Michele Eve Sandberg/Sipa USA via AP Images
At last year’s Stonewall Pride parade, in Wilton Manors, Florida, June 17, 2023
To describe today’s Republican Party is to describe a cosmic downward spiral, in which each day’s anti-Enlightenment position gives way to a more extreme anti-Enlightenment position on the following day. Autocracy eclipses democracy, force supersedes consent, factional rule trumps majority rule, and white Christian nationalism overruns egalitarianism.
A Gallup poll released yesterday puts the party’s diminishing belief in human equality on glaring display. It shows a marked decline in Republicans’ support for same-sex marriage. Overall, 69 percent of the American public supports legal same-sex marriage, which has been the law of the land since the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. The majority opinion in that case was written by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, an old-school moderate Republican. And until the past couple of years, a succession of polls showed that support for legal same-sex marriage was rising steadily not just among the public at large, but among Republicans, too—peaking at 55 percent in 2021 and 2022.
But as Republican ranks increasingly and obsessively focused on the war on woke, that support has dropped to just 46 percent today, just as the share of Republicans who consider same-sex relations “morally acceptable” has dropped over the past two years from 56 percent to 40 percent. Among the entire public, by contrast, 64 percent consider such relationships to be morally kosher.
Why the GOP drop? I can think of several causes: the increasing assertiveness of evangelicals in Republican ranks (particularly since the public is clobbering them on the abortion issue); the new prominence of gender and transgender issues, which has induced a backlash among cultural conservatives that has sloshed over to hitherto less controversial issues like same-sex relationships; the emphasis that Republican politicos, beginning with Florida’s “don’t say gay” Gov. Ron DeSantis, have placed on such issues; and the deliberately panic-inducing “coverage” of these issues in right-wing media, both traditional and social. Indeed, it’s cultural panic (a compound of sexual panic, racial panic, and religious panic), as much if not more than anything else, that defines today’s Republican base, much as it does the supporters of Putin and Orbán in other lands.
And nothing breeds extremism like panic.
