Gallup Poll: 71% in US Want Legal Gay Marriage

In the latest Gallup Poll, 71% of Americans say same-sex marriage should be kept legal. Public support for legally recognizing gay marriages has been consistently above 50% since the early 2010s.

The groups most in favor of legal same-sex marriage are adults aged 18 to 29 (89%), Democrats (84%), and infrequent churchgoers (83%).

But Republicans and weekly churchgoers are not as supportive of gay marriage. Less than half of Republicans (49%) and weekly churchgoers (41%) say gay marriages should be legally recognized.

Republican support for gay marriage has hovered around the 50% mark since 2020, with slight majorities backing it in 2021 and 2022, Gallup observed.

College-educated people are more in favor of gay marriage than those without degrees, while Southerners have a less favorable opinion of it than those on the coasts or in the Midwest.

Same-sex marriage has received majority support in the U.S. for more than a decade, and support has been on an upward trajectory for most of Gallup’s polling since 1996.

Gay marriage became the law nationwide after the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision. President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation to codify gay marriage late last year. A dozen Republican senators (out of 50) and 39 Republican House members (out of 208) voted in favor of the legislation, NPR noted.

In the absence of a Supreme Court decision to overturn the ruling in Obergefell, the right to same-sex marriage is still protected nationwide, The Hill noted. “But if Obergefell were to fall, the regulation of same-sex marriage would be turned over immediately to individual states, as the regulation of abortion was turned over to the states after the court’s call to cut Roe.”

The congressional push to codify same-sex marriage came on the heels of Justice Thomas’ suggestion that the court should “reconsider” cases that had affirmed LGBTQ rights and the right to access contraceptives, comments that were seen by many as a red flag for the future cases, The Hill noted.

The latest figures are from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 1-24. Gallup interviews a minimum of 1,000 U.S. adults aged 18 and older for each GPSS survey. No margin of error was provided.