Why support for same-sex marriage is declining

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | May 31, 2025

“Support for same-sex marriage among Republicans has dropped 14 points in the last 3 years, per Gallup.” So reports Bryan Metzger, a senior politics reporter for Business Insider. According to Gallup’s analysis of their own numbers:

Ten years after the Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, national support remains strong and steady at 68%. However, this ostensible stability masks deepening partisan divides. Although Democrats’ and independents’ support continues to rise or hold steady, Republicans’ support—which initially grew in the years following the Obergefell decision—has fallen each of the past three years. The moral acceptability of same-sex relations shows a similar pattern.

Why? What is going on here? We don’t have hard data yet as to what caused the trend. But here are a few thoughts. They are in no particular order and they overlap somewhat.

First, it’s not just a partisan thing. It’s a generational thing. Generation Z’s support for same-sex marriage has “plummeted” in recent years.

Second, well, consider some of the comments in Metzger’s thread. Says Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm:

People are starting to see the big picture. SSM was sold on the basis that personal happiness is the greatest good. That was never true, but pretending it is has terrible consequences that we are just beginning to experience and come to terms with.

Third, consider some of those terrible consequences. “Maybe pushing gay porn and gender ideology into schools wasn’t such a great idea,” says one commenter in Metzger’s thread. “I had no idea accepting gay marriage meant I would have to accept men in women’s sports and doctors cutting the breasts off of teenage girls,” says another.

Same-sex marriage supporters will scoff. But these were never a thing until after same-sex marriage. Neither were “drag queen story hour” for toddlers in public libraries and all manner of other oddities that the public has been bullied into accepting.

Fourth, transgenderism is particularly unpopular. Even many who identify with one of the other three letters in “LGBT” are opposed to the “T.” Hitching same-sex marriage to these other items helped bring down popular support for same-sex marriage.

Fifth, people know now that they were lied to. As Matthew Schmitz writes in First Things, Obergefell did not bring about the goods that were promised. Further, the claim that same-sex marriage wasn’t going to affect anyone else? Well…

Sixth, no one likes a moralistic busy body. I know, that’s supposed to be us, the religious nuts. But LGBT activists turned out to be far more religiously nutty than Christian conservatives. By the time we reached Peak Wokeness (say, about three or four years ago) we lived in what was practically an LGBT theocracy. Remember twenty years ago, when Pope Benedict was warning us of a “dictatorship of relativism?” Oh, for the days of relativism! It faded but the dictatorship remained.

If you work in corporate America, for instance, try a little relativism and see what happens. When Pride Month comes around, march down to H.R. and tell them that same-sex marriage is “their” truth but it’s not “your” truth, so you’re not going to put up the rainbow image that has been mandated for your department. You will be disciplined, of course, perhaps even fired. And why? Because relativism is no longer necessary now that it has gotten us to where its adherents intended to lead us. Moral absolutism is back, baby! Only this time, it’s gay.

Frankly, I’m not sure how solid the previous numbers ever were, the ones that showed support for same-sex marriage at its height. People were afraid they would lose their jobs, they would suffer some other punishment, they would be run out of a town on a rail, if they opposed it. It is only now, when the bravest of them reacted against it, creating a “vibe shift,” that more people felt comfortable “coming out of the closet,” as it were, and expressing their true thoughts about same-sex marriage.

That, I think, is what is really behind the softening support for same-sex marriage. The fact that it was always softer to begin with than the press was willing to admit. And that people can now see the consequences of such a radical change in the definition of society’s most basic unit.

That old question, “how does it affect you if two people of the same sex get ‘married’?” People couldn’t answer that question ten or twenty years ago. They can answer it now. And they don’t like the answers.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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