The Obergefell Slippery Slope Was Real

By Jack Butler

Sunday, June 29, 2025

 

Would Edmund Burke have supported gay marriage? Andrew Sullivan thought so. Making what the New Republic called “a (conservative) case” for same-sex unions in 1989, Sullivan described them not as “a denial of family values” but rather “an extension of them.” Hence, in his view, the 18th-century British conservative thinker and statesman who, among other things, critiqued the French Revolution “could have written a powerful case” for gay marriage.

 

Leave Burke aside for the moment, save to observe that Sullivan’s approach in invoking him was novel at a time when even like-minded activists preferred radicalism. Its widespread adoption undoubtedly played some role in the shift of public opinion that culminated in the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015, to legalize it. “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

 

Yet ten years later, near the end of what much of the commanding heights of our culture still insists on calling “Pride Month,” Sullivan is now critical of LGBT activists. Rather than “celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives,” he wrote recently in the New York Times, “they radicalized.” His critique has merit. But in condemning the excesses of those to whom he is sympathetic, Sullivan spotlights fundamental flaws in the case he has been making all along.

 

Sullivan’s more recent analysis focuses on the ways that the cause of transgenderism has hijacked the movement. He condemns the attempt to “dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society” and “to replace biological sex with ‘gender identity’ in the law and culture.” He rejects the demand that “the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted.” And he argues that trans activists proceeded in an imperious and closed-minded way, brooking no dissent, not even internally. All true. It’s also true that these activists are now on the back foot, both politically and legally.

 

But Sullivan reveals lingering sympathy for his fellow travelers. He believes that “the greater acceptance of trans people is a huge step forward for all of us” and condemns “genuine transphobia among some on the right.” He also suffers from some of their blind spots. He suggests that modern progressive activists’ intolerance is new. “The idea that we would tell other people what words they can use, shut down speakers, criticize journalists and threaten others into silence was once absurd.” He must have missed the last few years of the gay marriage debate, when corporations were boycotted and their executives fired for adhering to a millennia-old understanding of marriage, and random Indiana pizza restaurants received national attention for doing the same.

 

Sullivan must also have paid little attention to the way that gay marriage has collided with our legal regime. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not need the intervening ten years to predict in his Obergefell dissent that the decision “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” The Job-like travails of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who declined to create cakes for gay weddings, had begun even before that ruling. After Obergefell, other people and institutions similarly fell victim. That some of them eventually found legal recourse does not erase their protracted struggles. So much for tolerance. So much for live and let live.

 

The current condition of his movement is a direct consequence of successes that Sullivan helped it to achieve. Throughout the gay marriage debate, advocates rejected the idea of a slippery slope: that moral degradation would inevitably follow from enshrining gay marriage in law. It is true that little is inevitable in human affairs. Yet it is indisputable that the legalization of same-sex unions emboldened others to proceed beyond the point where those like Sullivan would have had them stop. There was a germ of radicalism even in arguments for gay marriage that presented themselves as conservative. It turns out not to be so easy for those who initiate radical change, however marketed, to set limits upon it once they have achieved their aims.

 

Others, however, have pushed back. The same public that has mostly (though not entirely) accepted gay marriage has, to an extent, rejected the latest iteration of this activism. And that these causes became linked, regardless of Sullivan’s own preference, has contributed to the lower cultural footprint of so-called Pride Month this year. Yes, many institutions still display obligatory fealty to the superficialities to which this month has become annually subjected. But far fewer than usual. For the first time in years, perhaps since Obergefell itself, the forces of pride seem . . . humbled. That, too, is a consequence of Andrew Sullivan’s success, even if it’s one Sullivan would now say he did not intend.

 

Contrary to Sullivan’s attempted necromancy, gay marriage — to say nothing of transgenderism — would probably have been unfathomable to Edmund Burke. Before the French Revolution had even reached its full, poisonous flowering — when so many, including figures of our own revolution, such as Thomas Jefferson, thought so well of it — Burke had its number. “It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes,” he wrote.

 

It was Sullivan’s novelty to imagine same-sex unions as such a model of approved utility. Yet the principle, outlined by Justice Kennedy, that enabled them was so untrammeled as to defy Burke’s caution that “liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed.” His warning here about the French Revolution’s excesses could just as easily apply to today’s cultural convulsions:

 

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

 

Perhaps Burke, if not Sullivan, could have foreseen where Obergefell would lead.