Same-sex marriage is not on the rocks — yet. But the LGBT triumphalism of a few years ago is receding. Support for same-sex relationships is dropping, businesses are less inclined to pay for “pride” festivities, and Republican leaders are reclaiming June from the rainbow.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The issue was supposed to be settled, with the rainbow triumphant and opposition receding to a few marginalized religious weirdos. But in the years since the Supreme Court invented a right to same-sex marriage in the Obergefell decision, the effects have become clear, and they aren’t what we were promised. 

Same-sex marriage was sold to the public as loving and harmless. We were told that “love is love” and that “marriage equality” would have no negative effects on the rest of us. But the slope was slippery, and assurances of “live and let live” proved to be a lie.

There are two main causes why slippery slope warnings proved more prophetic than fallacious. First, there is the premise of same-sex marriage, which is that male and female don’t matter in marriage except for subjective preference. Objections to this are dismissed as bigotry. These ideas have consequences, and they have since been made manifest. The second (and related) cause of the slippery slope is that LGBT groups and their allies wanted far more than same-sex marriage. They weren’t going to put a ring on it and then declare victory and go home. Rather, everyone and everything, from schools to sports, had to bow to the rainbow flag.

The convergence of these factors was clear in the trans revolution that immediately followed Obergefell. Ideologically, transgender ideology is an obvious extension of the logic of same-sex marriage; if male and female don’t matter in marriage and parenthood, they don’t matter anywhere. And organizationally, the gay-rights movement had already spent years preparing to pivot to transgenderism after same-sex marriage. 

So Americans learned that same-sex marriage was a bait and switch. It was promoted as a way to include same-sex couples in normal life, but instead, it unleashed radicalism into normal life. Democrats were, and still are, all in, from the topless trans activist shaking his fake breasts at the Biden White House, to putting men in women’s prisons, to advancing legislation that erases the words mother and father and replace them with “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.”

Likewise, polygamy, rebranded as polyamory, is not only promoted in left-wing media, but it is now being legally recognized in some deep-blue jurisdictions. Opponents of same-sex marriage were denounced as alarmist bigots for predicting this would happen; now The New York Times is reporting favorably as it happens.

As the radicalism intensified, so did efforts to punish dissent. They weren’t just going after the baker who didn’t want to do custom work for a same-sex wedding but after spas that wanted to keep naked men out of the women’s area. Rainbow woke made a lot of enemies out of normal people who are now determined that it must not regain power. And so some Republicans are starting to find their spines.

But it is not just post-Obergefell weirdness and wokeness that is turning Americans against same-sex marriage. Americans have also gained clarity about the ordinary evils of same-sex marriage, such as male homosexual couples buying babies via commercial surrogacy and intentionally depriving them of their mothers forever. 

Pretending babies do not have mothers exemplifies the rejection of reality inherent in same-sex marriage. The basis for marriage as a social and legal institution is not adult sexual and romantic desires but the complementarity of male and female, a complementarity that gave each of us life. That is fundamental human reality, not irrational bigotry.

Marriage is rooted in human nature, and trying to have its benefits while denying that nature is harmful, individually and socially. Marriage is about the two halves of humanity coming together in committed relationships that continue the human species. It is both foundational to the good order and flourishing of society, and a source of some of the highest joys and greatest fulfillments possible in this life. And for Christians, it is also an image of our fulfilment with Christ in heaven.

Marriage encompasses everything from basic biological truths to the mysteries of the divine. But our culture has reduced it to a subjective expression of sexual and romantic partnership, dissolvable at will; marriage is just a contract — and not the hardest to get out of. This reductive view of marriage dispenses with both commitment and complementarity, which is to say, with the point of marriage.

The invention of same-sex marriage was not the primary, let alone only, cause of the decline in marriage. But it did make matters worse, and it is now an obstacle to getting back on track. We cannot restore a right understanding of marriage while pretending that sex, in every sense, is irrelevant to it.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of "Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All" (Ignatius, 2025).