The so-called “culture war” is made up of fights over all kinds of social and cultural issues, but in the recent past, it appeared marriage equality was no longer near the top of the list of contentious disputes. The Supreme court made same-sex marriage the law of the land; polls showed broad and bipartisan public support; and even congressional Republicans moved on.
The civil rights fight was over. Fairness and human decency had prevailed.
There’s fresh evidence, however, that a growing number of Republicans are starting to move backwards on the issue. NBC News reported:
While Democratic support for gay nuptials has risen steadily since [the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015], Republican support has tumbled 14 points since its record high of 55% in 2021 and 2022, according to a Gallup report released Thursday.
As recently as a few years ago, Gallup found that a narrow majority of self-identified Republican voters agreed that same-sex couples should be “recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.” But over the last three years, GOP support for marriage equality has fallen from 55% to 41% — the sharpest slide since the national pollster started keeping track — even as attitudes among Democrats and independents move in the opposite direction. (For more information on the poll’s methodology and margin of error, click the link.)
In fact, Gallup’s latest data suggests GOP voters are roughly back to where they were in 2016, surrendering nearly a decade of progress.
Complicating matters, the survey isn’t the only discouraging news for civil rights advocates.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, even after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling, then-Sen. Marco Rubio (before the Floridian became secretary of state) was one of the most prominent Republicans who not only said he disagreed with the justices’ decision, the Floridian also vowed to look for ways to “change the law” in order to stop same-sex couples from getting married.
Soon after, in October 2020, Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas complained in a dissent about the “victims” of the court’s marriage equality ruling, and a month later, Alito delivered an unusually political speech to the Federalist Society in which he complained about social pressure surrounding anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.
“You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman” anymore, the conservative justice whined, as if he were a candidate seeking social conservatives’ votes. “Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.” A year later, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, argued that if you support marriage equality, “it means you’re not a movement conservative.” All of which is to say that it seemed as though the debate over marriage equality had run its course, but for too many on the right, that’s apparently no longer the case. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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