New, Ominous Signs for Gay Rights Keep Emerging

What happens to a dream undone? For many Americans, the progress of gay rights over the past quarter century was one of the country’s greatest achievements. Even as social change on other fronts stagnated or reversed, LGBTQ Americans gained new acceptance and protections. In 2002, Gallup found that just 38 percent of Americans believed that homosexual behavior was morally acceptable. Barely more than a decade later, in 2015, that number was 63 percent; that year, the Supreme Court granted same-sex couples the right to marry. This change was celebrated by its beneficiaries, of course, and by progressives, but also more broadly. By 2022, 55 percent of Republicans supported same-sex marriage, according to Gallup—a huge leap from just 22 percent 10 years earlier.

Now alarm bells are ringing for same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights in general. A new Gallup poll shows that Republican approval of homosexual rights has dropped from 56 to 40 percent in two years, and that support for same-sex marriage is down to less than half, at 46 percent. Liberal justices on the Supreme Court warned in a dissent last week that their colleagues are chipping away at the right to marriage. Over the past four years, Republican policy makers have mounted a campaign against transgender rights and discussion of homosexuality in schools, but the result appears to be a wider backlash against LGBTQ rights.

The slippage belies the Whiggish view of inexorable if slow progress that many liberals, most notably former President Barack Obama, espoused in the early 21st century. The Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Dobbs shows that even things that courts have long treated as fundamental rights can be reversed. But although that ruling was a shock to many, abortion has long been a subject of entrenched division. Gay rights seemed like an area where public opinion was moving quickly, and in one direction.

Whether permanent or fleeting, the reversal fits with a general revanchist push by the MAGA movement against cultural change. The pushback on transgender and educational issues may have looked to some Americans like simply pumping the brakes—after such fast change on gay rights generally, slower movement was merited. These new developments, however, indicate that a growing faction supports not just pausing change but reversing it.

Donald Trump makes for a strange figurehead for such a movement. Just as Trump was a libertine who favored abortion rights before transforming himself into a hero of evangelical Christians who brought down Roe v. Wade, he seems to have had little animus toward LGBTQ people before his political career. If anything, he brought a median New Yorker’s shrugging acceptance. During his first presidential campaign, he spoke little about gay rights but still went further in affirming them than any prior Republican nominee had.

But just as Obama disingenuously claimed to have “evolved” toward greater support for gay rights once in the White House, Trump appears to have made a strategic choice to devolve. He first indicated that he’d preserve an Obama-era rule providing workplace protections for LGBTQ employees, but his administration proceeded to water down or roll back existing rules, and to institute carve-outs for religious organizations. Even so, Gallup found that GOP support for same-sex relations stayed stable during the Trump presidency. (Trump hosted a gay wedding at Mar-a-Lago a few months ago.)

What happened from 2022 to 2024? The most obvious answer is that Republican candidates made attacks on LGBTQ people a centerpiece of the 2022 midterm elections. Red states and jurisdictions passed laws restricting discussion of sexual orientation in schools, some of the more than 1,800 anti-LGBTQ-rights bills introduced nationwide in the past four years. Bans on books that discussed the subject spread widely. Advocates claimed, with no basis, that these books and other events were part of a dark conspiracy to “groom” children into being gay. States also pushed to restrict gender-affirming care for transgender people, both children and adults, and to circumscribe transgender rights.

More than just an attempt to slow down change, these political campaigns have reversed public opinion, at least among Republicans. Views among Democrats and independents remain basically stable, which is one reason approval for same-sex marriage still sits at 69 percent, down from 71 percent a couple of years ago.

Such a shift could be consequential in policy terms. If Trump wins in November, his allies are pushing for a greater rollback in LGBTQ rights through executive policy, part of a larger assertion of presidential power; a Republican majority in Congress, bolstered by shifting GOP-voter opinions, could make changes statutory.

These moves might be constrained somewhat by electoral imperatives. The Supreme Court would not be. The Dobbs decision showed that the most conservative justices have no qualms about issuing politically incendiary opinions, and that Chief Justice John Roberts is unable or unwilling to restrain them. Justice Clarence Thomas has already argued in a concurring opinion that the Court should reverse its rulings protecting same-sex marriage and relationships as well as contraception. The conservative bloc’s ruling in a case about an American woman and her immigrant husband last week drew warnings from the minority that same-sex marriage could soon be threatened. And the next president is likely to appoint more justices, so a Trump victory would solidify the Court’s rightward direction, and possibly shift it yet further.

American law has treated same-sex marriage, like abortion, as a fundamental right since the 2015 ruling. If Dobbs shows that such rights can be taken away, it still doesn’t explain what that would look like. The end of a pregnancy is a moment in time, and past abortions aren’t reversed. But if the Court revoked the right to same-sex marriage, what would happen to couples who married and established lives based on that right? No one knows, but surely the answer is nothing good.