Support for same-sex relations has plummeted among Americans over the past year, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.
Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll found that 64% of Americans believe same-sex relations are acceptable in 2023, compared to 71% in 2022. The 7-point drop in views of gay and lesbian relations represents the steepest decline of all polled social issues. Moral acceptance of same-sex relations has fallen to its lowest level since 2019, a year in which 63% of respondents said they found gay relationships “morally acceptable.” (RELATED: Americans Overwhelmingly Reject Transgender Ideology: POLL)
Still, the poll shows that same-sex relations are still viewed much more favorably than in past decades. In 2012, 54% of Americans found gay and lesbian relationships acceptable. In 2002, 38% of Americans found them acceptable. Likewise, a record-high 71% of Americans support same-sex marriage, according to a June 5 Gallup poll.
There was a shift away from most liberal beliefs in the Gallup Morality poll, but same-sex relations dropped 7%(!) as Republicans went from majority to minority support https://t.co/WbIm1CXOdN
— Dingers (@ding3rs) June 16, 2023
The backslide in acceptance same-sex relations comes mainly from Republicans, according to Gallup. Only 41% of Republicans reported finding same-sex relations morally acceptable, a sharp drop from the record-high of 56% in 2022. The 41% figure represents the lowest level of support same-sex for relations in nearly a decade. In 2014, 39% of Republicans found gay and lesbian relationships “morally acceptable,” according to the poll.
Support for gay relationships among Democrats slightly declined from 85% in 2022 to 79% in 2023. Independents saw a slight uptick, with support increasing from 72% to 73%.
The decline of same-sex relationship acceptance comes amid a broader backlash against the LGBT movement over the past year, with many Republican state legislatures moving to ban sex changes for children and explicit books featuring gay sex from school libraries. Conservatives expressed outrage against Bud Light and Target over the alleged promotion of transgender ideology, which has resulted in declining sales and stock prices for each entity, respectively.
Some have questioned if the political packaging of homosexuals with gender ideologues would result in a backlash against the gay and lesbian community.
“But when you examine the other issues at stake — public schools teaching the concepts of queer and gender theory to kindergartners on up, sex changes for children before puberty, the housing of biological males with women in prisons and rape shelters, and biological males competing with women in sports — you realize we are far beyond what the gay rights movement once stood for. It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists,” gay rights activist and public intellectual Andrew Sullivan wrote in a May blog post.