When the Southern Baptist Convention unanimously approved a resolution on June 10 that called for reversing Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 US Supreme Court decision that required states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, they dragged out a series of assertions grounded in religion, such as “Obergefell v. Hodges and policies that deny the biological reality of male and female are legal fictions, undermine the truth of God’s design, and lead to social confusion and injustice,” to defend the resolution.
Should that decision be debated again in America, religious arguments would certainly be part of that, but the right wing would struggle with arguments that showed some success in the run up to the Supreme Court decision, such as that schools would be required to teach children about same-sex marriage or that religious charities and houses of worship would somehow be impacted by allowing same-sex couples to wed.
With nearly a generation’s worth of same-sex couples marrying since such couples started tying the knot in Massachusetts in 2004, every prediction made by right wingers about the consequences of such weddings has been proven wrong.
No church, no synagogue, no temple, and no mosque has been required to marry a couple that those houses of worship did not wish to marry. There were arguments claiming that religiously-affiliated non-profits, such as Catholic Charities, had to shut down adoption programs because their refusal to help same-sex couples adopt was barred by state anti-discrimination laws that had sexual orientation as a protected class.
In a 2012 Republican Party debate during that party’s primary, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, both blamed same-sex marriage for Catholic Charities in Boston ending its adoption program.
“Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples, which is exactly what the state has done?” Gingrich asked. Romney said “What happened was Catholic Charities that placed almost half of all the adoptive children in our state was forced to step out of being able to provide adoptive services.”
Those arguments were false. It was the Vatican that required Catholic Charities to stop assisting same-sex couples in adoptions. A 2003 Vatican encyclical that described parenting by gay and lesbian couples as “gravely immoral” eventually required these agencies to end adoptions. The document was issued by what is now known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had a long anti-LGBTQ history and went on to become the pope. He passed away in 2022. The encyclical also said that “Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children.”
In 2006, Cardinal William Levada, who replaced Ratzinger as the head of the dicastery, ordered all Catholic Charities agencies to stop placing “children for adoption in homosexual households.” Levada ran the San Francisco archdiocese from 1995 to 2005. Published reports noted that Catholic Charities there placed 136 special needs children over the prior five years, with five of them going to gay or lesbian households. It is unknown if Levada knew about those placements.
In 2005, the Boston Globe reported that 13 of the 720 adoptions completed by the Catholic Charities agency in Boston over the prior 20 years were by gay or lesbian couples. In a 2012 interview, a former board member at that agency told Gay City News that Cardinal Bernard Law, who ran the Boston archdiocese from 1984 to 2002, and Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, who replaced Law, were aware of the adoptions by gay or lesbian couples. Law died in 2017 after fleeing the US for the Vatican in 2002 to avoid any consequences for his involvement in the church’s sexual abuse scandal. O’Malley retired in 2024.
Presenting same-sex marriage as bad for children was also a common tactic. In a 2012 interview with Marvin Olasky, a right wing author, Maggie Gallagher, the founding president of National Organization for Marriage, argued that children needed a mother and a father and that any other way of organizing a family harmed children.
“Same-sex marriage totally separates marriage from its core public function and idea: that we as a whole society need to bring in male and female to make and raise the next generation, because children need mothers and fathers,” Gallagher said.
While Gallagher was an effective speaker for the anti-marriage movement, she was confronted with a large body of science that showed that children raised by same-sex couples performed as well as children raised by heterosexual couples. Just like children raised by heterosexual couples, any differences among the children were explained by differences in the socioeconomic status of the parents and the stability in the relationship of the parents. Gallagher eventually began arguing that the negative effects of same-sex marriage would take a generation or more to be uncovered.
The most effective messages were arguments that allowing same-sex marriage would require schools to discuss same-sex marriage with students. In 2008, a right-wing group in California successfully passed a ballot initiative, Prop. 8, that amended the state’s constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. That group ran a TV ad that showed a child coming home from school and showing a book to her mother that depicted two princes marrying. Prop. 8 was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 2013 because the proponents of Prop. 8 did not have standing to bring the lawsuit. This inflammatory and dishonest message has continued to have an effect. Currently, 19 states have laws barring LGBTQ content in schools.
June 26, which marked the 10th anniversary of the Obergefell decision, reveals that hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples have married since Obergefell and hundreds of thousands more married before 2015. While press reports focused on polling data showing continued support for same-sex marriage in the US, what those polls ignore is that the audience for these messages is the US Supreme Court and its nine members, three of whom would be likely to support overturning Obergefell: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts, the chief justice. LGBTQ groups remain confident that will not happen.
“The freedom to marry for same-sex couples has been the law of the land in every state for 10 years now,” the National Center for LGBTQ Rights said in a written statement. “Public support has never been higher. More than two-thirds of Americans support the freedom to marry, and that figure has remained stable for nearly a decade. People today are well accustomed to attending their friends’ and relatives’ weddings, watching them grow together as a family, and often seeing them raise children. They can see with their own eyes that none of the terrible social effects that were predicted by anti-marriage activists have come to pass. The freedom to marry is here to stay, and public statements urging courts to reverse it are nothing but political theater.”
