The alarmists were right. Ten years after the Obergefell decision enacting same-sex marriage nationwide, its opponents — smeared then and now as cranks and bigots — have been vindicated. Same-sex marriage was sold to the public through a campaign of lies, and the lies are hurting people.

It is therefore no wonder that support for same-sex marriage seems to have peaked, and may even be starting to decline, especially on the right. Of course, GOP leaders, whether from MAGA or the old establishment, have no stomach for the fight. They just want the issue to go away. They and the left thought that opponents of same-sex marriage should surrender or slink off into the social shadows and fringes.

But instead, the remaining opponents of same-sex marriage seem emboldened. The latest example comes from the Southern Baptist Convention, which overwhelmingly voted for a resolution calling for Obergefell to be overturned. It is not surprising that Southern Baptists are still against same-sex marriage, but engaging the issue shows that they do not consider it a lost cause. And they may well be right.

During debates over same-sex marriage, Americans were endlessly told that there was no slippery slope. We were assured that this was about loving adults, and that the gay-rights movement was not going to infringe on anyone else’s rights, let alone try to groom kids in any way. They lied.

Not only did they lie, they did not even bother to hide it. After Obergefell, the champions of same-sex marriage were convinced that they were riding an inexorable wave of rainbow-hued social progress, and so they enthusiastically launched their movement down an incline that was practically a cliff. The same people and organizations that told us that same-sex marriage was about letting adults live and let live championed transitioning children and demanded a drag queen in every child’s library story hour and a man in every girls’ locker room. They declared that “eunuch” was a valid “gender identity” that ought to be medically affirmed.

The mantra that “love is love” disappeared into a sudden enthusiasm for polyamory — love is love is love is love. They demanded a right to buy babies without so much as a background check. And they insisted that all of this be celebrated through a new lineup of holidays, capped by the month-long national festivities of Pride. And those who objected had their reputations, careers, and even families threatened and attacked.

These excesses and evils were intrinsic to the campaign for same-sex marriage, which is rooted in a revolt against human nature and a rejection of the normativity of male and female. It places subjective desire at the core of human identity, and disdains all restraint on that desire. This established a disconnect between human embodiment and human meaning and identity. Same-sex marriage presumed that men and women — and mothers and fathers — are interchangeable except insofar as they are objects of personal sexual desire.

This is why the supposed inclusion of same-sex marriage meant social revolution. It is not just that Obergefell was an activist decision utterly ungrounded in the Constitution, though of course it was, but that same-sex marriage was intrinsically radical. If the differences between male and female don’t matter in marriage, then they don’t matter anywhere, which is why same-sex marriage immediately led to the promotion of gender ideology, especially for children.

Thus, opposition to same-sex marriage is essential to defending the truth about human nature and about how we flourish and are fulfilled. As Andrew Walker, a Baptist theologian and my colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center explained to a reporter following the Southern Baptists’ vote:

These are moral realities that cultures across history and across the globe have recognized … a moral order that is both broadly recognized and deeply rooted in natural law and human nature. The Christian moral witness aligns with these “self-evident truths” — to borrow the language of our own Declaration of Independence — not because Christianity is an arbitrary imposition, but because it faithfully testifies to the way the world actually is. This is the enduring beauty of Christian morality: it is not a parochial morality, but a true morality. To speak of “imposing” a Christian understanding of marriage and family is no more an imposition of sectarian dogma than it would be to say that gravity imposes itself upon us.

The truth about marriage as the union of one man and one woman is not an idiosyncratic religious observance or opinion, but is rooted in the immutable reality of who we are and how we are to live for our own good and the good of others.

Of course, instantiating these truths will require more than rejecting same-sex marriage, which was always just part of the sexual revolution and its evils. This revolution did not begin with same-sex couples: marriage had been degraded and redefined a great deal before same-sex marriage even became thinkable. Nonetheless, the legal enactment of same-sex marriage further enshrined the lies of sexual liberalism, with its hatred for human nature.

And so abolishing same-sex marriage is essential. Genuine social justice must be rooted in the truths of human nature, including that men and women are not interchangeable.

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).