The Liberty Daily 
(LifeSiteNews)—Another poll has corroborated that American support for same-sex “marriage,” while still a majority, is on the decline, likely due to the continued aggression of the LGBT lobby on gender issues.
The Economist/YouGov’s July 25-27 poll of U.S. adults asks, “Do you think that same-sex marriage should or should not be legal?” 54 percent say legal, 34 percent say not legal, and 13 percent are unsure. The numbers are almost identical to those found by YouGov last October, which represented a notable decline; Gallup had not found support for same-sex “marriage” below 60 percent since 2015, the year the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling forced all 50 states to recognize homosexual unions as “marriages.”
As with YouGov’s previous poll, the framing of the issue around “legal/illegal” could be construed as implying some sort of punishment, while Gallup’s questioning more accurately asks whether same-sex unions should be “recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.” Yet the harsher-sounding question garnered less support for same-sex “marriage” than the milder one.
Still, the new poll indicates the last one was not an outlier, and LGBT activists are not regaining the ground they lost.
The Christian Post notes that Gallup’s most recent poll found support for same-sex marriage much higher at 65 percent, but that too was a drop from the 71 percent high Gallup found in 2022 and 2023.
“The promise of ‘marriage equality’ was that it was simply about allowing committed same-sex couples to formalize their relationships. Americans were assured that nothing else would change,” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins wrote for the Post. “But that is not what happened,” with “pride parades in major cities where public nudity and sexually explicit displays are celebrated in full view of families and children”; “major corporations, universities, and professional sports organizations pressuring employees and athletes to affirm an ever-expanding list of sexual identities”; and a “growing commercial surrogacy industry that intentionally deprives children of either their mother, their father, or both.”
A substantial amount of social science literature supports the conclusion that children are best served by homes with both a mother and a father, as each sex brings unique strengths and emphases to parenting, which complement one another; and gives children a positive role model of their own sex as well as helping them to understand and relate to the opposite sex. By contrast, a male couple would by definition lack a mother, and a lesbian couple would be unable to provide a father.
Yet depriving children of both parents has been just one of the social ills exacerbated by the advent of same-sex “marriage,” ever since Obergefell. Undoing the ruling has long been a goal of social conservatives and constitutional textualists and originalists, but remains an uphill battle.
Three of the current sitting justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, and conservatives Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented from Obergefell. The latter two are considered reliable votes to overturn if the chance arises, given statements both have made in the years since. But it is less certain how Roberts and the court’s three more recent Republican appointees would rule, given past statements about deferring to precedent and their mixed records on cases important to conservatives. In November 2025, the court declined to hear a case from former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis that could have reconsidered Obergefell.
Further, as a practical matter, even if the Supreme Court reversed Obergefell, recognition of same-sex “marriage” would still be mandatory nationwide, thanks to former President Joe Biden signing the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act,” which codified Obergefell, in 2023. Thirty-two states still have duly-enacted same-sex “marriage” bans on the books, according to World Population Review, all of which have been blocked from enforcement since Obergefell. Only 18 states plus the District of Columbia have no ban in place.
At least half a dozen states have adopted resolutions urging the nation’s highest court to revere Obergefell. They have no legal force, nor can they begin any legal battle that could eventually put the issue back before the nation’s highest court, but they raise awareness of an issue that, while long since declared “settled” by the establishments of both parties, set the stage for today’s battles over transgenderism, surrogacy, and religious freedom.
