The Southern Baptist Convention voted overwhelmingly last week to pursue the reversal of a U.S. Supreme Court decision establishing the right for same-sex couples to marry.
A legal right to gay marriage is an ideal that the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of LGBT+ conservatives, have long fought to make possible within the Republican Party, successfully leading the party to remove language stating that marriage is “traditionally between a man and a woman” in the 2024 platform.
With that success in mind, Andy Blalock—leader of the Huntsville chapter of Log Cabin Republicans—said he is not concerned about the party bending its ear to the SBC, which votes heavily in favor of the party.
“It’s really a moot point,” Blalock said. “Under the First Amendment, there can be no law respecting the establishment of religion. The GOP is not going to favor the SBC anymore than they favor any other group. We don’t mind that they’re voting on that; to each their own. You can have your opinion—that doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to take law.”
While the SBC serves as a major influencer within the white evangelical voting bloc, the Republican Party has already shown a willingness to split from its agenda. When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created for in vitro fertilization are persons under Alabama law, the SBC soon voted to oppose IVF as a practice and seek regulation of the procedure.
Republicans at both the state and national level took a different tack, swiftly moving to protect IVF as a procedure.
Blalock said the GOP has become more welcoming to gay members than ever, thanks to President Donald Trump and specifically Lara Trump and Melania Trump, who has raised more than $2 million for the organization.
“There are a great number of conservative lesbian and gay couples that are great Trump supporters,” Blalock said. “The last thing the GOP wants is to start ruffling those feathers. Now, I’ll be conservative the rest of my life, whether they overturn gay marriage or not, because there’s not one issue in America that is the overall issue.”
The GOP has become the home for what JD Vance called, and Blalock echoed, the “normal gays” who they say have fled from a Democrat effort to widen the community beyond sexual orientation.
“The Democrat party supports the ‘T,’ the ‘Q,’ the ‘I,’ the ‘A,’ the ‘plus,'” Black said, “Being lesbian and gay is sexual orientation, that’s innate; the rest are all identities. What JD Vance calls your ‘normal gays’ are saying ‘You know what? I don’t like pride anymore, what they’re tacking on to LGB.”
Blalock clarified that he had no problem with transgender people living their life, but said they should be looking for “equal rights” and claimed the group has instead been seeking “special rights.”
Despite Republican leaders at the national level not expressing a desire yet to overturn Obergefell, some Republican lawmakers have already begun the process of challenging the decision.
Lawmakers in Idaho passed a petition in January directly asking the Supreme Court to overturn its ruling on same-sex marriage. A lawmaker in Oklahoma proposed a child tax credit and expressed hope that the bill could lead to a challenge of Obergefell at the Supreme Court level.
