How to win a culture war from behind
Marriage equality won by changing the question. Trans rights activists are fighting on the wrong terrain.
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Imagine the following scenario:
A Republican president running for his second term is using LGBT rights as a cudgel against the left in order to consolidate moderate support while firing up conservatives.
A host of red states are pushing through anti-LGBT laws.
A narrow plurality of voters believes that the LGBT movement in question is “morally wrong.”
This could describe the state of the trans rights movement under Donald Trump. But it also describes the state of the gay marriage movement during George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004.
And yet, 22 years later, same-sex marriage stands as arguably the hallmark victory of social liberalism in the 21st century, with a durability that is nothing short of remarkable.
Today, the public’s support levels for gay marriage are higher than they were in Trump’s first term, and every major demographic group — white, nonwhite, young, old, male and female voters alike — is in broad agreement on marriage equality.
Same-sex marriage is now actually supported by a plurality of Trump voters, along with an overwhelming majority of independents. Even self-identified Republicans — a far more socially conservative voting bloc than the wider set of Trump voters — split fairly evenly on the matter. (This is partly why the Republican Party notably removed its explicit opposition to marriage equality from the 2024 platform. There just isn’t much of an appetite to ban this any longer, even among the party’s own base.)
These results are not outliers; they align very well with the findings from Gallup. Study after study reinforces the reality that Americans view this as a settled matter. Ten years after the landmark Obergefell ruling, there exists virtually no appetite for restricting or banning same-sex marriage.
Trans Americans are in a very different place.
Last month, The Argument released a poll showing that registered voters are increasingly turning against trans rights. By a 47-43 margin, registered voters said they believe that being transgender was morally wrong in our last survey.
This result is almost identical to Gallup’s 2024 results. It is not a finding that can be attributed to question wording or design choice. It is not a “push poll” designed to make progressives look bad. The simple reality of the matter is that Americans are currently quite hostile to the trans rights movement.
The gay rights and trans rights movements are not identical, but understanding what the former did to win not only courts and legislatures but also the hearts and minds of the public is instructive: There’s, of course, no single answer, but research suggests that the activists in the movement made a conscious choice to change the framing of the movement from one about morality into one about fairness.
How marriage equality won
There is a great piece by Deva Woodly called “The Importance of Public Meaning for Political Persuasion,” which argued that although the gay marriage debate began with a great deal of public hostility and misgivings, activists successfully “altered the public meaning of the problem, causing the issue to be generally understood in terms of ‘marriage equality,’ rather than ‘same-sex marriage.’”
In essence, for a long time, gay marriage was fighting a losing battle when people viewed it as a question about contested moral priors, that is, whether homosexuality was right or wrong.
Instead of continuing to fight on that unfriendly terrain, however, activists made a conscious choice to shift the debate onto grounds where most Americans already agreed: The broadly shared moral intuition that the government should not treat people unequally.
This is sometimes described as a shift from “morality” to “fairness.” But I’d say that this framing is slightly misleading, as fairness itself is a moral concept.
