How Illinois rewrote its family law, who wrote the script,
where the money came from, and why the change had nothing to do with science.
The Strategy
In 1989, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote a book titled After the Ball, which outlined a strategy for changing a culture’s attitudes on a large scale. The strategy does not work by argument. You tie the thing you want accepted to warm, sympathetic feelings. You repeat it relentlessly until it stops sounding strange and starts sounding ordinary. You put it in the mouths of trusted, likable, authoritative figures so that it arrives already endorsed. And you make objecting to it socially expensive, so that the doubters fall silent rather than pay the price of speaking.
The whole approach aims at the reflex and steps around the reason.
Look at how the language in infant feeding spread, and you are looking at that method in operation. The change was framed from the first as compassion and inclusion. Repetition through journals, conferences, and style guides turned it into the mark of a competent and caring professional. One of the most trusted authorities in the field, Mohrbacher herself, carried it into the standard reference. And questioning it inside the profession came at a real cost to a person’s standing, so silence spread through the field faster than agreement ever could have.
Whether or not a single person in this story ever held Kirk and Madsen’s book in hand, the campaign followed its logic step by step, because that logic is how this kind of change is engineered.
The method has a living practitioner
The method has a living practitioner, and he described it himself long before anyone made him a public official. In 1995, a former history teacher named Kevin Jennings stood up at a movement leadership conference and explained how his side had won its first big fight in Massachusetts. They had taken their opponents’ own word, safety, and made it their own, recasting an advocacy campaign as the protection of children, because almost no one will stand up against keeping children safe. He warned that same audience that if their opponents ever managed to portray them as preying on children, they would lose.
That is the reframing laid out in plain language, by one of its most effective hands, years before any of this reached infant feeding.
Jennings had founded GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. This organization pioneered the model school policies that were later used to grant students access to locker rooms and restrooms based on gender identity rather than sex. President Obama appointed him Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Department of Education’s Office of Safe Schools and put him in charge of the administration’s anti-bullying initiative, the campaign behind the federal bullying summits, and the 2011 White House Conference on the subject.
In October 2010, in the middle of that campaign, the department sent a Dear Colleague letter to administrators at every public and private school in the country, including the nation’s roughly fifteen thousand superintendents. The letter bore the signature of Russlynn Ali, who ran the department’s Office for Civil Rights, rather than Jennings’s, whose safe-schools office was a separate shop. Yet it was the civil-rights arm of the initiative Jennings led. Jennings was the public face of that initiative, and he helped roll it out and ran the campaign that pushed it into the schools. It rested on the same safety framing he had used since Massachusetts.
The campaign was his. The letter served it.
The choice of office was the point. The Office for Civil Rights is the one part of the department that can open an investigation into a school and put its federal funding at risk, so a letter from that office reminding schools of their “obligations” lands as a warning. Every superintendent who received it understood that an investigation and the loss of federal money stood behind the polite language. And the warning told them that harassing a student for failing to conform to sex stereotypes counted as sex discrimination under Title IX, and that a school treating such conduct as ordinary bullying could be found in violation of its students’ civil rights.
The department then ran workshops across the country to train educators in the new reading. The framing was safety. The instrument was the threat of a federal civil-rights investigation and the loss of federal money.
The 2010 letter never named locker rooms. It laid the track. So when the next Dear Colleague letter arrived in May 2016 and named locker rooms and restrooms out loud, long after Jennings had left the department, it did not have to win any argument. The schools had spent six years being taught the sex-stereotyping theory, trained in it by federal workshops, and reminded that the civil-rights office stood ready to enforce it. The resistance that might have met a cold new demand never came. The ground had been prepared.
After he left the government, Jennings ran the Arcus Foundation, one of the same private funders whose money reaches the legal network in this story, for about five years. And in 2019, he became the chief executive of Lambda Legal, one of the three litigation organizations that helped write the degendering of parentage law into state codes, and the organization that today sues school districts to force the very facilities access that GLSEN’s model policies first proposed.
Follow that one career, and the whole machine shows up in a single man. As a young activist, he built the method. He later spent five years directing one of the movement’s largest pools of money, and he now runs one of its three principal litigation organizations. The commanding chairs in this movement, among its funders, its lawyers, and the commissions that write its model laws, are held by a small circle of people who rotate among them, and Kevin Jennings has now held three of those chairs in turn.
The engine underneath the method
The premise driving the method has a home, and the home is a division of the American Psychological Association. APA Division 44, now formally called the Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, has for years promoted what its own leaders call liberation psychology.
In the fall of 2004, the division’s president, Judith Glassgold, reprinted her remarks from the APA convention in the division newsletter, and she told her colleagues that “much of the behavior that ends up being termed ‘psychopathology’ is not simply an individual trait, but the outcome of social forces.” If a person’s distress comes from social forces and from the very words a society uses, then the way to treat the patient is to change the society and rewrite the words. The work of the profession ceases to be the care of the person in the chair and becomes the remaking of the world around the chair.
That premise sat underneath every professional decision in this story. In July 2021, Division 44 made its logic explicit. It voted to make its committee on consensual non-monogamy a permanent body. It announced, in its own words, that this was the first time a national scientific association had committed to formally recognizing and supporting consensual multi-partner families.
The same division’s leaders went on to co-author a new guideline in the APA’s official guidelines for practice with sexual minority persons, Guideline 9, which directs psychologists to affirm clients in consensually non-monogamous relationships.
A field that once described families had begun, through its own governing guidelines, to expand what counts as one.
This is the layer that explains the sincerity of everyone above it. The lactation consultant adopting new words, the physician signing a language statement, the nurse trusting her association, each of them acted in good faith on a premise that had been placed there for them by people whose actual aim reached far past any single clinic.
They thought the question was kindness to a patient. The people who set the premise understood the question as the remaking of culture, and they had said so out loud in their own newsletters for those who cared to read them.
The same premise, carried into the law
The law was moved by the same premise, in a different set of hands. The litigation organizations of the movement, Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, now renamed the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, have for years pressed for the broadest possible removal of sexed terms from family law. To get that into the statute books across the country, they used an institution that almost no one outside the legal profession has ever heard of, and its obscurity is exactly why it was useful.
The Uniform Law Commission has drafted model laws for the states since 1892. It is funded by state dues, treated as neutral and technical, and adopted by state legislatures as a matter of routine good government, the way they would adopt a model commercial code. In 2017, the commission promulgated a new Uniform Parentage Act that replaced “mother” and “father” with “parent” throughout, replaced “paternity” with “parentage,” and introduced the term “gestating parent.”
Now look at who wrote it. The drafting committee was co-chaired by Jamie Pedersen, a Washington state senator who is now his chamber’s Majority Leader. Pedersen has chaired Lambda Legal’s National Leadership Council continuously since 2005, after serving as chair of Lambda’s board from 2003 to 2005. And after the model act was finished, he sponsored his own state’s adoption of it, carrying the bill that was enacted in Washington, the language he had helped write at the commission.
The advocacy organization, the drafting authority, and the legislative sponsor were a single man. The committee’s official Reporter, the person who actually drafted the text, was Courtney Joslin, a University of California, Davis law professor who then published an endorsement of the act in the Yale Law Journal. And sitting in the room as official observers, arguing for the provisions, were Lambda Legal and the ACLU, confirmed in Oregon’s own legislative record, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, confirmed in NCLR’s own published statement.
The model law that came out of that room has now been adopted, in whole or in part, by eleven states. California, Washington, and Vermont enacted it in 2019. Maine, Connecticut, Colorado, and Rhode Island followed in 2021. Hawaii came in 2022. Oregon and Illinois enacted it in 2023. Massachusetts passed its version in 2024, and the Massachusetts House passed it 156 to nothing.
The escalation is already visible in New York, where Senate Bill 9316 passed the state Senate 38 to 23 in 2026 and would push “gestating parent” out of surrogacy law and across the entire family code.
A trusted, neutral institution had been used to move an advocacy position into the statute books, and because legislatures trust that institution, they handled the change as housekeeping. In most of those eleven states, the words “mother” and “father” left the law with little debate and no public reckoning at all. Illinois, as we began, did it twice, first by adopting the model act as House Bill 1591 in 2023, then by gutting its parentage language far more aggressively with the Equality for Every Family Act in 2025.
stay tuned for part three…
