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Support for same-sex marriage at record high: Gallup

by Maureen Breslin - 06/01/22 9:28 AM ET

Support for same-sex marriage reached a new high in Gallup’s latest polling, rising to 71 percent of respondents who now say they are in favor of it.

The previous high, 70 percent, was recorded last year.

The survey giant noted just 27 percent of respondents supported same-sex marriage when it first began asking about the topic in 1996 and majority approval did not occur for another 15 years.

It was not until 2015, right before the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage federally, that support for same-sex marriage hit 60 percent approval in Gallup’s polls.

Subgroups that had long been majority-opposed to same-sex marriage also have switched to a majority approval in recent years, such as Americans aged 65 and older, 53 percent of whom approved in Gallup’s polling in 2016.

Protestants, including all non-Catholic Christians, had a majority approval for same-sex marriage for the first time in Gallup’s polling in 2017, at 55 percent. Catholics, meanwhile, have held a majority approval of same-sex marriage since 2011.

Last year, a majority of Republicans also supported same-sex marriage for the first time. In 2021, Gallup’s poll showed that 55 percent of supporters of the GOP were in favor of same-sex marriage.

A subgroup that is one of the last holdouts for majority approval of same-sex marriage is weekly churchgoers, Gallup noted on Wednesday. Their current rate of approval for same-sex marriage is 40 percent, which falls within the 39-44 percent threshold Gallup has recorded since 2016.

Compared to weekly churchgoers, those who go to church gatherings semi-regularly, such as once a month, support same-sex marriage at a 70 percent rate, while 82 percent of those who seldom or never attend support it.

The polling comes amid questions about whether a conservative majority Supreme Court, which is reportedly on the verge of overturning abortion protections in Roe v. Wade, may reexamine Obergefell v. Hodges.

Gallup’s latest poll was conducted by telephone interviews May 2-22, with a random sample of 1,007 adults ages 18 and older. Gallup’s margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence interval.