It has been more than a decade since same-sex marriage dominated the national political discourse.
Public opinion turned rapidly toward acceptance well before the Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a national right in 2015. By 2021, a Gallup poll showed that most Americans, including a majority of Republicans, favored legal recognition of such marriages, and ahead of the Republican National Convention in 2024, Donald J. Trump ordered the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman removed from his party’s platform.
But in state legislatures across the country this year, there is new activity on the same-sex marriage front — and echoes of the issue’s long, contentious past.
In half a dozen states, Republican lawmakers have introduced resolutions urging the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. In Tennessee, a Republican legislator has proposed a new category of “covenant” marriages between “one male and one female.” And in several states, including Virginia and Oregon, Democrats are laying the groundwork to repeal old state statutes and constitutional amendments that prohibited same-sex marriage, which could come back into effect should Obergefell be overturned.
No one is suggesting that reconsideration of the decision in Obergefell is imminent. Still, the number of state measures proposed signals an effort to shift the perception of same-sex marriage as an established civil right, leaders on both sides of the issue say.
“We have to prepare for the worst,” Jeremy Moss, the state’s first openly gay state senator, wrote in a piece for The Detroit Free Press under the headline, “Gay marriage isn’t safe in Michigan.” Mr. Moss, a Democrat, called for a ballot initiative to protect same-sex marriage after Representative Josh Schriver, a House Republican, introduced a resolution asserting that the Supreme Court’s decision had “confused the American family structure” and proposing that the Michigan Legislature condemn it.
Resolutions like Mr. Schriver’s, calling on the Supreme Court to undo Obergefell, carry no legal authority, and no state has approved such a resolution so far.