A May 2026 Gallup poll shows that U.S. public support for same-sex marriage and the moral acceptability of gay and lesbian relations has declined slightly since 2022, marking a pause in more than two decades of steady growth. The shift is driven primarily by a continued drop in support among Republicans, while views among Democrats and independents have remained largely stable.
About 65% of U.S. adults now say same-sex marriage should be legal, down from 71% in both 2022 and 2023, according to the Gallup survey. In the same poll, 62% of adults said gay and lesbian relations are morally acceptable, a decrease from 71% in 2022. The poll was conducted from May 1 to May 17, 2026, based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,001 U.S. adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.
Republican attitudes have shifted. In the 2026 poll, only 37% of Republicans said same-sex marriage should be legally valid, and just 35% described gay and lesbian relations as morally acceptable. In contrast, majorities of both Democrats and independents continue to support the legality and moral acceptability of same-sex relationships, with little change from recent years.
Gallup’s long-term trend data shows a rise in acceptance over the past 30 years. In 1996, only 27% of U.S. adults supported legal same-sex marriage. By 2001, 40% said same-sex relations were morally acceptable, and that figure grew by nearly 30 percentage points over the next two decades. Support for same-sex marriage peaked at around 70% in the early 2020s before the recent dip.
Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized nationwide since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. By 2025, more than 800,000 married same-sex couples lived in the U.S., according to data from the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. Despite ongoing legal recognition, a petition to overturn the 2015 decision reached the Supreme Court in 2025, echoing Justice Clarence Thomas’s earlier call to revisit the ruling. The Court declined to take up the case without comment.
During the same period, the Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly called in 2025 for reversing the 2015 marriage ruling and instituting a national ban. Lawmakers in at least 11 states introduced legislation in their current or most recent sessions seeking to ban same-sex marriage, according to an analysis of bills tracked by Plural. Most of those proposals did not advance.