Opinion Today: Ten years of marriage equality
The gay and lesbian movement built a mainstream consensus — and now might lose it.
Opinion Today
June 26, 2025

By Carl Swanson

Deputy Editorial Director, Opinion

Thursday is the 10th anniversary of the day the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges ushered in marriage equality in the United States.

Andrew Sullivan, an early and influential advocate for gay marriage, argues in a guest essay that after the gay rights movement won its most sought-after and once-unimaginable goal it turned ever more radical, especially on trans issues. And in doing that, he says, it lost its way.

“This new ideology, I believed, was different,” he writes. “Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I was supposed to believe the difference didn’t exist?”

Sullivan worries that the gay and lesbian movement, by allying itself with what he sees as new gender ideologies, including the medical treatments of trans kids that was the subject of the recent Supreme Court decision in United States v. Skrmetti, may have weakened the American consensus on gay rights.

Read the guest essay:

Here’s what we’re focusing on today:

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