The most promising moment for proponents of gay marriage in 2015 was not actually the Supreme Court‘s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which dubiously but definitively claimed that marriage equality was protected by the 14th Amendment. Rather, it was the moment Donald Trump, that thrice-married Manhattanite with a lengthy history of donating during the AIDS crisis and supporting domestic partnerships as far back as 2000, came down the escalator and announced his candidacy for president.
Trump’s embrace of gay marriage allowed the GOP to more or less turn the page on the whole matter, conceding during the 2016 campaign that he was “fine” with the Supreme Court enshrining gay marriage as the law of the land and publicly embracing the rainbow flag, both figuratively and literally.
From the start of Trump’s presidency through the end, Republican support for legal gay marriage soared from 30% to 55%, with most polling indicating that conservatives had become functionally libertarian on the matter.
Unfortunately, as the “T” has cannibalized the “LGB,” conservatives in recent years have been increasingly forced to care by an aggressive activist class. Unable to accept the categorical victory of the gay marriage detente, LGBT interest groups that saw their fundraising dry up after their primary mission was accomplished had to create a new one. And thus, teachers uncomfortable with elementary school students reading pornographic comic books like Gender Queer were smeared as book burners. Parents who didn’t want to castrate their prepubescent children chemically to treat supposed gender dysphoria lost custody. Government policies mandated that biological males be admitted to girls’ restrooms and school sports teams in defiance of Title IX, and dissenters were branded as bigots.
The marriage equality argument that actually won was functionally a small-c conservative rationalization: rather than continue to exile gay people into a frequently promiscuous fringe of civil society, would it not be better for society to allow, nay, encourage, gay adults to find stability and family in the blessings of legally privileged monogamy? That’s an argument that asks next to nothing of surrounding bystanders, and more or less allows everyone involved to mind their own family’s business.
The radical transgender hysteria that’s ramped up in the past half-decade is the logical opposite. Use of preferred pronouns and performative displays of allyship are just the beginning of what the contemporary transgender lobby demands of the masses. Girls must be comfortable changing next to teenage boys. Single mothers must embrace sleeping next to men in women’s shelters. Parents must affirm and embrace their children’s gender dysphoria rather than, you know, try and remind them that gender dysphoria is a mental illness that completely desists in nine of 10 children that grow out of it into adulthood.
Now, Gallup reports that just 41% of Republicans support legal equality for gay marriage, the lowest share of support since before Trump was elected in 2016. The trajectory of overall approval of the moral acceptability of gay relations is even bleaker. After reaching a 56% peak of support among Republicans in 2022, just 38% of Republicans report that same-sex relations are “generally morally acceptable.” In just the last two years, legal support for gay marriage among weekly church goers fell from 41% to 33%.
The greatest enemy of progress for (I suspect) the overwhelming majority of gay folks who just want the right to live in monogamy has been the radical progressives. It’s a story we’ve seen repeated in the past five years: after Trump assembled a consensus to pass a federal overhaul of criminal justice reform and draft new police reform, radical progressives hijacked 2020 to push “Defund the Police” and anarchy, resulting in a generational backlash in favor of carceral urbanism. And now, after Trump settled the gay marriage issue and made history in appointing Ric Grenell as the first openly gay Cabinet-level official in the nation’s history, it is the bullying and belligerence of fringe progressives who have set progress for the LGB majority of their ostensible coalition back an entire decade.
The marriage equality activists of the early aughts succeeded by convincing the skeptical that we should not care what’s happening in other people’s bedrooms or sex lives. The transgender lobby of today has turned off tens of millions of Americans by insisting that, actually, we have to care, not just about the sexual lives and identities of adults, but also, creepily, of children.
The only silver lining for the unfortunate silent majority of LGB folks (and even the non-activist class of Ts), according to the statistics, is that Trump is the president who has proven he can restore progress where Democrats fail.