The Convenient Patience of the Already-Married

There is a version of the argument that is genuinely worth taking seriously.

Marriage equality was a heavy lift. Anyone who tells you otherwise is rewriting history to make themselves feel better about the present. In 2004, eleven states passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in a single election cycle, some by margins north of seventy percent. George W. Bush ran on a Federal Marriage Amendment. John Kerry, the Democrat, also opposed same-sex marriage — or said he did, which in politics amounts to the same thing. The Overton window wasn't just closed; it was nailed shut, weatherstripped, and someone had pushed a bookcase in front of it.

And then it moved. Slowly, then not so slowly. Visibility worked. Will & Grace worked. Ellen worked. The accumulated weight of millions of Americans realizing they actually knew gay people — and that their gay people were, in the main, unremarkable — worked. By the time Obergefell v. Hodges came down in June 2015, something like sixty percent of Americans supported marriage equality. The Evangelical apocalypse that had been promised did not materialize. Society did not collapse. Children were not endangered. The republic endured.

So when Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller — the Bulwark's openly gay co-anchors and two of the most prominent voices in the Never Trump ecosystem — counsel patience on transgender rights, they are pointing to something real. They lived the arc. They crossed the finish line.

What's strange is that they were there for all of it. Not just the triumphant ending, but the brutal middle. They were present for what it actually felt like when Obergefell came down and the right didn't shrug and update its priors. Ted Cruz called for retention elections to remove Supreme Court justices. Mike Huckabee announced his intention to simply defy the ruling. Kim Davis went to jail rather than issue a license and became a conservative martyr. The entire Republican presidential field spent the summer of 2015 in an arms race of performative outrage, each candidate trying to out-aggrieve the others for a base that was genuinely enraged. The Southern Baptist Convention didn't hold a quiet moment of reflection and conclude that God's plan might be more capacious than previously understood. It seethed.

What Longwell and Miller seem to remember most clearly from that period is that it eventually quieted down — that the apocalypse didn't come, that people adjusted, that the republic endured. What they seem to remember least clearly is that it didn't quiet down because opponents made peace with the outcome. It quieted down because they went off to build a longer-term project. That project is now delivering results.

And they are saying, not unreasonably, that the arc they traveled is the model for everyone else. That visibility takes time. That the culture has to catch up before the law can. That pushing too far, too fast, activates a backlash that sets everyone back.

It's a coherent argument. It's also, at this particular moment in history, almost entirely wrong.

The Number Is 37

Let's start with the premise — that marriage equality represents stable ground, a proven template, a secured beachhead from which the rest of the LGBTQ+ community can eventually advance.

The number is 37.

That is the percentage of Republicans who currently support same-sex marriage, according to Gallup's May 2025 survey. In 2021, that number was 55. In 2022, it was still 55. Then something happened — or rather, something was done — and in roughly three years, Republican support for marriage equality collapsed by 18 points, back to where it stood in 2015, the year Obergefell was decided.

The partisan gap on marriage equality is now 47 points — Democrats at 87 percent, Republicans at 37, a chasm that Gallup notes is the largest it has measured in the nearly thirty years it has been asking this question. Independent support remains relatively solid at 67 percent, though it too has slipped. The overall trendline, which peaked at 71 percent in 2022 and 2023, has been drifting downward.

This is not drift. This is a deliberate realignment being driven by Evangelical institutions and conservative media, working methodically to move their audiences back toward opposition. In June 2025, the Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination in the United States — voted to make reversing Obergefell an explicit organizational priority. At least nine states introduced legislation in 2025 either challenging marriage equality directly or urging the Supreme Court to reverse it at the first opportunity.

The model Longwell and Miller are selling as the template for transgender progress is a model whose gains are actively eroding among the exact electorate they have spent enormous professional energy trying to rehabilitate.

Patience is excellent advice when the process is working. It is considerably less useful when the clock is running backwards.

A Man Named Mitchell

Perhaps you are thinking: the polling is one thing, but Obergefell is settled law. The Supreme Court has shown no appetite to revisit it.

Allow me to introduce you to Jonathan Mitchell.

In November 2025, the Supreme Court turned away Kim Davis — the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, was jailed for contempt, and eventually appealed all the way to the top asking the justices to overturn Obergefell. The court declined without comment, and the consensus reaction was a sigh of relief. See? Safe.

What got considerably less attention was the statement issued by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito alongside that denial. They agreed the Davis case wasn't the right vehicle — Davis, who had been married four times to three different men, was not exactly the ideal messenger for the sanctity of one man and one woman. But they made their intentions explicit: they want to overturn Obergefell. They are simply waiting for a cleaner case.

Jonathan Mitchell is building that case.

Mitchell is the architect of Texas SB 8, the 2021 law that effectively killed Roe v. Wade two years before Dobbs by delegating enforcement to private citizens rather than state officials, making it nearly impossible for courts to enjoin it through traditional channels. He found the procedural crack in the wall and drove a truck through it. Roe had survived for nearly fifty years. It did not survive Mitchell.

In December 2025, Mitchell filed a new federal lawsuit on behalf of Dianne Hensley, a Waco justice of the peace who has refused to perform same-sex marriages since 2015. Mitchell acknowledged in the filing that the lower court has no authority to overturn Supreme Court precedent — but made clear that was never the point. The point is to construct a case with a cleaner factual record, a more sympathetic plaintiff, and a more carefully engineered legal theory, and walk it up through the Fifth Circuit — the most conservative appellate circuit in the country — to the Supreme Court's door.

The people who are confident that Obergefell is safe have apparently not been paying attention to what Jonathan Mitchell does for a living.

The Backstop That Isn't

"But the Respect for Marriage Act," someone will say. It's the answer everyone reaches for, the evidence that Congress has already acted, that even if the court blinked, the legislative safety net would hold.

The Respect for Marriage Act is a statute.

Statutes require constitutional foundations. The RFMA's primary legs are the Full Faith and Credit Clause — requiring states to recognize marriages performed where they're legal — and Congress's power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to pass enforcement legislation protecting constitutional rights.

Here is the problem: Section 5 enforcement power only exists to protect rights that exist. If the Supreme Court overturns Obergefell on the grounds that the 14th Amendment does not protect a right to same-sex marriage, the constitutional foundation of the RFMA's state-recognition requirement doesn't weaken. It disappears. You cannot have congruent and proportional enforcement legislation for a right the court has just ruled isn't in the Constitution.

The Full Faith and Credit basis is not much sturdier. The deep irony is that DOMA's Section 2 — the provision that explicitly allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages from other states — was also passed under the Full Faith and Credit Clause. Congress has used that power in both directions. A court motivated to dismantle marriage equality protections has existing precedent to draw on when arguing that states' sovereign authority to define marriage overrides congressional mandate. Courts have long recognized a "public policy exception" to full faith and credit — and a hostile bench will have little trouble ruling that a state's definition of marriage is exactly that kind of fundamental public policy.

And then there's the simplest threat of all: a future Republican Congress repeals the RFMA with 51 votes. The 12 Republican senators who voted for it in 2022 were operating in a pre-Dobbs political environment where overturning marriage equality seemed abstract and unlikely. In a world where Obergefell has already fallen, the political math changes. Primary pressure changes it. Retirements change it. The coalition that passed RFMA is not locked in place forever.

The Respect for Marriage Act is not the firmament. It is a speed bump on a road that is already being paved.

The Tribal Tell

Now we get to the part that is less about law and more about incentives.

Longwell and Miller are married. They have the right. The process worked for them. They crossed the finish line, and now they are counseling the people still running the race to slow down and trust the same process — while the very coalition whose voters they spend enormous professional energy trying to court is the coalition actively organizing, litigating, and legislating to reverse it.

That is not a coincidence. It is a conflict of interest.

The Never Trump ecosystem, for all its genuine courage on the authoritarianism question, has a structural problem: its business model requires being acceptable to moderate Republicans. That means its rhetoric has to remain within the range of what soft Republican defectors will tolerate. Transgender rights poll badly with those voters. Marriage equality, until recently, polled reasonably well with them. The strategic advice Longwell and Miller are dispensing — wait on trans rights, trust the process, don't go too far too fast — tracks suspiciously well with what their target audience already wants to hear.

They have chosen which part of the LGBTQ+ community they are willing to go to the mat for, and it is, with some convenience, the part that includes them.

You can call that strategy. It has a more direct name, but I'll let you pick it.

What I'll say is this: the implicit promise of the "slow and steady" argument is that patience will eventually deliver for everyone what it delivered for Longwell and Miller. But that promise only holds if the ground doesn't move. And the ground is moving. The former Republican voters they're trying to win back are not sitting still, waiting for their attitudes to slowly liberalize. They are attending SBC conventions voting to reverse Obergefell. They are electing state legislators passing zombie-law resolutions. They are funding the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family and a coalition of 47 right-wing organizations that has united around the explicit goal of returning American law to a pre-2015 baseline.

The ask being made of transgender Americans is to trust a process that is being actively run in reverse by the very people whose political rehabilitation is the central project of the Never Trump enterprise. The model being pointed to as proof of concept is under coordinated legal attack. The statutory protection that supposedly backstops it has the constitutional durability of a campaign promise.

You don't have to be transgender to find this insulting.

You just have to be paying attention.