A year before the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell, Time magazine published “The Transgender Tipping Point” as its June 2014 cover issue, highlighting trans actress Laverne Cox and burgeoning transgender visibility. In 2015, just weeks after the court ruling, trans actress Jen Richards wrote for The Advocate about the need for a more cohesive trans movement, writing, “With the battle for gay and lesbian rights on a seemingly inevitable path to victory in the United States, both the media and LGBT organizations have been in search of what's next. And there are plenty of people to point out that no one has been treated less equally than trans people.” [Time, 5/29/14; The Advocate, 7/14/15]

In June 2015, the Family Research Council — which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group — released a document outlining how to respond to the transgender movement, pushing rhetoric that called trans identity a “fantasy” or “delusion” and arguing against pro-trans legislation. In December of that year, Media Matters wrote that right-wing media had begun wholly recycling anti-gay rhetoric against trans people, claiming that acceptance was a “slippery slope” to incest and bestiality or a threat to religious freedom and that trans people were a threat to children. Anti-LGBTQ televangelist Pat Robertson notably changed his tune, shifting from asserting in 2013 that he did not believe transness was sinful to calling trans people “frauds” in 2016. [Family Research Council, June 2015; Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 3/17/25; Media Matters, 12/28/15; The Advocate, 7/29/13; People for the American Way, 4/19/16]

Then-Gov. Pat McCrory convened a special legislative session in March 2016 to codify House Bill 2, a bathroom ban passed in retaliation to a local ordinance in Charlotte. The ban prompted widespread backlash that eventually cost the state an estimated $3.76 billion in lost business over 12 years and cost McCrory his reelection. [WUNC, 3/29/16; AP News, 3/30/17; Slate, 11/9/16]

Over the course of the decade, right-wing media's culture war has resulted in over a thousand anti-trans bills proposed across the country — with more than 800 considered this year alone. Laws limiting best practice gender-affirming care for youth have been passed in 27 states. Just as many states have restricted trans students from participating on competitive athletic teams. The 2024 election featured an ad blitz targeting Democratic candidate Kamala Harris' past support for trans rights, and now the Trump administration has attempted to instate these bans at the federal level by executive fiat in an ongoing effort to push trans people out of public life. [Anti-Trans Legislation Tracker, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022; KFF, 3/19/25; Williams Institute, February 2025; AP News, 11/14/24; Media Matters, 2/11/25]

Right-wing media tried to deny there would be any new threats to gay marriage, even though Supreme Court justices floated overruling Obergefell. In 2020, conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said the ruling on same-sex marriage was a mistake that only the court could “fix” in a joint statement after the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of anti-LGBTQ legal clerk Kim Davis. Before that, right-wing outlets had denied that a conservative court would be a threat to gay marriage, a claim that Fox News repeated even after Alito and Thomas’ assertions. [Media Matters, 10/14/20, 10/5/20] 

This denial continued for years alongside open calls to overturn Obergefell after Roe v. Wade was dismantled. In its 2022 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court found that the 49-year-old right to abortion was “not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history.” In a concurring opinion, Thomas once again singled out both the seven-year-old Obergefell decision and the 19-year-old Lawrence v. Texas decision which protected the private right to same-sex activity. Despite this, right-wing media continued to deny that gay marriage was in danger — a pattern they also followed with Roe before it was overturned. Amid this denial were also outright calls to overturn Obergefell, with The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro saying a Supreme Court “worth its salt” would do it, and Steven Crowder also targeting gay marriage after Roe was overturned. [U.S. Supreme Court, 6/24/22; The New York Times, 6/24/22; Media Matters, 6/19/22; The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 5/4/22; BlazeTV, Louder with Crowder, 6/24/22]

Onslaughts against gay marriage began to crystallize in response to the Respect for Marriage Act. In response to a Supreme Court that appeared to be itching to overturn Obergefell, the Respect for Marriage Act was brought forth to preserve gay marriage. It passed with bipartisan efforts — 47 Republican House members and 12 senators helped propel the bill into law. Right-wing media took offense at that, condemning those Republican lawmakers and demanding they be “exiled” from the party. Conservative pundits also pushed more absurd rhetoric against the legislation and gay marriage itself, claiming Martians would oppose gay marriage and that codifying the Respect for Marriage Act would open the door to pedophilia and bestiality. [Media Matters, 8/3/22; The Washington Post, 11/29/22; The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 11/15/22, 11/16/22; The Daily Wire, The Matt Walsh Show, 11/15/22]

Attacks on marriage equality have also materialized against gay couples’ rights to parenthood by way of adoption and surrogacy. After a harrowing story of a couple trafficking their adopted children emerged in January 2023, right-wing media spun it as a means to rail against the right of same-sex couples to adopt rather than confront the egregious flaws in the adoption and foster care system. Additionally, right-wing media began taking up arms against surrogacy throughout the year, claiming that it’s “demonic” and an “evil practice” for gay parents to have a child via a surrogate and that it makes women into a commodity. In one of his several attacks on surrogacy, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh claimed a child would be better off missing an arm than to have gay parents. [The Imprint, 3/27/23; Media Matters, 1/19/23, 6/26/23; The Daily Wire, The Matt Walsh Show, 12/4/23]
 

Right-wing media attacked gay marriage, going as far as to claim it “doesn’t exist” and that the right was “invented” by the Supreme Court. Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric began to reach a fever pitch in 2023 as The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life entirely,” before claiming the same “illogic” that supports trans people also applies to gay marriage. Shortly after, Knowles declared on his show that “gay marriage doesn’t exist” and denied its legality. In September of that year, BlazeTV host Steve Deace echoed this belief, claiming, “The definition of marriage has never changed. There has never been a single gay marriage in the history of humanity.” This continued through 2024, with highlights such as Knowles’ colleague Andrew Klavan claiming the Supreme Court “invented a constitutional right to gay marriage.” [Conservative Political Action Conference, 3/4/23; YouTube, Young America’s Foundation, 3/10/23; The Daily Wire, The Michael Knowles Show, 3/20/24; BlazeTV, The Steve Deace Show, 9/5/23; The Daily Wire, The Andrew Klavan Show, 11/25/24]

When some Virginia lawmakers launched a fight to strike the state's same-sex marriage ban, the Daily Signal — an outlet previously affiliated with the Heritage Foundation — platformed Alliance Defending Freedom's arguments against doing so. The proposed resolution would prevent the state from denying “lawful marriage on the basis of the sex, gender, or race of such parties.”  A lawyer for ADF, an SPLC-designated hate group, submitted a letter to Republican state legislators targeting the use of both “sex” and “gender” in the text. He argued that adding “gender” to the state constitution would cause “chaos and abuses” to follow. Weeks later, Michael Knowles reiterated his belief that gay marriage is “predicated on the logic of transgenderism,” saying: “Well, if transgenderism is wrong, that means there really are distinctions between men and women. If there really are distinctions … then maybe we need to rethink that redefinition of marriage thing. Because that … is predicated on the logic of transgenderism — the notion that the sexes are basically indistinguishable and indiscernible.” A month after that, Knowles’ colleague Matt Walsh argued that gay marriage was not “settled,” citing “gender ideology” as a reason for its declining support in YouGov polls. Walsh added, “What conservatives need to do as quickly as possible is to capitalize on Democrats' weakness, start passing laws that reverse the derangement that's been so dominant for so long.” [SPLC, archived 3/17/25; The Daily Signal, 1/15/25; The Daily Wire, The Michael Knowles Show, 2/6/25; The Daily Wire, The Matt Walsh Show, 3/6/25]

Knowles endorsed a “covenant marriage” bill in Tennessee that would create a legally distinct category of  heterosexual marriage with more restrictions on divorce, such as requiring tangible proof of adultery, abuse, or abandonment in order to dissolve a marriage. Knowles argued the designation was “what everyone understood marriage to be until relatively recently. Until the Obergefell decision.” Anti-LGBTQ ideologues have pushed covenant marriages for years — in 2023, American Principles Project president Terry Schilling called for a better “marketing campaign” for them on an episode of Timcast IRL after host Tim Pool suggested the concept of a “super marriage.” On his Daily Wire podcast, Jordan Peterson spoke to Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us, who suggested that children of gay parents suffered as much as children who lost their parents through tragedy or divorce. The attacks also align with Project 2025’s efforts to undermine no-fault divorce. [The Daily Wire, The Michael Knowles Show, 2/4/25; WBIR, 1/23/25; The New York Times, 11/3/23; The Daily Wire, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, 3/6/25; Them Before Us, archived 3/20/25; Media Matters, 6/27/23, 8/2/22, 6/11/24]

After Michigan moved on a proposal for the Supreme Court to revisit Obergefell, anti-LGBTQ state Rep. Josh Schriver argued that gay marriage should be “illegal again” and claimed his stance was “not remotely controversial, nor extreme.”Legislators in at least five states so far this year — Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Michigan — have introduced similar proposals, egged on by SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group MassResistance. At least four more states — Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas — have introduced bills creating a “covenant marriage” category for heterosexual couples. [LGBTQ Nation, 12/3/24; The Washington Post, 3/6/25; NBC News, 2/25/25; The Advocate, 3/13/25; Daily Montanan, 3/3/25; The Hill, 3/14/25]