On September 15, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to add “family and relationship structure” to the city’s civil rights code. Polyamory, asexuality, aromanticism, chosen family, and multigenerational households are now protected classes, covered in employment, housing, business licensing, public accommodations, city parks, and how police are trained to treat residents. It takes effect in June 2027. It gave polyamory civil-rights protection in the name of equality.

This is the final phase of deconstruction of what used to be the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known.

Marriage has historically been defined by three stabilizing norms: permanence, complementarity, and monogamy. These characteristics did not become central to marriage across civilizations by happenstance. Each serves a distinct, child-centered purpose.

Permanence matters because children need both parents for life. Before no-fault divorce, marriage could be dissolved only when one spouse was deemed “at fault” for violating their vows. In California, that changed in 1969. No-fault divorce allowed adults to exit a marriage if the wife “had an unseen mental load,” if the half-his-age secretary made a better vacation companion, or simply when that “chapter of their life” ended. Research consistently shows that divorce is associated with long-term physical, emotional, academic, relational, and economic disadvantages for the children involved. No-fault divorce marked the first time our laws formally declared that marriage was not a child-centric institution, but was instead primarily about adult happiness.

Complementarity requires that both halves of the human species be represented in a child’s home. That matters because mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. Children do not need “parents” in the abstract; they need a mother and a father. Men and women bring distinct, embodied differences critical for child development. But post-Obergefell, marriage was legally redefined to exclude sexual complementarity altogether. Male and female presence was treated as optional, leading to the intentional creation of motherless and fatherless homes, and the identity struggles and mother or father hunger that go with it.

Monogamy matters because biology matters. It protects children by keeping their biological parents in and unrelated adults out. A child’s own mother and father are statistically the adults most likely to be connected to, invested in, and protective of that child. The presence of unrelated adults in the home consistently correlates with higher risks of abuse and neglect, a pattern so well-documented that it is known among sociologists as the “Cinderella effect”. Stepmothers spend less money on children, take them to the doctor less, and buckle their seatbelts less often. Stepfathers and live-in boyfriends? Statistically the most dangerous people in a child’s life. Monogamy may be the most effective tool of child protection in humanity’s arsenal.

That’s why, at every stage of marriage’s redefinition, adults gained freedom and “equality,” but children paid the price.

Seattle’s ordinance doesn’t create a new protected category for poly-identifiers. It extends the city’s existing definition of sexual orientation to cover polyamory, folding “consensual relationships with multiple partners” directly into what the law already protects under “sexual orientation.” Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck called it equal protection under the law, the same phrase used for the previous round of family redefinition. Somerville, Massachusetts, made the identical argument in 2020, when it became the first U.S. city to recognize polyamorous domestic partnerships: love is love, we deserve equal protection, we’re not harming anybody. Seattle is the latest of several cities to follow suit, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Nobody in that council chamber spoke for the kids who will grow up inside these arrangements. And if they did, they likely would’ve repeated the same dangerous lie: polyamory just means more adults to love a child. In line with everything else we know about child protection, namely that unrelated adults always increase the risk of abuse and neglect, the research on polyamory and polygamy specifically says the opposite.

Anthropologists note that polygynous households carry elevated risks of intra-household abuse, neglect, and homicide, because more partners means more genetic strangers in the home, more unrelated dyads. Children who live with one or more unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die from an inflicted injury as children living with both biological parents. Additional adults in the home don’t multiply love. They multiply risk.

Seattle is using marriage to validate adult sexual identity. As always, children will pay the price.

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Katy Faust (@Katy_Faust) is president of Them Before Us, and author of the books “Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement,” “Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City,” and “Pro-Child Politics.” Subscribe to her Substack: http://thembeforeus.substack.com.

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