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Marriage for same-sex couples has been legal across the United States since the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision a decade ago. While Democratic support for gay nuptials has risen steadily since that landmark 2015 ruling, Republican support has tumbled 14 points since its record high of 55% in 2021 and 2022, according to a Gallup report released Thursday.
In the latest Gallup poll, 41% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats said marriages between same-sex couples should be “recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.” This 47-point gap is the largest it has been since Gallup first started asking the question in 1996. The report found 76% of independents and 68% of all U.S. adults surveyed backed marriage rights for same-sex couples.
A separate question about whether “gay or lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable or morally wrong” found a similar political trend, with 86% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 38% of Republicans answering answering “morally acceptable.”
When broken down by nonpolitical subgroups, women, younger people and college graduates were more likely to support gay marriage and find same-sex relations morally acceptable than men, older people and those who did not graduate college.
The Gallup report’s authors noted that the “widening political divide suggests potential vulnerabilities in the durability of LGBTQ+ rights” in the country.
The report cited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling — which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision — that stated the high court ”should reconsider” some of its past rulings, including the 2015 same-sex marriage decision.
And, as NBC News reported earlier this year, lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced measures to try to chip away at same-sex couples’ right to marry.
