Republican support for gay marriage noticeably declined over the past two years as LGBT activists have increasingly focused their efforts on advocating medical transition for gender-confused youth and the teaching of gender ideology in schools.
After peaking at 55 percent in 2021 and 2022, Republican support for gay marriage is down to 46 percent overall, dropping 9 points in just two years, according to new Gallup polling. Gay-marriage support among Democrats remained steady at 83 percent compared to 74 percent support among independents.
Overall, more than two-thirds of Americans, 69 percent, believe same-sex marriage should be legally recognized and same-sex couples granted the same rights as traditional marriages. A majority of Democrats have supported legalizing gay marriage since 2004, and independents have taken that position since 2011.
The downward trend reverses a decade of steady increases in Republican support for gay marriage, which stood at 22 percent in 2012, and five years later reached 47 percent support. The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015 with the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, a landmark decision unlikely to be seriously challenged anytime soon. One year after Obergefell, six-in-ten Americans supported the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Congress codified the Obergefell ruling in 2022 when it passed the Respect for Marriage Act after a bipartisan group of negotiators secured enough Republican votes to push it through the Senate. Conservatives criticized the legislation for not offering enough religious-liberty protections for practitioners and organizations who may object to same-sex marriage because of their faith.
In total, 64 percent of American adults believe same-sex marriage is morally acceptable, down from 71 percent in 2022, likely due to the changes in Republican attitudes. Two years ago, 56 percent of Republicans believed same-sex relations were morally acceptable, compared to 40 percent of Republicans today.
Gallup surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,024 adults in May and its margin of error is plus or mins four percentage points.
The grouping together of LGBT Americans likely contributed to shifting Republican attitudes on the subject of gay marriage. Republicans have fought left-wing efforts to bring LGBT curricula into K-12 schools, most notably in Florida with governor Ron DeSantis’s parental-rights legislation. Similarly, conservatives have opposed the left-wing push for distressed minors to undergo irreversible gender-transition procedures, an issue the Supreme Court will take up next term.
Since 2012, the percentage of Americans identifying as LGBT has more than doubled, according to a Gallup poll taken in 2023. Among U.S. adults, 7.6 percent identify as LGBT, with 57.3 percent considering themselves to be bisexual. The numbers are particularly high with Generation Z, as 22.3 percent of young Americans consider themselves LGBT, up from 9.8 percent in the Millennial generation.
Gallup’s survey on LGBT identification among U.S. adults aggregated data from more than 12,000 interviews.