A Republican Said Homosexuality Has No Place In America – And Some Americans Are Starting To Agree
On the second day of Pride Month, a sitting US congressman told the country that gay people do not belong in America. The post on Republican Andy Ogles’ X account read,
“Homosexuality has no place in America,” with a cheerful sign-off: “Happy Nuclear Family Month.” It was gone within hours.
A Pride Month post that backfired
News.com.au framed the fallout as a Republican civil war, and for once the description fit. Ogles, who represents Tennessee, has a long record here. He is one of Congress’s loudest opponents of LGBTQIA+ rights, and he has spent years attacking transgender Americans and Pride events.
The “Nuclear Family Month” line nodded to a nonbinding resolution signed by Governor Bill Lee in April that defines a family as “one husband, one wife” and their children.
When the post blew up, Ogles said a member of his communications team wrote it while he was on his farm, and that the staffer had been reprimanded. “The post was stupid, hurtful and a complete distraction from my America First focus,” he wrote. Few people bought it.
His own side said enough
The sharpest replies came from inside his party. Republican congressman Mike Lawler of New York called the statement “absolutely idiotic” and pointed out that Ogles has gay family, friends and constituents.
“Homosexuality exists. In America,” Lawler wrote. “It doesn’t make them less than or somehow unworthy of being an American.”
Senator Ted Cruz, hardly a friend to the community, told TMZ that “for all of recorded history, homosexuals have been part of humanity” and that “the behavior of consenting adults is their business.”
The Log Cabin Republicans, the party’s own gay group, were blunter still: “What has no place in America is Andy Ogles’ bigoted views.”
The numbers behind the noise
Here’s why one deleted tweet is worth your attention. The next day, Gallup published its annual Values and Beliefs survey, and the trend is heading the wrong way.
Support for legal same-sex marriage now sits at 65%, down six points from its 2022-2023 high. The share of Americans who call gay and lesbian relationships morally acceptable has fallen to 62%, the lowest since 2016. Acceptance of people changing their gender is down to 38%, an eight-point drop since 2021.
Gallup, which surveyed 1,001 adults in May, is clear about who is moving: most of the decline sits with Republicans, whose support for same-sex marriage has slid from 55% to 37% in four years.
What it adds up to
Ogles, then, is not a one-off. He is the loud end of a quieter shift the polling has finally caught up with.
Gallup links the drop to conservative leaders pushing back on the diversity, equity and inclusion programs built to widen acceptance in the first place.
The encouraging detail is the rebuke from his own side, proof that the bigotry is not universal, even on the right. The harder truth is the graph. They are falling now, and a congressman feels safe enough to say so out loud.
