Editor’s Note: This story was updated to include Gallup’s May 2017 poll data on attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex “marriage,” which was inadvertently left out of the original article.
June 5, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The latest Gallup survey on American attitudes toward homosexuality finds the highest support ever for legalized homosexual “marriage” (64 percent-34 percent), but a pro-family leader says that should be expected given the “constant media and cultural propaganda” on behalf of the unnatural unions.
The ongoing Gallup survey, conducted May 3-7, asked the question, “Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?” Sixty-four percent said they “should be valid,” 34 percent said they should not, and two percent had no opinion.
“(T)his is the highest percentage to date and continues the generally steady rise since Gallup's trend began in 1996,” Gallup reports, noting a three percentage point uptick from 2016, when it found 61 percent-37 percent of Americans in favor of legalizing same-sex “marriage.”
Gallup has been asking a version of the “same-sex marriage” question only since 2005. In that year, separate polls found 68-28 and 56-39 against the idea of legalizing homosexual “marriage” — in other words, a complete flip from where the public reportedly is today.
Gallup records 2012 as the first year showing more Americans in favor of homosexuality-based “marriage” than against it. That is also the year that then-President Barack Obama famously switched his stance to support “gay marriage,” months before his re-election later that year.
Whatever factors are behind the massive and rapid public opinion shift, it cannot reasonably be challenged that Americans have strayed far from the historic, Judeo-Christian (biblical) understanding of homosexuality as a sinful behavior. The issue has become one of the most important moral issues of modern times — although social liberals construe it as about “rights” — having been brought to the fore in America by the “gay liberation” movement that emerged from the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.
It takes ‘massive propaganda’ to redefine normal
Brian Camenker, founder and president of the pro-family group Mass Resistance, said Americans need to evaluate the Gallup poll data in a larger context.
“It’s all artificial. Because homosexuality is innately unnatural, it takes massive amounts of constant media and cultural propaganda for people to believe these things. Thus, the big change in a relatively short time. But if that stops, everything will go back to normal. It always has,” Camenker told LifeSiteNews.
Camenker, who has been a leader worldwide in fighting the same-sex “marriage” movement, said court rulings imposing the phenomenon also provide a patina of respectability to the revolutionary redefinition of the ancient institution uniting the sexes.
“Too many law-abiding people are deluded into believing that rulings by judges must be recognized as ‘immutable law’ no matter how corrupt or bizarre, and all our thinking and morality must be adjusted,” Camenker said. “That’s happened with school prayer, abortion and now homosexual so-called ‘marriage.’
“It’s simply wrong,” he said. “Judges were never meant to have that power.”
Even ‘conservatives’ go along
Perhaps the survey showing accelerated support for “gay marriage” helps explain why, in another Gallup poll (May 3-7), more than four in five Americans (81 percent) said U.S. moral values are “only fair” or “poor,” with 77 percent saying they are getting worse.
The new, anti-biblical “morality” seems to create its own momentum. One example of how homosexual “marriage” has been normalized is that even many self-styled conservative websites and activists have either embraced it or no longer focus on it as a major issue.
In 2015, one-time conservative standard-bearer National Review ran an essay in defense of “gay marriage” by its managing editor, Jason Lee Steorts. NR’s founder, William F. Buckley, was firmly against legalizing homosexuality-based “marriage” as a Catholic, but his great-nephew, Sean Buckley, a homosexual, came out for it in 2015.
Openly homosexual “conservative” Republican Fox News pundit Guy Benson praised the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling Obergefell v. Hodges, imposing the de facto legalization of “gay marriage,” as “poetry.” Benson describes himself as a Christian despite his embrace of sexual behavior historically proscribed by the Bible. This is a tack that more and more LGBT advocates are taking as they accelerate their push to win denominational backing for same-sex behaviors and “gay marriage.”
President Trump, as president-elect in November, angered social conservatives by calling homosexual “marriage” “settled law.”
“It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it’s done … And, I’m fine with that,” said Trump, even though he promised conservative Christians on the campaign trail that they could “trust” him to uphold traditional marriage. Trump had said he hoped to reverse Obergefell by sending “gay marriage” back to the states to be adjudicated.
Majority of Protestants accept “gay marriage”
Gallup reports that this year, for the first time, its homosexuality poll reveals that a majority of “Protestants” (“non-Catholic Christians”)—55 percent—accept homosexual “marriage,” compared to 65 percent of Catholics. It states:
“U.S. Protestants, including all non-Catholic Christians, are now about twice as likely to support gay marriage as they were in 1996 (55 percent vs. 27 percent). In recent years, some Protestant churches have moved toward supporting same-sex unions; however, this year's poll is the first time Protestant support has reached the majority level.
“Meanwhile, a majority of U.S. Catholics have consistently supported same-sex marriage since 2011, which is at odds with the Roman Catholic Church's official position opposing same-sex marriage.”
Other findings – most still say people born gay
Beyond same-sex “marriage,” the 2016 version of the same Gallup homosexuality poll found that the number of people who believe homosexuals are “born gay” fell five points from the year before. However, the “born that way” belief still dominates the public’s mind. (Even LGBTQ advocates are moving away from the “born gay” concept: “A top researcher with the American Psychological Association and lesbian activist has acknowledged that gays are not ‘born that way,’” LifeSiteNews reported in September.)
Asked the question in 2016, “In your view, is being gay or lesbian something that a person is born with, or due to factors such as upbringing and environment?” 46 percent told Gallup, “Born with”; 33 percent said “Upbringing/environment;” and 12 percent said both. In 2015, the numbers for the same question were 51-30-8, respectively.
To give some perspective, back in 1997, only 13 percent of Americans endorsed the “born that way” view as the main causative factor in homosexuality, according to Gallup, while 56 percent cited “Upbringing/environment”; 14 percent said “both.”
Is homosexuality morally acceptable?
On the question of whether homosexual sex is moral, there has similarly been a massive public shift. In the poll published last month, 63 percent of those surveyed agreed that “gay and lesbian relations’ (read: homosexual sex) are “Morally acceptable,” and 33 percent said they are “morally wrong.”
That’s up from 60 percent of Americans in 2016 who said “gay or lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable,” and 37 percent said they are “morally wrong.”
In 2001, with the same question asked except using the more straightforward words “homosexual behavior” rather than “gay or lesbian relations,” the results were flipped: a majority, 53 percent, of American said homosexual behavior is “Morally wrong,” while 40 percent said it is “Morally acceptable.”
But going back to 1982, in response to a related question, “Do you feel that homosexuality should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle or not?” only 34 percent of Americans said it was “acceptable.” Fifty-two percent said it was “not acceptable.”
By 2008, the results had flipped, with 57 percent of Americans saying homosexuality was “acceptable,” and 40 percent said it was not.
GOP support for “gay marriage” growing
Compared with the 2017 responses on whether homosexual “relations” are moral acceptability, an even higher percentage of Americans (72 percent) now believe homosexual sex should be legal, according to Gallup. That’s way up from 43 percent in 1977, when Gallup first asked the legality question. (The Supreme Court struck down Texas’ anti-homosexual-sodomy law in 2003 with its Lawrence v Texas ruling, paving the way for further LGBT legal victories nationwide.)
The 2017 Gallup poll also found that 74 percent of Democrats support homosexual “marriage” compared to 47 percent of Republicans. That's the highest figure ever for surveyed GOP voters. Back in 1997, when the question was first asked, Republicans and Democrats were unified in big majorities opposed to homosexual “marriage,” with 32 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats supporting it.
Independents registered the same as Democrats against “gay marriage” back in 1997, but today, 71 percent of independents support it.
Gallup reports that results for its latest poll on homosexuality “are based on telephone interviews conducted May 3-7, 2017, with a random sample of 1,011 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.”