A new Gallup poll shows that public acceptance of same-sex marriage and relationships in the United States has flattened after more than two decades of steady growth.
About 65% of US adults now believe same-sex marriage should be legal, down from 71% in both 2022 and 2023.
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The decline is largely driven by dropping acceptance among Republicans.
In the May survey, only 37% of Republicans said same-sex marriage should be legally valid, and 35% viewed gay and lesbian relations as morally acceptable.
Views among Democrats and independents remain largely stable, with most in both groups supporting same-sex marriage and viewing same-sex relationships as moral.
The widening partisan divide reflects broader policy debates on LGBTQ+ issues across the US, coinciding with legislative efforts targeting transgender people and a push in some states to ban same-sex marriage.
The downtick is striking given the dramatic shift in US views over past decades. In 1996, only 27% of US adults supported legal same-sex marriage.
Support rose steadily until peaking a few years ago at about 7 in 10 adults. Opinion on the morality of same-sex relationships followed a similar pattern.
In 2001, about 4 in 10 US adults viewed same-sex relations as morally acceptable. That number increased by nearly 30 percentage points over the next two decades.
In recent years, Gallup data has shown signs of a reversal.
The new poll found that 62% of US adults view gay and lesbian relations as morally acceptable, down from 71% in 2022.
Legal Landscape and Pushback
Same-sex marriage has been recognized nationally since a 2015 Supreme Court ruling, capping a 12-year period of expanding recognition through court rulings and state laws.
By last year, there were more than 800,000 married same-sex couples, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
However, pushback against the ruling has persisted.
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A call to overturn the 2015 decision reached the Supreme Court last year, invoking Justice Clarence Thomas's earlier call to undo it.
The court declined the appeal without comment.
The Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly called for reversing the ruling and imposing a ban last year.
Lawmakers in at least 11 states introduced legislation to ban same-sex marriage in their current or most recent sessions, according to an Associated Press analysis of bills compiled by Plural.
Most of these bills did not gain momentum.
However, the Tennessee House passed a measure allowing private citizens and organizations to refuse recognition of such unions, and the Idaho House passed a resolution urging the Supreme Court to undo the 2015 decision.
A similar number of states have introduced measures aimed at protecting same-sex marriage.
The Gallup poll also found that about 4 in 10 Americans view changing one's gender as morally acceptable, down from nearly half in 2021.
Transgender rights remain a hot-button political issue.
Most Republican-controlled states have adopted laws in the last five years barring gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors, restricting bathroom use, and barring transgender girls and women from some sports.
Trump has signed executive orders seeking similar policies at the federal level.
This week, a court ruled that the military illegally banned transgender troops, dealing a blow to one such policy.
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The Gallup poll was conducted May 1-17, based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,001 US adults, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
