Even before the Supreme Court handed down Obergefell v. Hodges ten years ago, conservatives — an unruly and ill-defined bunch on a good day — were deeply split over the issue of gay marriage.
On one hand, the Andrew Sullivans of the day argued that conservatives were uniquely equipped to support gay marriage and that such support would bolster participation in marriage in general. (A decade of continued declines in marriage rates is ample evidence that this reasoning was flawed.)
On the other hand, there were many in the movement who felt that there was something deeply unconservative about failing to adhere to the traditional definition of marriage that had long been taken for granted by nearly everyone. Calling homosexual relationships “marriage” seemed unnatural.
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Yet many wondered: What difference did it make if gays and lesbians wanted to call their relationships “marriage”? They weren’t hurting anyone, or so the reasoning went.
When the Obergefell v. Hodges decision came out, there was a brief flurry of opposition from conservatives — and then silence.
One can hardly blame them. A mere glance at a Gallup poll in the years following Obergefell gave the impression that a campaign to deny marriage licenses to homosexual couples would be incredibly unpopular.
The Religious Response
Among religious groups, responses to Obergefell have varied in clarity and success. This is despite the fact that Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and many Protestants hold, as a matter of religious principle, that marriage is solely between a man and a woman.
Consider the Catholic Church, the single largest religious organization in the U.S. In the aftermath of Obergefell, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called the ruling a “tragic error.” Unfortunately, the Catholic Church’s messaging since then has been less clear. Liberal activist priests like Father James Martin have loudly championed the pro-LGBTQ agenda, seemingly with the occasional nod of approval from the Vatican. And in late 2023, the Church released Fiducia supplicans, which stated that priests could give unofficial blessings to same-sex couples. That policy muddled the issue so badly that the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, clarified that the Church has no intention of redefining marriage.
Meanwhile, the Southern Baptist Convention, which represents the second-largest religious group in the United States, did not officially call for the reversal of Obergefell until June of this year.
Unfortunately, the religious argument isn’t particularly useful in an increasingly secular society. That said, religious beliefs can still drive political action. That’s true in the case of Josh Schriver, a Catholic in Michigan’s House of Representatives, who has repeatedly spoken out against same-sex marriage and who introduced a resolution in February asking the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell. Idaho state Representative Heather Scott, who is Christian, introduced a similar resolution that was passed by Idaho’s House in January.
A Momentum Shift
These state resolutions are unlikely to have an immediate effect, but they underline something that Gallup has recently found in its polling: Support for gay marriage has waned. In 2022 and 2023, national support for same-sex marriage reached an all-time high of 71 percent, following consistent increases in support year after year. Last year, however, support tapered off to 69 percent. That number seems to be driven by a drop in Republican support for same-sex marriage, which has decreased from 55 percent in 2022 to 45 percent last year.
Why the change? It’s certainly not because pro-family activists or Christians have been campaigning furiously. It’s because leftists have spent the last ten years sabotaging themselves.
Whether they wanted to or not, the Ls and Gs got lumped in with the Bs, Ts, and Qs, as well as with the blue-haired they/thems, the drag queens, and the activists advocating for transing the kids.
Americans, generally willing to let “you do you,” have not been so willing to allow the far-left activists to impress their sexual fetishes — ranging from furries and drag queen story hours to bondage gear and sex-change hormones and surgeries — on children.
Robert George, a professor at Princeton University, noted recently in First Things that supporters of same-sex marriage, including Andrew Sullivan, acknowledge that the growing backlash to same-sex marriage stems from the radicalism of the left-wing groups that advocated for Obergefell. George argues that the extremism of today’s social progressivism is “proving unsatisfying and unsatisfactory … to younger Americans, who are bearing the brunt of its psychological and social consequences.”
He further argued in his First Things essay that there is a collective wake-up call to the “illiberal tactics … of the organizations that forced same-sex marriage on us by judicial fiat.” These tactics, George said, include “everything from invading churches to stigmatizing believers in marriage as a conjugal partnership as ‘bigots.’”
Now, more than ever, is the time to defend marriage as God designed it.
Most recently, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have exploded in popularity, providing gay and lesbian couples the means to have biological children — at the cost of employing an industry that exploits women for their childbearing capabilities and turns children into mere commodities. In July of this year, a gay couple’s video celebrating the birthday of their son, who was born via surrogacy, went viral after it was discovered that one of them is registered as a Tier 1 sex offender in the state of Pennsylvania.
Discomfort is only increasing over same-sex marriage’s association with paying women to undergo the heartbreak of giving birth to children they will not raise and with creating children who will be separated from one or more of their biological parents.
Hope for the Future
Americans have witnessed the nation tumble down the slippery slope after Obergefell, and they are now retreating of their own accord.
The conservative movement’s recent wins should persuade us that now, more than ever, is the time to defend marriage as God designed it: the permanent, complementary union of a man and a woman, existing for the nurturing of children and the mutual benefit of the spouses.
The cultural winds are shifting in our direction on issues that are far less critical to society than marriage, and there is no better moment to restore our national understanding of the natural and beautiful benefits of the union between a man and a woman, which is uniquely capable of forming the fundamental building block of society. It is time to cease our abject failure to show up on the battlefield.
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