Support among Republicans for gay marriage has plummeted in the last three years, according to a new Gallup poll.
Gallup’s poll released on Thursday found 41% of GOP voters support gay marriage, as opposed to 55% in 2021 and 2022. A whopping 88% of Democrats approved of gay marriage in the new poll; the 47-point gap between the two parties is the largest since Gallup first asked the question in 1996. Seventy-six percent of independents approve of gay marriage. In 1996, 16% of Republicans approved; 33% of Democrats and 32% of independents agreed.
86% of Democrats said gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable; 38% of Republicans agreed, a drop from 2022, when 56% of Republicans agreed. Among those who attend religious services at least once a week, 33% said same-sex marriage was morally acceptable and 24% said gay-lesbian relations were socially acceptable. Gallup polling between 2020-2023 found that more Republicans attended weekly religious services than Democrats by 15 percentage points.
When writing a concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made the legal case for overturning Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the last of which guaranteed the right to gay marriage.
Thomas explained that the three cases relied on substantive due process, which he called “an oxymoron that lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.”
Courts have used substantive due process to protect unenumerated rights not mentioned in the Constitution. The right to privacy and the right to gay marriage have been recognized under substantive due process.
“On the Due Process Clause, Justice Thomas has long argued (consistent with much academic commentary) that insofar as the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates enumerated rights against the states and protects unenumerated rights, this work is done by the Privileges [and] Immunities Clause, and not the Due Process Clause,” Reason noted.
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“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents, After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
“Substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority,” he wrote, “Substantive due process distorts other areas of constitutional law. … Substantive due process is the core inspiration for many of the Court’s constitutionally unmoored policy judgments. … The harm caused by this Court’s forays into substantive due process remains immeasurable.”
