Gallup: US Support for LGBTQ+ Rights Keeps Sliding — and Red States Are Rebranding June

Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll landed this week, and the numbers tell a story that LGBTQ+ Americans have been feeling in their daily lives for a while now: public support is eroding, and the erosion is not slowing down.

The numbers

Support for same-sex marriage now sits at 65 percent, down from a peak of 71 percent in 2022 and 2023. The share of Americans who say gay or lesbian relations are “morally acceptable” fell to 62 percent — the lowest that figure has been since 2016, a year after Obergefell. And just 38 percent say changing one’s gender is morally acceptable, down eight points since 2021.

Two-thirds support for marriage equality is still a solid majority, and worth keeping in perspective: it’s roughly double what it was when Gallup started asking the question in 1996. But trendlines matter more than snapshots, and this is now the third consecutive year of decline from the peak. What once looked like a noisy dip increasingly looks like a real shift.

Who’s moving

Gallup’s breakdown is unambiguous about where the change is coming from. The pullback is driven largely by Republicans and, to a lesser extent, independents. Democrats’ views on LGBTQ+ issues have remained essentially steady.

Age is the other axis worth watching. Younger Americans remain far more supportive than older cohorts on every measure Gallup tracks, which is why long-run projections still point toward acceptance. But “the kids will fix it” has always been a complacent reading — younger Republicans have shifted right on these questions too, and demographics move on a timescale of decades while legislation moves in a single session.

That partisan divergence is the story under the story. American opinion on LGBTQ+ rights isn’t drifting uniformly — it’s polarizing. A decade ago, support for marriage equality was rising across every partisan group simultaneously, which made the question feel settled. What’s happening now is different: one party’s voters are being persuaded, year over year, that the consensus was a mistake. The relentless volume of anti-trans legislation, campaign advertising, and media coverage since 2021 was designed to do exactly this, and the polling suggests it’s working — and that the effects don’t stay neatly contained to trans issues. The “morally acceptable” number for gay and lesbian relations doesn’t fall to a ten-year low by accident.

Meanwhile, in the states

The poll arrived the same week several Republican-led states made a coordinated-looking show of replacing Pride Month with alternatives. Utah Governor Spencer Cox declared June 2026 “Fidelity Month,” joining Arkansas. Tennessee, Alabama, and Indiana proclaimed June “Nuclear Family Month.” Oklahoma declared June “Life Month.”

Proclamations are symbolic, but symbols are the point. For years, even Republican governors who opposed LGBTQ+ rights legislatively tended to simply ignore Pride Month. Actively counter-programming it is a newer posture, and it tracks with the Gallup data: this is a political environment where being seen rejecting LGBTQ+ visibility is treated as an asset rather than a risk.

What this means

We write about rights erosion in the US sparingly — the whole internet covers American politics, and the facts here speak for themselves. But this poll is worth sitting with because public opinion is the substrate everything else grows from. Court rulings, legislation, executive orders: all of it eventually answers to what voters will tolerate.

The lesson queer communities abroad learned long ago — in Hungary, in Poland, in the Balkans we cover every week — is that public support is not a ratchet. It can go backward, and it goes backward fastest when people assume the fight is finished. Sixty-five percent is still a majority. The work is making sure it doesn’t become 59, then 53, then a talking point about how the country “never really supported this.”

Pride Month exists precisely for years like this one.