“Nuclear Family Month” shows that MAGA is still coming for same-sex marriage

In recent years, Republican propaganda has quietly moved away from loud condemnation of the gay community to focusing the most overt hate on trans people. Donald Trump even has a few token gay men in his closest circles, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has two children with his husband. Marriage equality was legalized in all 50 states by the Supreme Court 11 years ago in Obergefell v. Hodges, and it has often been tempting to assume that the GOP has largely given up on trying to restigmatize, much less ban, gay marriage.

After all, the main argument Republicans had against marriage equality was that it was a threat to straight marriage. A 2015 amicus brief arguing against same-sex marriage, for instance, said that legalizing same-sex marriage would teach people that “society no longer needs men to bond to women,” and would lead to straight men — “who generally need more encouragement to marry than women” — to give up on marriage.

A decade later, it’s hard to believe someone wrote that with a straight face, especially as polls show that men are more eager than women to settle down and build families. Efforts to drum up straight “victims” of marriage equality have been a joke, even by basement-level right wing standards. No one seems willing to claim they lost or were denied access to straight marriage because of gay couples.

But while it hasn’t attracted widespread media coverage, Republicans have not given up arguing that LGBTQ+ equality is a threat. This year, a slew of red state governors signed proclamations intended as blatant attacks on Pride Month. Some states are even calling June “Nuclear Family Month.” Others have dubbed it “Strong Families Month” or “Fidelity Month.” Whatever euphemism is used, they are all poking a thumb in the eye of LGBTQ+ people during Pride, as Arkansas’s Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, made clear when she tweeted a Daily Wire article headlined, “Another Red State Is Counter-Programming Pride Month, Focusing On Family Instead” — as if queer people don’t have families.

Reading the proclamations reveals another layer of awful. Straight people should definitely not feel safe with these Republicans in charge. These documents don’t only demonize LGBTQ+ people; they condemn the vast majority of straight people who don’t adhere to the exceedingly narrow proscriptions of the Christian right. Divorced people, anyone who has ever needed government assistance, parents who put their kids in public school, non-Christians and women who don’t see themselves as inferior to their husbands all get blasted as immoral — and queer people are implicitly blamed for what Republicans see as “dysfunction” in the lives of everyday straight people.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey outright declared “fathers are the head of the household” and condemned both single parents and unmarried parents as unable to provide “stable family environments.”

Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee proclaimed “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure,” and “the nuclear family is God’s perfect design for humanity.” Fewer than one in five households in the U.S. meet this description. Lee noted that “the nuclear family is under attack,” but it’s actually the majority of people who aren’t living the mom-pop-and-kids lifestyle that are the target of official condemnations from state governments.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was explicit in his declaration that most Americans, straight or not, deserve condemnation, insisting that “a majority of Americans no longer esteem values like faith, family, patriotism or community involvement” — as if the only people who love their families or contribute to the communities are those in traditional marriages.

For years Republicans were successful in pitting straight people against marriage equality with vague arguments about how queer neighbors were a threat. Slowly, through robust public debate that now feels almost quaint in our era of polarized media, it became clear that what really worried conservatives was that same-sex marriage might cause straight people to question the social forces railroading them into often unsatisfying marriages. What made the discourse even more ridiculous was that the ship had sailed long before. Most straight people already believed women should work, premarital sex is normal and unhappy couples should divorce.

“If gay people get married, straight people will feel more free” was always the argument, and unsurprisingly, straight people in large numbers eventually rejected it. Americans are funny like that: We tend to feel we know better than pinch-lipped moral scolds what’s best for our lives.

But he spate of “Nuclear Family Month” and other such nonsense this year reflects a resurgence in the GOP of the view that most people, straight or not, are wicked, oversexed hooligans who need to be browbeaten into depressing marriages. Vice President JD Vance has been at the forefront of this pressure campaign that wants people to marry not out of love or joy, but out of grim duty to the patriarchy. During the 2024 campaign, Vance became infamous for chiding unmarried or childless women for being “cat ladies,” even calling them “miserable” and “sociopathic.”

This backfired on Vance horribly, kickstarting what is now two years of speculation that his own marriage is in trouble. Even the news that his wife, Usha Vance, is pregnant the fourth time has not slowed the fascination with their marriage. The couple has been mocked for being unable, despite strenuous effort, to convincingly portray normal affection, and it’s not helped by the fact that Vance can’t stop insulting his wife in public while she offers tight, forced smiles for the camera.

The joy some are taking from the perceived unhappiness of the Vances is a synecdoche for a larger —and not unjustified — belief that the loudest scolds about getting married are those who enjoy it the least. There’s a real “misery loves company” component to the pressure to shoehorn everyone into their narrow vision of the nuclear family. This is especially obvious for queer people who would have to deny their identity and sexual desires to pair off into the prescribed one-man-one-woman marriages. But it’s also true for most straight people, who want the freedom to marry only if it feels right, and to leave if it stops making them happy. These red state proclamations reveal that most people, queer or not, are under threat by MAGA’s vision of marriage.