In the space of roughly a decade, a remarkably short amount of time, the fight for marriage equality achieved a wave of legal and political successes. Legal equality became so normalized — especially after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which mandated marriage equality throughout the country — that liberals could be forgiven for thinking they had achieved a permanent victory. As of 2022, the census reported that there were 1.5 million same-sex marriages in the country, plenty of which occurred in red states. There are married LBGTQ people in popular culture, in the corridors of power and in communities everywhere.
For many conservatives, however, that is unacceptable. They’ve been telling themselves they can reverse history and undo their losses if they’re patient and use their power aggressively when they have the chance. And now they believe that chance has come.
Two events have shaped the right’s perception of what it has to tolerate and what it can reverse.
At the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual gathering this week in Dallas, the more than 10,000 delegates representing churches affiliated with the SBC passed a resolution calling for the “overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God’s design for marriage and family,” as well as “for laws that affirm marriage between one man and one woman.”
This is hardly a surprise coming from a deeply conservative organization. But the SBC, representing nearly 13 million members, is at the forefront of a right-wing cultural backlash that can be seen in the pews, in the media, in state legislatures and in Washington.
Though none of the right’s predictions of societal collapse if we allowed same-sex couples to marry have materialized, that hasn’t stopped conservatives from wanting to roll back the clock, in both law and public acceptance. That includes at least two Supreme Court justices. In his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, Clarence Thomas argued that both Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case declaring that laws banning sodomy were unconstitutional, ought to fall as well.
“We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas wrote, by “overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions.” Likewise, Justice Samuel Alito has made no secret of his contempt for the Obergefell decision. They’d have to persuade three of their colleagues to overturn the decision. But Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the Obergefell ruling back in 2015, and the court has moved substantially to the right in the 10 years since.
Outside its walls, more conservative activists and politicians no longer pretend they’re OK with full civil rights for LGBTQ people. Lawmakers in nine states have introduced bills that call for Obergefell to be overturned or otherwise undermine same-sex marriage rights. Just three years ago, a majority of Republicans (56%) told Gallup that same-sex relations are morally acceptable; now that number has fallen to 38%. That’s the lowest since 2013, even as support among Democrats (86%) and independents (76%) has continued to increase.
All across the right, this new spirit of aggressiveness can be felt.
Two events have shaped the right’s perception of what it has to tolerate and what it can reverse: the Dobbs decision and Donald Trump’s election win in 2024. In both, conservatives saw time in the wilderness give way to victory and revenge. As they watch Trump dismantle the federal government, send the Justice Department after his political opponents and deploy the military against civilians, they know that this is a new era where nothing is off the table, including rolling back civil rights for their fellow Americans.
All across the right, this new spirit of aggressiveness can be felt, as the Trump White House takes actions that previous Republican administrations would never have considered. This administration has removed books on civil rights from libraries, scrubbed websites of the accomplishments of women and minorities, gutted the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and all but declared that discrimination against whites is the only kind worth doing anything about. Trump reinstated a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military, while he and Pete Hegseth, the least qualified secretary of defense in history, fired female and minority flag officers with decades of experience and accomplishments in a purge of alleged “wokeness” in the military.
There’s an important lesson here about social movements. The adage that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice isn’t really true. The fight for civil rights doesn’t follow one continuous path; sometimes it stops and turns backward. Earlier this month, Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in that landmark case, told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “I’m worried about marriage equality because there are people who refuse to let it lie. … We are heading backward in time instead of forward.”
That’s exactly what conservatives are trying to accomplish. And they’re not done yet.
