It’s Pride 2026. And MAGA is coming for us all

Trump and the GOP are fomenting a full-throated backlash meant to destroy LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality. But we have the power to stop it.

This year at least five red states are trying to erase Pride month, renaming June to celebrate the heterosexual family—as if it’s not celebrated every day in American life.

The homophobic MAGA GOP Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee—one of the aforementioned red states—this week posted on X that “homosexuality has no place in America,” wishing his followers a “Happy Nuclear Family Month.” After much outrage he deleted it, blaming it on a “staffer,” though we’ve heard no news of the staffer facing dismissal or any punishment. Ogles, let’s not forget, is a hardcore bigot, who also posted earlier this year that “Muslims have no place in American society.”

Gallup released a poll this week showing a sharp drop in support for marriage equality, as anti-LGBTQ sentiment rose dramatically within the Republican Party.

And attacks on trans rights have escalated in states across the country as Donald Trump has grotesquely vilified trans people, including kids, pushing to make them invisible—literally removing their gender markers from passports and replacing them with those of their “biological sex”—and putting their lives in danger as he promotes the kind of rhetoric that fosters violence.

This is where we stand in 2026 as we mark Pride month, and it’s important to see that MAGA, which has itself taken over the GOP, has enacted a full-blown assault on LGBTQ rights, meant to strip those rights entirely.

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According to Economist/YouGov polling, in 2022 only 38% of the GOP identified as MAGA. Today 62% of the party identifies as MAGA, a nearly two-thirds takeover of the party within a few short years. (In the larger population, Americans who identify as MAGA rose from 11% to 19%.)

The new Gallup poll on marriage equality eerily mirrors this shift. Support for same-sex marriage is down a whopping 18 percentage points within the Republican Party since 2022—from a 55% majority supporting marriage equality to a minority, at 37%. This brings support for same-sex marriage down 6% among all Americans, the lowest in years, to 65% from its peak of 71% in 2022.

Christian nationalists, in addition to the increasingly visible white supremacist extremists within the MAGA base, see ending marriage equality within reach: Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs decision, infamously pointed to both the Obergefell marriage equality decision and Lawrence v. Texas—which banned sodomy laws—as needing to be revisited now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned.

Red states, as always, are leading the charge. MAGA-ified Tennessee, which has been among the states passing bathroom bills and bans on gender-affirming care for youth, passed a bill last year that began a trend, rebranding June as “Nuclear Family Month.” Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas this year issued a proclamation naming June “Fidelity Month,” attempting to blunt Pride and celebrate “fidelity to God, family, community, and country.” (The absurdity of the former press secretary to the adulterous Donald Trump equating heterosexuality with fidelity should not be lost on any of us).

Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox followed suit this week, proclaiming June “Fidelity Month,” while Indiana’s Governor Mike Braun joined Tennessee on “Nuclear Family Month.” Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama went with “Strong Families Month.”

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The Gallup poll also showed a startling drop in support for trans rights, as gender identity is generally more misunderstood by Americans than sexual orientation, which has been part of the public discussion for a much longer time. And again, the drop appears to have been driven by the MAGA movement within the GOP. Only 5% of Republicans say transitioning as a trans person is acceptable, while 42% of independents find it acceptable, as do 60% of Democrats. Gallup first asked the question in 2022, when 22% of Republicans accepted gender transition. Democrats’ and independents’ support stayed relatively stable while Republicans’ support plummeted.

This comes as we’ve seen anti-trans laws passed across the country by the GOP, as Trump and the Republicans have cruelly targeted trans kids. A well-funded anti-LGBTQ legal movement led by Christian nationalist groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom has made progress at the far-right Supreme Court, which has increasingly allowed states to discriminate against trans people, including trans youth.

Some gay, lesbian, and bisexual people might be tempted to believe that the backlash against their rights is because of the animus toward trans rights, something they might call a spillover effect. And we’ve seen the small band of GOP Republicans—gay MAGA—scurrilously join in the demonization of trans people, with some even calling for taking the “T” out of LGBTQ. But recent research debunks the notion that negative attitudes about trans rights somehow caused a drop in support for the rights of the rest of the community.

Earlier in the year I interviewed Tessa E.S. Charlesworth, a research psychologist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who studies implicit bias. She and her colleague, Eli J. Finkel, also a psychology professor at Northwestern, had written that they were “stunned” by the reversal of support for the rights of gay and lesbian people. And again, 2022 appears to be the high-water mark, after which we see a decline—as MAGA identity rose quickly in the Republican Party.

In 2022, Charlesworth published a study she’d led that detailed the decline of implicit bias against gay people—the kind of bias that is not overt and is often unconscious—drawing upon 7.1 million responses from Americans that began being collected in 2007 and ended in 2020. Her forecasting models predicted that anti-gay bias might be at zero by 2022, the year she published the study. But analysis of millions more responses between 2021 and 2024 showed a striking reversal, with anti-gay bias rising by 10% in four years. More worrying, the trends showed anti-gay bias increasing at the fastest rate among young people, those under 25.

Writing in The New York Times, the researchers hypothesized that there wasn’t a correlation with anti-transgender bias as much as there was, oddly, a correlation with “anti-establishment” bias.

The sustained social disruption since 2020 has fueled resentment and a loss of confidence in institutions perceived to have failed — governments, corporations, the broader establishment. By 2020, support for gay and lesbian equality had become an establishment position. Corporate America, for example, demonstrated a concrete commitment to gay rights, with companies donating hundreds of thousands of dollars for Pride celebrations and other efforts at gay and lesbian inclusion.

In other words, gays and lesbians were “collateral damage,” they theorized, amid a larger revolt against established institutions. The MAGA movement and Trump drove this resentment of the establishment right into the ballot box, both nationally and in states across the country. The anti-DEI purge was very much about taking on institutions that were falsely-framed as having privileged the rights of women and minorities, including LGBTQ people.

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The bottom line: MAGA has been successful at making not only trans people but also gay, lesbian, and bisexual people into the enemy, in addition to people of color and women. And that’s why all LGBTQ rights are under assault by a GOP that is feeding a movement that has taken over its party. This is a GOP more radicalized than ever before, where even logic and reason are ignored, as they hurtle toward a possible mid-term disaster, often unable to pull back on their positions and certainly their loyalty to Trump.

The good news is that the vast majority of Americans—non-MAGA Americans—support basic rights for LGBTQ people. There may be varying degrees of support on some issues, such as trans athletes on team sports or gender-affirming care for youth, but these are not issues the majority of voters see as important to them. And when it comes to anti-discrimination laws, trans people, like gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, have the support of the great majority in just about every poll.

We are also seeing MAGA fracturing and crumbling, as various factions attack Trump on the war in Iran, inflation, and other issues. Democrats are taking advantage of that, driving the point home that Trump betrayed his own base. And Republican leaders, worried about the midterms, are beginning to push back ever so slightly.

Beating back MAGA, a radicalized force now dominating the GOP but representing only 19% of Americans, is key to disempowering the backlash against queer people and protecting equality and freedom. And so far we’ve seen big wins at the ballot box in special election after special election—even when the GOP has used anti-LGBTQ political ads to engage its base—and in the polling heading into the midterms. We just have to stay focused, work hard, and keep all of this front of mind as we celebrate Pride 2026.