Almost 10 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage would be legal across the country. Today, sensing a political shift toward socially conservative policy, Republican policymakers in states from Michigan to Tennessee have begun proposing bills that would roll back same-sex marriage.
These lawmakers may discover to their dismay that they have the politics of the issue quite wrong. Though the cultural winds have shifted on many issues, Republican voters are not clamoring for an unraveling of same-sex marriage rights. Republican voters have objected to socially progressive policies that they believe incur a cost to themselves or others, but the experience over the past decade with legal same-sex marriage has persuaded many in the party that it is nothing to be feared.
Polls of American voters generally show support for same-sex marriage rising over the past three decades, both before and after the Obergefell decision. A whopping 68 percent of Americans said they supported legal recognition of same-sex marriages, according to a Gallup poll from last month. Younger voters, a demographic courted by Donald Trump in his recent presidential campaign, are typically the most supportive of gay rights; indeed, some of those who voted for the first time in 2024 may have scarce memory of a time when same-sex marriage was not the law of the land.
Among Republicans, the story is admittedly more complicated. There has been a backsliding of support for same-sex marriage among Republicans in recent years, but surveys differ on whether this is a blip or a full-fledged reversal. While Gallup shows a 14-point decline in support among Republicans for same-sex marriage since 2022, my surveys have shown Republican support for legal same-sex marriage bouncing back above its pre-2022 levels, from 40 percent in 2022 to 43 percent in 2023 to 48 percent in 2024. (Notably, even in Gallup’s grimmer data, Republican support for gay marriage remains significantly higher today than it was on the day the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell.)
There are two main lines of argument that seem to resonate most strongly with Republicans on preserving same-sex marriage: Live and let live, and leave well enough alone.
Republicans remain very open to the idea that the government should not be in the business of meddling with or punishing people because they are gay or lesbian. In polling I conducted with a coalition of Republican pollsters on behalf of Centerline Liberties and Project Right Side, published Friday morning, roughly 78 percent of Republicans surveyed said that “what two consenting adults do in their personal lives is none of my business — and it shouldn’t be the government’s either.” Government is already “too big and intrusive” was a convincing argument in support of legal same-sex marriage, according to the survey. (My polling firm Echelon Insights was compensated for our work on the poll.)
L.G.B.T.Q. issues remain a major part of our political discourse, and Republican voters seem to have made a distinction between the “L.G.B.” and the “T.” They continue to strongly oppose things like the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports — a topic on which a majority of Americans agree with them. However, when it comes to same-sex marriage, people appear to feel little or no imposition on the lives of others. Same-sex couples can live and thrive in communities side by side with heterosexual married couples harmoniously. Live and let live.
But even setting aside the arguments in favor of same-sex marriage on the merits, there are legal and political considerations that even more skeptical Republicans understand. Mr. Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 with a more moderate approach to social issues than most of his competitors in the primary. Not long after his victory over Hillary Clinton that year, he indicated that he considered the same-sex marriage issue resolved, telling Lesley Stahl: “These cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And I’m fine with that.” In 2024 he proposed a Republican Party platform that softened the party’s stance on the matter. In my polling with Centerline Liberties, some seven in 10 Republicans found Mr. Trump’s stance to be a convincing reason to support same-sex marriage.
The reality is that there is little political passion or momentum on the side of opposition to legal same-sex marriage. It has been in place for a decade (or longer in states that embraced it before Obergefell). Families have been established, and gains have been made that people will be loath to give up. As millennials and Generation Z voters become a larger slice of the electorate, the political viability of opposing same-sex marriage will continue to evaporate. Republicans will recognize that this is an issue where trying to undo what has been done would be a losing strategy.
Republicans do not live in a bubble. According to a 2023 study by the Public Religion Research Institute, “There are only minor differences across the partisan spectrum in how likely people are to have close relationships with L.G.B.T.Q. people,” with more than four in 10 Republicans reporting that they had a gay, lesbian or bisexual person as a close friend or family member or were gay themselves. Many survey respondents in my recent polling mentioned personal interactions with same-sex married couples in their lives to explain their support for same-sex marriage, using words like “love” and “family.”
Republican policymakers should not misread the moment. Both as a matter of political prudence and as a matter of embracing personal freedom, when it comes to same-sex marriage Americans should be allowed to live and let live.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is a Republican pollster, a speaker, a commentator and the author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up).”
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