secularism. The complete absence of any reference to the objective good of the children, the supernatural destiny of the family, or the objective moral order established by God reveals the spiritual vacuity of the entire project. Burke’s statement is not a defense of marriage but a celebration of adult narcissism, a public relations campaign for the normalization of a objectively disordered arrangement. The post-conciliar structures, with their endless talk of “accompaniment” and “discernment,” have provided the perfect theological cover for this kind of spiritual child abuse, reducing the moral law to a set of suggestions and the good of children to a secondary consideration.
The symptomatic level of analysis reveals that the Obergefell decision and the cultural apparatus surrounding it are inherent fruits of the conciliar revolution and its embrace of modernism. The “hermeneutics of continuity” has been exposed as a fraud; the real trajectory of post-conciliarism is one of systematic accommodation to the world, a practical implementation of the very errors condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907) and Pascendi Dominici gregis. The modernist proposition that “revelation… did not cease with the Apostles” (proposition 21) and that dogmas are merely interpretations of religious facts (proposition 22) has led directly to the dissolution of all moral boundaries, including the definition of marriage. The current antipope and his predecessors have consistently refused to clearly and unequivocally condemn the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts and the impossibility of same-sex marriage, preferring instead the language of “respect” and “welcome” that enables the very cultural revolution documented in this article. The structures occupying the Vatican are not merely failing to resist the Sexual Revolution; they are actively facilitating it through their silence, their ambiguous language, and their practical acceptance of the gender ideology that underlies the entire movement.
The gravest omission in the article, from a Catholic perspective, is the complete silence about the supernatural dimension of the crisis. The children conceived through donor sperm are not merely psychologically disadvantaged; they are being deprived of the supernatural good of being raised by their natural parents within the sacrament of matrimony, which is a living sign of Christ’s union with His Church. The Catholic tradition teaches that the family is a domestic church, and that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children in the faith. The deliberate creation of fatherless or motherless children through artificial reproduction is a violation of the natural law and a grave sin against the dignity of the human person. The post-conciliar structures, with their endless talk of “accompaniment” and “mercy,” have abandoned these children to a spiritual wasteland, offering them no protection and no truth. The Defense of Sedevacantism reminds us that a manifest heretic cannot be the head of the Church, and that the current occupants of the Vatican, by their public and manifest defense of positions contrary to the faith, have lost all jurisdiction. The true Church endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith and are led by bishops with valid sacraments, and it is only within this true Church that the protection of children and the defense of the family can be secured.
The article’s concluding prayer for Burke and her children is a natural gesture of compassion, but it is insufficient without the supernatural truth that alone can heal the wounds of the Sexual Revolution. The Catholic response to this crisis must be not merely therapeutic but theological and spiritual: a reaffirmation of the divine institution of marriage, the absolute primacy of Christ the King over all human societies, and the objective moral law that governs human sexuality and procreation. The Syllabus of Errors condemns the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (proposition 80). The current crisis is the inevitable result of the attempt to reconcile the Church with the Sexual Revolution, and the only remedy is a return to the immutable tradition of the faith, without compromise or accommodation. The children of donor conception, and all the victims of the Sexual Revolution, deserve nothing less than the full truth of the Catholic faith, proclaimed without fear or equivocation.
Source:
Are We Sure the Kids Will Be All Right? (ncregister.com)
Date: 26.06.2026