PRINCETON, New Jersey — The latest Gallup poll shows that Americans’ trust in the judiciary has fallen to an all-time low.

Trust in the judicial branch of government dropped eight points just in the last year, which saw major decisions including the constitutionalizing of homosexual “marriages.”

It is a “significant” loss of trust, according to Gallup, with only 53 percent of Americans responding that they have “a great deal” or even just “a fair amount” of trust in the third branch of government. Trust in the executive (45%) and legislative (32%) branches are also quite low, but both were slightly up from last year.

In 2009, Americans’ trust in the judiciary was 76 percent. In just the six years since then, mistrust has risen in nearly a third of Americans.

The Gallup website explained that “the decline in trust in the judicial branch likely stems from the Supreme Court’s controversial decisions this year to legalize same-sex marriage, and uphold a key provision of the Affordable Care Act” (Obamacare). “As a result, the Supreme Court’s job approval rating among Republicans plummeted to 18% in July,” the polling website reported.

Additionally, a growing number of Americans (37%) describe the court’s ideology as “too liberal,” up seven percent from last year. That’s the highest percent of Americans considering the court overly liberal in 22 years.

Gallup speculated that the low trust and “too liberal” opinions are “the effect of the Supreme Court’s prominent left-leaning decisions.”

Notably, 63 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of independents now say the Supreme Court is too liberal, with both figures up from last year. A large number of Democrats moved from saying the Supreme Court was “too conservative” to saying the nation’s highest court is “about right” (54%).

Gallup concluded that “the decline this year is almost certainly a reaction – primarily among Republicans – to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage and its turning away the latest legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act” (ObamaCare).

The results are based on Gallup’s annual “Governance” poll, taken September 9-13. Just over one thousand people age 18 or older were randomly called via landline telephone (40%) and cell phone (60%). Gallup says the poll has only a plus-or-minus four-percent possibility of error.

Reprinted with permission from LifeSiteNews.

You can view the official Gallup report here.