In the latest sign the LGBT agenda is losing support, the number of people who view same-sex relationships as “morally acceptable” tumbled last year — a sign “people are beginning to connect the dots” between legalizing same-sex marriage and indoctrinating schoolchildren in the LGBT agenda, a prominent pro-family leader says.
Overall, support for homosexual relationships fell this year by 7%, the largest decrease of any of the moral issued posed by Gallup pollsters in their annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted each May. In 2023, 63% of Americans say they see nothing wrong with “gay or lesbian relations.” Fewer Republicans and Democrats said they found homosexual relations morally neutral this year.
“People are beginning to connect the dots between these agendas,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Monday. “We were told all this is just about live and let live, just being able to marry the one you love.” Disengaged voters “didn’t realize that it was going to involve the indoctrination of their children, the infiltration of every media outlet in America,” or that “different professions will be forced to affirm these same-sex unions” or go out of business.
Americans are “saying, ‘Enough is enough,’ and they’re pushing back.”
Since the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision discovered the “right” to same-sex marriage in the U.S. Constitution, teachers unions and LGBT activists have rushed to normalize homosexual unions, and homosexuality in general, in the eyes of children. Nationwide, school libraries have stocked books parents have described as pornographic. These titles include “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, which contains illustrations of man-boy sexual relations, and “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, in which a boy fondly remembers an episode as a fourth-grade boy when he performed fellatio on an adult man.
“Now we are seeing the reality” of “what is now required of us because of agreeing to that erroneous idea that two people of the same sex can be married,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told Perkins.
The reversal in social acceptance of homosexual relations is driven by Republicans, whose support dipped by 15 points over the last year, from 56% to 41%. Yet support for homosexuality also fell a significant 6% among Democrats, from 85% to 79%; independents’ views remained essentially unchanged.
Gallup did not specify which Democratic constituencies changed their views, but the poll’s crosstab data show that “non-whites” are 10 points less likely to find same-sex relations “morally acceptable” than whites. Although the category is not further defined by ethnicity, polls from 2017 through 2022 show black Americans are more likely to reject same-sex relations than white and Hispanic respondents.
“This Gallup poll is showing you” that “the extremism of the Democratic Party” is “definitely losing part of their base,” said Kilgannon.
Black Americans flatly reject efforts to conflate the ever-expanding LGBTQIA2S+ coalition’s agenda with the 1960s civil rights movement. “When you say to African-Americans, ‘The gay struggle is the black struggle,’ they don’t buy it,” former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) told Ginni Thomas of The Daily Caller in a 2012 video. “Many African-Americans think there’s a virtue in men marrying women, because it means mothers and fathers, frankly. That’s their real stake in the issue.”
Although support for homosexuality fell last year, it is down from last year’s record high of 71%. A majority of Americans did not support same-sex marriage until 2011, Gallup says; an Associated Press-GfK poll showed the number falling into a minority even after Obergefell.
The largest opposition comes from weekly churchgoers, Gallup found: Only 41% of weekly churchgoers view same-sex marriage as moral, according to Good Faith Media.
Numerous Bible passages condemn same-sex relations as immoral (Genesis 19; Leviticus 18:22-24 and 20:19; Romans 1:26-32; I Corinthians 6:9-11; I Timothy 1:8-11; Jude 7; and Revelation 21:8 and 22:15). The Christian church has maintained for 2,000 years that all sexual relationships outside the marriage of one man and one woman violate God’s will and purpose for our lives. “Those shameful acts against nature, such as were committed in Sodom, ought everywhere and always to be detested,” wrote St. Augustine of Hippo.
“Weekly Churchgoers Are the Final Holdouts of Opposition,” proclaimed Gallup last June. Yet this year, Republican support for same-sex marriage fell to 49%. In all, 57% of self-identified conservatives find same-sex relations “morally unacceptable.” This year, Gallup also found that two-thirds of Americans oppose letting men compete in women’s sports; 55% of Americans believe transgenderism is immoral; and the number of social conservatives reached its highest level in a decade.
“The tipping point has been what’s happening in the classrooms of America,” said Perkins. While Christians and broader society may have overlooked multiple lawsuits harassing Jack Phillips’ Masterpiece Cakeshop and driving elderly Christian florist Barronelle Stutzman out of business, they cannot ignore what’s happening with their children, said Kilgannon. That has catalyzed organizations not usually part of the social issues movement to join the fight for parental rights.
They are on the front end of a societal backlash, polls suggest. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released last Friday found that 82% of parents favor “legislation that would strengthen parental rights over their children”; 77% oppose transgender injections or surgeries for minors (including 67% of Democrats and 77% of independents); and 70% say schools should not teach children their gender is a choice (including 54% of Democrats).
Although an overwhelming and bipartisan majority oppose such procedures, 2016 and 2024 Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie told CNN he would allow minors to receive cross-sex hormone injections and puberty blockers with parental consent.
The Democratic Party also doubled down on its commitment to extreme transgender ideology, due in part to “old Democrat Party politics,” including teachers unions and “the LGBT lobby, which are “probably [the] most powerful parts of the coalition in terms of boots on the ground,” Kilgannon said. The need to placate these megadonors and get-out-the-vote organizations will continue to pull the Democratic Party’s leader leftward, she added.
“They’re gearing up for 2024, and” the transgender agenda for children “is the clarion call they’re sending out.”
Parents of all political identifications must actively turn back the attempt to indoctrinate students in LGBT propaganda, said Kilgannon, because the stakes are too high.
“It is about them having power over our children to direct their thinking and their upbringing in a way that only parents are authorized to do,” Kilgannon concluded.
“It’s about who has the power over children: Is it going to be their parents or is it going to be the state?”
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
Ben Johnson
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