Has Public Opinion Shifted Under the Gavel?: Obergefell After One Year
By Cathy Ruse, Family Research Council:
ast June five Justices of the Supreme Court ruled that no state of the Union could define marriage as a man-woman institution. This nullified the law of most states, and the individual votes of 50 million Americans, not to mention thousands of years of human history.
Has public opinion shifted under the weight of the gavel? If so, it is not in the direction of acquiescence.
Conventional wisdom says the law is a great teacher, and indeed, when the Court created a constitutional “right” to abortion, the country’s opinion on abortion shifted considerably in its favor (twenty-five years later the momentum would shift against it).
The same cannot be said about homosexual marriage, according to the annual Gallup poll on moral issues released last month.
Since 2001 the Gallup organization has asked Americans about the acceptability of a range of “moral issues.” For each, the question is asked: “… [do you] personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong?”
Ten years ago, most Americans viewed “gay or lesbian relations” as morally wrong, by a margin of 51-44. In 2008, the acceptability measure rose steadily until, in May of 2015, 63 percent of Americans said same-sex relations were morally acceptable. Days later the gavel came down and the right to same-sex marriage was found in our nation’s Constitution (somewhere in the invisible ink).
Now it has been one year since the Obama administration aimed a bank of spotlights on the White House alighting it in the colors of the gay-pride rainbow. Surely those approval numbers are still climbing. Isn’t basically everyone on board at this point?
Apparently not. In fact, the Gallup results show that moral approval of “gay or lesbian relations” has actually declined. It is down 3 percentage points, while the “morally wrong” measure is up by 3 points. In terms of total population, about 7.5 million people have turned against the cause du jour since Obergefell. That’s a greater number of Americans than those who identify as homosexual.
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