A bill to repeal Pennsylvania’s currently-unenforceable same-sex marriage ban cleared the state House for the second time on Wednesday, with the partisan divide on the issue little changed in two years.
The measure, which would strike the line in state law saying that marriage is “between one man and one woman,” passed on a 127-to-72 vote, with all but one Democrat voting for it, along with 26 Republicans.
The vote lost support over the same bill that passed in the House two years ago, 133-to-68, although the vote is consistent with polls showing a recent backlash to gay marriage among the GOP voter base. The previous bill was not taken up in the Republican-majority state Senate, and the current one is also a longshot.
The bill would eliminate the state’s heterosexual-only marriage definition as well as the clause declaring that same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions will not be honored in Pennsylvania.
Those laws have been rendered null by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which found that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional. In 2022, Congress and then-President Joe Biden enacted a law prohibiting states from refusing to recognize marriages from other states based on the couple’s sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin.
But if Obergefell were to be overturned, Pennsylvania would be one of about two dozen states that would revert to laws invalidating same-sex marriages performed in their own state, according to a Poynter Institute analysis.
The bill is “about making sure that our laws reflect the laws of this land as upheld in Obergefell,” said the bill’s author, Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta.
Kenyatta – who married his husband in 2022 – recalled awaiting the Supreme Court news a decade ago, “refreshing the homepage to see if the court has granted you a fundamental right.”
Pennsylvanians “deserve to not live in fear that the union of your lives is in imminent danger” from a single court reversal, he continued.
Kenyatta’s bill would define marriage as a “a civil contract between two individuals,” something which Republicans have said is too vague and which obviates what they describe as the point of state-recognized marriage: to encourage the conception and rearing of children.
“People might wonder why government got into the business of regulating marriage in the first place,” said Rep. Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster County.
While Obergefell is “still good law” on its face, Cutler added, the dissenting opinion also warned that moving away from marriage as a heterosexual institution would “undermine people’s ability to adhere to a traditional view of marriage in the public square,” something that may happen in Pennsylvania if the state’s definition of marriage is watered down, Cutler warned.
By describing marriage as only a civil contract, “we’re taking something incredibly deep and meaningful and reducing it to something less,” said Rep. Charity Grimm Krupa, R-Fayette County, who acknowledged that she had voted in favor of the bill in 2024, but had reconsidered.
This isn’t an anomaly, according to most polling. Support for gay marriage grew consistently starting in the 1990s among Americans of all political stripes, although Democrats were always more likely to approve than Republicans, according to Gallup averages.
But recent years have shown polarization. Republican support for same-sex marriage declined from 55% in 2022 to 41% last year, according to Gallup, as Democratic support surged to 88%.
Some of this may have less to do with Obergefell and more to do with an opinion in the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the federal abortion protections found in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
In a concurring opinion, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote “we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents,” including Obergefell as well as cases that prevented states from banning interracial marriage and gay sex.
It remains to be seen if those outcomes would be substantially changed by Thomas’ belief that the court’s previous right-to-privacy standard was an “oxymoron” with no Constitutional basis. But Democrats have stressed to voters that this is a possibility, generating pushback from Republicans and the increasing partisan divergence on the issue since 2022.
“Let us today put into law in Pennsylvania what those who plot to undermine those rights would take from us on our highest courts and across this commonwealth,” House Majority Leader Matt Bradford, D-Montgomery County, said in a closing floor speech Wednesday.