The Resistance Brief: Families Aren’t Meant to Be Ranked 

Blog by Ricardo Martinez (he/him), Executive Director

A couple of weeks ago, a coalition of organizations that have spent decades opposing equality launched what they’re calling the “Greater Than” campaign. This is their latest attack on LGBTQ+ families and marriage equality. Something about it nagged at me immediately. The name and its messaging were just bizarre. “Greater Than” reminded me of a sticker we used at GLSEN (now Glisten) when I was there: together we’re greater than divided. That sticker made sense. It sought unity and community – it aspirationally made space for all of us. This campaign does the opposite. 

It wasn’t until I was sitting in a meeting of the Executive Alumni Council of my alma mater, The New School, that I figured out what nagged me most about the campaign. I’ve always been someone who loves statistics and follows rules, especially in math. And sitting there, it became clear: these organizations had tried to be clever, reached for a symbol, and fumbled it completely. 

In math, “greater than” does one simple thing: it tells you which of two numbers is bigger. For the numbers we use in everyday arithmetic, it works perfectly because those numbers live on a single straight line where every number has one place. The number 5 is always to the right of 3. End of story. But even mathematics itself recognizes that not everything fits along a single line, and the moment you move beyond one dimension, “greater than” stops working. 

And families are about as far from one-dimensional as it gets. You can’t meaningfully say that one type of family is “greater than” another, because there’s no single agreed-upon measuring stick. There never could be.  

The beauty of families is that they can’t be captured in a single measure. They’re shaped by love, history, culture, sacrifice, circumstance, and connection. Ranking them on one scale doesn’t clarify anything – it just strips away everything that makes them real – everything that makes them special.

This campaign is part of a sustained and coordinated effort to establish one narrowly defined family structure as the only legitimate one. We’ve watched the same playbook deployed against transgender people: a flood of misinformation designed not to inform but to otherize, to make LGBTQ+ lives and families seem threatening or simply wrong. The “Greater Than” campaign is that same effort extended to marriage and family – an attempt to use the apparatus of law and culture to encode a homogeneous, patriarchal vision of family life as the rational and moral basis for governance. It is Christian Nationalism with a symbol attached. 

The people claiming to be the great defenders of children and family are using a framework so narrow it can barely contain what families actually are. This is the same “Save Our Children” messaging Anita Bryant weaponized in 1977, now repackaged by her ideological descendants who are doing the most they can with the least they’ve got. This campaign doesn’t protect children – it abandons them. It attacks the loving, supportive homes where millions of children are being raised: by single parents, LGBTQ+ parents, parents who grew their families through IVF, gamete donation, surrogacy, or adoption, stepparents, widowed parents, divorced parents, and beloved caregivers. Children thrive when they have people who love and care for them – and our society is stronger when those people can become parents and nurture the next generation.

The more sinister message lurking beneath the symbol is this: for something to be “greater than,” something else must be less than. That’s what this campaign wants people to absorb – that LGBTQ+ families don’t just differ from what they consider traditional, they rank below it. That our children deserve less. That our love counts for less. That we are less. 

But that’s not how the world works. Nature, culture, language, and human experience don’t thrive through ranking – they flourish through variety. Jazz isn’t better or worse than classical music; both are vital and irreplaceable parts of our shared human experience. The same is true for families. A worldview that can only sort the world into “greater” and “lesser” doesn’t see the world more clearly. It misses almost all of it. 

And that is telling. This campaign feels like a desperate attempt to recapture a past when our families were invalidated simply for being different, and it shows. A campaign that can’t define what it’s measuring is only measuring fear. Even the Supreme Court understands this should stay relegated to the past, declining to revisit marriage equality just this past November. Some arguments don’t deserve a debate; they just deserve to lose.

We should be long past the day when children are denied the security and stability they deserve simply because some disapprove of how their family was formed. The real work is strengthening the conditions that help all families thrive – not tearing down the ones that don’t fit a narrow mold. That’s where our energy belongs. 

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What to know, what to do:

• We joined NCLR and COLAGE to oppose pending federal rules that would strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals caring for transgender youth. Read our blog post or learn more from our video about this action.
• Polly Crozier, Director of Family Advocacy, joins WGBH Under the Radar to discuss the Olympics, the Trump Administration removing Pride flags at Stonewall, and the extreme “Greater Than” campaign aiming to undermine families and equal marriage. ​​​​​
• The Ringer follows people caught in the current administration’s deliberate cruelty, including Nic Talbott and Logan Ireland, plaintiffs in our legal challenges to the administration’s hostile actions against transgender servicemembers. 
• In a dangerous escalation Kansas revoked transgender residents’ IDs overnight. The move comes amid intensifying attacks on vulnerable communities and priming restrictions on Americans’ voting rights.

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