The Doomsayers Were Wrong About Same-Sex Marriage
Currents
It's been 20 years since Marcia Kadish and Tanya McCloskey’s 2004 wedding in Massachusetts made them the first legally married same-sex couple in the United States. It’s also been nine years since the 2015 landmark Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage across America. Today, even amid the throes of an anti-LGBT backlash, support for same-sex marriage sits at a comfortable 69%. It’s easy to forget, especially for younger folks, that it was ever a controversial issue. But as the LGBT rights movement gained steam throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, the resistance it faced was as ferocious as it was deranged. Religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives relentlessly railed that it would be a harbinger of societal ruin. But recent research proves the doomsayers were wrong.
Evangelist James Dobson once said that same-sex marriage would destroy traditional marriage and the family. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a thrice-married philanderer who left his first wife when she had cancer and his second wife when she had multiple sclerosis, likened it to a form of paganism that would erode Western civilization. Others prophesied that same-sex marriage was a slippery slope to moral anarchy. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee compared LGBT rights to incest. Senator Rick Santorum, whose surname, thanks to Dan Savage, has been established in the American lexicon as referring to a frothy anal sex byproduct, famously compared same-sex marriage both to pedophilia and “man on dog” marriage. US Congressman and apparent Elmer Fudd cosplayer Louie Gohmert likewise suggested it would pave the way for bestiality. Behind the most grandiose headlines of that era was a constant energetic thrum of talking points: LGBT rights would wreck the family unit, harm kids, and unravel the social fabric.
Many of us knew that such hyperbolic fearmongering was bigoted nonsense even back then. Based on an exhaustive new meta-analysis of relevant studies, however, we can now say definitively and objectively that same-sex marriage was not just a giant leap for moral progress and human rights, it has measurably improved society.
In a report released by the RAND Corporation in 2024, researchers reviewed nearly 100 studies spanning the past two decades on the effects of same-sex marriage in the United States. Their findings were clear: “The evidence review revealed that for LGBT individuals and same-sex couples, their children, and the general US population, the benefits of access to legal marriage for same-sex couples are unambiguously positive.” In a separate press release, UCLA psychologist and study co-author Benjamin R. Karney said, “Overall, the fears of opponents of same-sex marriage simply have not come to pass.”
RAND found that the impact of same-sex marriage legalization on LGBT people has been profound, as one would expect. In states where same-sex marriage was legal (a limited number of states prior to Obergefell and all states after), same-sex households experienced increased earnings, higher rates of homeownership, better retirement planning, and better preparation for end-of-life care. Same-sex marriage was also associated with more stable relationships, lower rates of sexually transmitted infections, less substance abuse, improved mental health, improved physical health, and better access to health insurance, especially for the children of same-sex couples, who also had better educational outcomes. In addition, perceived anti-LGBT stigma declined, as did anti-LGBT hate crimes and employment discrimination, while both social support and family support rose. The authors also found that married same-sex couples had better mental health than those in civil unions, domestic partnerships, or with no legal status. By contrast, LGBT people in states that banned same-sex marriage pre-Obergefell reported higher anxiety and lower life satisfaction than residents of states without such bans, “even after controlling for other elements of the state political climate.”
Notably, the benefits of same-sex marriage were by no means confined to LGBT people. Post-legalization, HIV, AIDS, and syphilis rates all fell sharply. Adoption rates rose between 4–6%, new marriages increased by 1–2% among opposite-sex couples (and 10% overall), and attitudes about marriage among high school seniors improved. The researchers also found that, despite the religious right’s longstanding predictions, there was no rise in divorce or unmarried cohabitation among opposite-sex couples as a result of same-sex marriage. LGBT rights even paid economic dividends. States that legalized same-sex marriage saw higher rates of patents, and the corporations headquartered there saw their market values rise swiftly, likely due to higher productivity from all of the other positive effects.
To read through this 200-page RAND report is to be pummeled with such an avalanche of good news that one is left with progress fatigue. Or, to put it in more Trumpian terms, “Too much winning!” Same-sex marriage has not, in the final analysis, destroyed the institution of marriage, nor turned society into a giant interspecies sex party. America did not become a John Waters film or the United States of Leather Daddies — it became a more perfect union, one where we’re all better off.
But progress always has its malcontents. While attitudes toward LGBT people have become dramatically more enlightened since the 2000s, there remains a seething minority dedicated to keeping the flame of old-school homophobia alive. With the calumnies and canards of yesteryear no longer empirically tenable, the cultural right has moved the goalposts. They can’t claim that opposite-sex marriage or the family has been destroyed. They can’t point to some troubling uptick in brothers marrying their sisters (and given the geographical politics of the US, that’s a game they probably don’t want to play). Instead, they’ve retconned same-sex marriage into a slippery slope to all of their current bugbears: trans culture wars, sexy Pride festivities, the so-called “grooming” panic, rainbow capitalism, and so forth. First, you let Adam marry Steve, and the next thing you know, they’re putting trans people on beer cans and drag queens are reading stories to your kids.
Whatever one thinks of the LGBT-related trends of the past few years — and they’ve certainly rubbed some people the wrong way — the connection between, for example, the increase in non-binary identity and same-sex marriage is tenuous at best. And in any event, even if the political right managed to ban same-sex marriage nationwide, there is no reason to expect it would magically zap trans people or blue-haired activists out of existence.
The irony is that same-sex marriage’s foremost advocates in the 1980s and 90s were gay and bisexual moderates, people like the conservative writer Andrew Sullivan, whose famous 1989 essay in The New Republic, “Here Comes the Groom”, helped put the issue on the map. These advocates faced fierce opposition not only from the religious right, but from gay separatists and queer radicals on the far left, who saw marriage as an irredeemably sexist, patriarchal, and heteronormative institution that they wanted no part of. The journalist Donna Minkowitz perfectly encapsulated this radical attitude in a 1994 LGBT-themed episode of Charlie Rose when she said, “We don’t want a place at the table — we want to turn the table over.” The movement for same-sex marriage was one of assimilationist, pro-family integration, not far-left ideological radicalism — one that was philosophically aligned with small-c conservative values and opposed by the LGBT far-left. To then turn around and implicate same-sex marriage in a slew of perceived far-left cultural overreaches is, in a sense, even more divorced from reality than outlandishly crying wolf about “man on dog” love affairs.
The disconnect runs even deeper, though. “None of us is free until all of us are free” might be a liberal platitude, but as this RAND report makes resoundingly clear, it also happens to be true. This isn’t just a political insight, but a spiritual one too. Virtually every religion contains some version of “When you help others, you help yourself.” When we expand the freedom and opportunity of those who have too long been unequal, we enable them to be more creative, innovative, and productive, which helps everyone. Similarly, when some people are suffering or unduly constrained, we all lose out on the many missed opportunities that go unrealized. Many critics of the cultural left’s overreaches are right when they point out that central planning doesn’t work because societies are too complex, distributed, and interconnected to be controlled from above. But this same sprawling interconnectedness puts the lie to the notion that denying one subset of society basic rights could be necessary for safeguarding the flourishing of everyone else. The proof is in the data. When LGBT people thrive, we all thrive. Every victory we win for LGBT people is, in fact, a victory we win for humanity.
Published July 31, 2024
