Ten Years After Obergefell, the “Conservative Case” Has Quietly Disappeared
I intended to write this essay in June 2025, shortly after the tenth anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right throughout the United States.
But other subjects intervened. The anniversary passed, and the essay remained unwritten.
Then I recently published an article titled “When Moderation Becomes Evasion.” In it, I argued that moderation is a virtue when we are balancing competing goods—but not when we are confronting questions of reality. There is no meaningful compromise between saying that human beings are embodied as male and female and saying that sex is whatever an individual declares it to be.
Reality is not negotiated into existence.
That essay focused primarily on sex and gender. But it reminded me that I had promised to return to another question arising from the same crisis of reality: What happens when marriage itself is detached from the embodied distinction between male and female?
So perhaps this is the right time to revisit the tenth anniversary of Obergefell—not simply to rehearse familiar arguments, but to ask what has actually happened to same-sex marriage during the decade since it became the law of the land.
And here is where this gets interesting.
A gay writer named Bryan Dumont asked essentially the same question in a remarkable article for The Dispatch titled “What Happened to Same-Sex Marriage?”
His answer is not what advocates of same-sex marriage might have expected ten years ago.
The Anniversary That Disappeared
Dumont supports same-sex marriage. He describes Obergefell as one of the most culturally consequential events in the history of gay and lesbian Americans. He was himself married to a man who later became an Episcopal priest.
Yet when WorldPride came to Washington, D.C., in June 2025, Dumont noticed something extraordinary.
WorldPride included events devoted to queer economic justice, trans housing policy, climate change, polyamory, racial justice, inclusive faith traditions, and seemingly every identity and intersection represented by the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym.
But there was no official program commemorating the tenth anniversary of Obergefell.
No panel on marriage equality.
No major celebration of the achievement that had once stood at the center of the gay-rights movement.
No sustained discussion of what same-sex marriage had accomplished—or whether it had fulfilled the promises made on its behalf.
Dumont asks:
“Why has the most transformative achievement of the LGBTQ movement … been all but erased from the very event that purports to celebrate LGBTQ progress?”
His conclusion is bracing:
“Marriage is no longer relevant to the ever-expanding acronym that makes up the LGBTQIA+ coalition.”
Think about that statement.
For years, Americans were told that marriage was one of the movement’s most urgent aspirations. Gay and lesbian couples wanted what their heterosexual neighbors had: permanence, fidelity, domestic stability, and public responsibility.
Ten years later, at one of the world’s largest LGBTQ gatherings, marriage was apparently too uninteresting—or perhaps too conservative—to mention.
How Same-Sex Marriage Was Sold
Dumont is particularly candid about the argument that persuaded Americans to support same-sex marriage.
It was not originally presented as a campaign to overthrow marriage. Advocates such as Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch made what was often called the “conservative case” for same-sex marriage.
As Dumont summarizes it:
“They didn’t ask the country to redefine marriage—they asked to be included in it.”
Marriage, in this account, was not merely a government benefit or a right to be claimed. It was a civilizing institution. It channeled desire into responsibility and joined personal love to public obligation.
The argument emphasized monogamy, permanence, fidelity, sacrifice, and duty.
Sullivan’s hope was that marriage might draw gay men away from the permissive sexual culture that had flourished in much of the gay community. The devastation of AIDS gave that hope particular urgency.
The message to America was reassuring: We do not want to destroy marriage. We value it so deeply that we want to participate in it.
That case proved enormously successful.
Many Americans who had once opposed same-sex marriage reconsidered. They did so, at least in part, because they were told that extending marriage to same-sex couples would strengthen its traditional ideals rather than dissolve them.
Dumont believes same-sex couples asked to enter marriage as it already existed. I disagree. Removing sexual complementarity from the definition of marriage necessarily changed the institution’s public meaning.
But Dumont is right about the promise that was made. Americans were assured that marriage would retain its moral architecture: permanence, exclusivity, obligation, restraint, and responsibility.
Ten years later, Dumont is asking whether that promise was kept.
The Open Secret
Dumont’s most revealing passage concerns sexual exclusivity:
“Yet even before Obergefell, it was an open secret that many gay male relationships operated under different norms—norms that placed far less emphasis on sexual exclusivity and far more on personal autonomy.”
He continues:
“Among the couples I know, ‘open relationships’ are not the exception; they are more often the expectation. Monogamy is treated with suspicion—either as a relic of heterosexual repression or an unrealistic constraint on adult desire.”
This is not a Christian critic speaking. It is a gay supporter of same-sex marriage describing the relationships he knows.
Dumont cites survey findings showing a dramatic difference between the attitudes of heterosexual and gay, lesbian, or bisexual Americans toward open marriage.1A 2023 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans whether “open marriage” was an acceptable arrangement for married couples. Twenty-nine percent of straight Americans said yes—compared to 75 percent of lesbian, gay, or bisexual Americans. He also acknowledges that Andrew Sullivan eventually began questioning whether monogamy should be expected in same-sex marriages, suggesting that gay couples might help “resuscitate” marriage by developing different forms of commitment. (Such as ‘ethical non-monogamy’.)
But that is a very different proposition from the one presented to the American public.
The original argument was that same-sex couples wished to be formed by marriage. Increasingly, the argument became that marriage should be re-formed around the preferences of same-sex couples.
Was marriage going to discipline desire—or was desire going to redefine marriage?
Dumont notes that only 10 percent of LGBTQ Americans were married at the time of his writing,2June 2025 which he says was essentially unchanged from 2016 and far below the rate among heterosexual Americans.
The institution once described as the crowning achievement of the gay-rights movement now appears peripheral to the movement’s identity.
Becket Cook’s Perspective
Becket Cook discussed Dumont’s article on his podcast.
Cook’s perspective is unusual and worth hearing. He spent roughly twenty years living as a gay man before becoming a Christian. Since his conversion several years ago, he has remained celibate because he accepts the historic Christian teaching on sexual morality.
Cook remembers discussing gay marriage with his friends long before his conversion. Their reaction was not excitement but bewilderment:
“Why do gays wanna get married?”
The point of gay liberation, as they understood it, was precisely to escape what they regarded as the “heteronormative” expectations of marriage—especially sexual exclusivity.
Cook says that he and his friends did not see monogamy, permanence, and duty as natural aspirations of gay male culture. In his own five serious relationships, he recalls infidelity in all but one.
Their accounts raise a question that cannot simply be dismissed: Did same-sex marriage transform the sexual culture Dumont and Cook describe, or did that culture gradually transform our understanding of marriage?
Cook’s answer is blunt:
“The movement to legalize same-sex marriage was really to remake marriage.”
Dumont stops short of that conclusion. He still wants gay and lesbian Americans to recover and defend marriage. But his own article shows how difficult that task has become.
From Marriage Equality to Liberation From Marriage
Dumont observes that some of the fiercest early opposition to same-sex marriage came not from conservative Christians, but from the queer left.
Radical activists regarded marriage as a bourgeois institution of domesticity and social conformity. They did not want inclusion in “heteronormative” structures. They wanted liberation from them.
Dumont writes:
“For decades the radical activists within the LGBTQ movement argued that marriage was not a right, but an existential threat—a set of chains wrapped around a community seeking to escape all ‘heteronormative’ restraints, especially restraints on sexual behavior.”
Those activists appear to have won the movement’s internal argument.
The energy has moved elsewhere: transgender ideology, polyamory, “ethical non-monogamy,” intersectional activism, and the deconstruction of categories such as male, female, mother, father, husband, and wife.
Marriage, with its vows and restrictions, now seems almost embarrassingly conventional.
This development connects directly to the argument I made in “When Moderation Becomes Evasion.” Once the body is treated as negotiable, the institutions arising from the body become negotiable as well.
If male and female are not objective realities, why should marriage be rooted in their union?
If marriage has no intrinsic connection to the kind of union that can produce children, why should the interests of children define its boundaries?
And if adult desire and personal autonomy become the controlling principles, why must marriage be restricted to two people?
Where Do We Draw the Line?
I have previously written about three men in a polyamorous relationship in Quebec who were approved to foster and then adopt a three-year-old girl.
Only two of the men were initially recognized as her legal parents, while the third sought equivalent recognition. But the household, the approval process, and the placement itself were organized around a three-man romantic relationship.
This is not a speculative thought experiment. A child was placed into precisely such a household.
The easy response is that same-sex marriage and polyamory are legally different. That is true. For now. The law can draw a numerical line at two adults.
But the deeper question remains: On what principled understanding of marriage is the number two essential once sexual complementarity, procreation, and the child’s relationship to a mother and father have been declared nonessential?
Why two and not three?
Why sexual exclusivity rather than “ethical non-monogamy”?
Why permanence rather than a renewable domestic contract?
A legislature can always draw an arbitrary line. The harder task is explaining why that line arises from the nature of marriage itself.
Traditional marriage has an answer. It unites the two sexually complementary halves of the human race and binds the man and woman whose union can create a child to one another and to the child they may create.
That does not mean every marriage produces children. Nor does it mean every heterosexual marriage is faithful, healthy, or exemplary. It means that the institution possesses a form and purpose grounded in the embodied reality of male and female.
Once that form is replaced by adult affection and autonomy, the argument against multipartner marriage becomes increasingly difficult to sustain without borrowing principles from the very definition that has been rejected.
And adoption makes the stakes especially serious.
Adoption should seek, as far as circumstances permit, to restore what a child has lost. It should be ordered first toward the child’s needs—not toward validating an adult relationship or demonstrating that every chosen household structure is equivalent to every other.
A mother is not interchangeable with a second father. A father is not interchangeable with a second mother. Love and material provision are indispensable, but they do not render sexual difference meaningless.
Where Was the Church?
Dumont directs some of his strongest criticism toward the Episcopal Church.
The denomination championed same-sex unions before the law recognized them and eventually became one of the most enthusiastic religious advocates of same-sex marriage.
Yet Dumont believes it failed after the victory:
“The church helped us get to the altar, but it did not teach us how to be married once we got there.”
He says the church spoke fluently about rights, inclusion, dignity, and symbolic justice but neglected the language of obligation, rules, sacrifice, and discipline.
There is a deep irony here.
The Episcopal Church helped persuade the culture that historic Christian teaching about marriage could be set aside. It then discovered that it lacked a coherent basis for imposing the historic disciplines associated with marriage.
Once the church made inclusion its controlling principle, how could it insist that sexual autonomy must yield to monogamy?
Once desire helped determine the meaning of marriage, how could the church impose limits upon desire?
Dumont believes the church failed to build guardrails. I would put the matter more fundamentally: it helped dismantle the theological foundation on which those guardrails rested.
Historic Christianity does not understand marriage as society’s ceremonial approval of a preferred adult relationship. Marriage is a covenantal union of man and woman, ordered toward fidelity, mutual sanctification, and the generation and nurture of children.
The Episcopal Church did not merely fail to teach people how to inhabit marriage. It helped redefine marriage while continuing to use the old word.
Now even the movement it served appears to have lost interest.
Should Obergefell Be Overruled?
I believe Obergefell was wrongly decided, and I would like to see the Supreme Court overrule it.
That conviction does not arise from hostility toward gay and lesbian people. Every human being bears the image of God and should be treated with dignity, honesty, and love.
But dignity does not require us to call every relationship a marriage. Compassion does not require the state to treat every household structure as interchangeable. And concern for adults cannot erase the claims children possess upon society.
Obergefell constitutionalized a defective account of marriage—one centered primarily on adult identity, choice, and recognition. It removed one of civilization’s foundational institutions from ordinary democratic deliberation and treated disagreement with its new definition as increasingly irrational or morally suspect.
Overruling Obergefell would not by itself restore a healthy marriage culture. Heterosexual Americans had already weakened marriage through divorce, cohabitation, infidelity, contraception, and the separation of sex from procreation.
Christians should acknowledge that honestly. We cannot credibly defend marriage merely by condemning the sins of other people while excusing our own.
But our failures to live according to an institution’s demands are not arguments for redefining the institution. They are reasons to recover it.
Empathy Is Not the Same as Love
Let me close with a distinction Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron recently drew while discussing Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy.
Empathy is the ability to enter imaginatively into another person’s experience. It is ordinarily a good and necessary human quality. It can make us patient, attentive, and compassionate.
But empathy is not identical to love.
Following Thomas Aquinas, Bishop Barron defines love as “to will the good of the other.”
That distinction matters enormously.
Empathy asks, “How does this person feel?”
Love asks an additional and sometimes more difficult question: “What is genuinely good for this person?”
The two need not be enemies. Ideally, empathy helps us understand another person while love directs us toward his or her true good. But when empathy becomes detached from truth, it can ask us to affirm choices, identities, or arrangements that do not promote human flourishing.
A professor who honestly gives inadequate work a low grade may hurt a student’s feelings, but he may also call that student toward excellence.
A parent who refuses a child’s destructive demand may provoke anger, but the refusal can still be an act of love.
A priest who calls a sinner to repentance may make that person profoundly uncomfortable, but Christianity has never taught that love consists in protecting us from every painful truth.
Jesus did not command his disciples merely to empathize with one another. He commanded them to love one another.
And Christian love cannot be separated from reality because love seeks the actual good of an actual person—not simply the validation of whatever that person presently desires.
That is the spirit in which Christians should speak about marriage.
We should lovingly engage gay and lesbian people. We should reject cruelty, mockery, and contempt. We should treat every person with the dignity belonging to someone made in the image of God.
But we should not confuse kindness with silence or empathy with affirmation.
If marriage is a covenantal union of man and woman ordered toward fidelity, children, and the common good, then saying so is not an act of hatred. It may be culturally unpopular. It may hurt feelings. It may even cost us friendships or reputations.
But love is not the refusal to say anything difficult.
Love wills the good of the other.
Ten years after Obergefell, even some of the decision’s supporters are asking what happened to same-sex marriage. The answer may be that an institution cannot retain its meaning indefinitely after being detached from the realities that gave it that meaning.
Marriage was presented as the means by which personal desire would be drawn into permanence, discipline, and obligation.
Instead, our culture increasingly asks marriage to accommodate autonomy, non-monogamy, polyamory, and the endless revision of family life.
That is not simply an unforeseen consequence.
It is a warning.
Reality has not changed. Men and women are still different. Children still come from mothers and fathers. Human beings still require limits, obligations, and forms of life that call us beyond ourselves.
Moderation cannot reconcile those realities with an ideology that treats every boundary as oppression and every desire as a potential identity.
At some point, moderation becomes evasion.
And empathy, separated from truth, ceases to be love.
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