Comments on: Rhode Islanders support marriage

By: Tony P

Tony P — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 11:14:29 +0000

I got the phone call with this survey so of course you already know how I answered.

I’m curious how they did their sampling.

By: Timothy Kincaid

Timothy Kincaid — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:27:23 +0000

“Maine” error fixed.

By: justsearching

justsearching — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:31:05 +0000

Who wants to think of themselves as cold or unfavorable? They should have had more neutral terms like “approve” and “disapprove.” I don’t think those results show much that we didn’t already know.

By: TampaZeke

TampaZeke — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:21:39 +0000

It’s just a shame that American’s are too uninformed about the Constitution and past practice to not understand that there has ALWAYS been and will ALWAYS continue to be a religious exemption to performing ANY marriage.

NO religion and NO religious leader has EVER been forced, by the government, to marry ANY two people that they didn’t want to.

I challenge anyone to provide a single example that proves this statement wrong.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:35:59 +0000

If you look later on, they ask first “do you favor or oppose gay marriage.” Then they explain the religious exemption and ask again. The support number increases significantly with the explanation. But even before that, there’s still a majority in support.

What’s most important to me is that of the 79% that know a gay/lesbian person, 81% know a g/l couple, and 78% know 4 or more g/l people. And for 56%, the g/l person they know best is a close friend or member of their family. Rhode Island is a small state, where everybody knows everybody. For a long time, that seemed to hold gay equality back, because it made it harder for people to come out — if everybody knows everybody, then everybody knows your parents. But then it reached a tipping point, where enough people were out and living perfectly happy lives — it got to be that because everybody knows everybody, everybody knew someone who was gay. And we’ve known for a very long time that knowing a gay/lesbian person is the single factor that makes people more likely to support equality.

I haven’t lived there in a while, but I love Rhode Island.

By: Elliot

Elliot — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:30:58 +0000

I’d be interested to see a graph that shows how the people who personally knew someone who is gay fared as opposed to those who did not.

By: Other Fred in the UK

Other Fred in the UK — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:29:16 +0000

Forgive me for being stupid, but surely highlighting the religious exemption merely causes respondents who might oppose such a bill because of misinformation or concerns about religious liberty to favour such a bill. The difference in results between this question and one that did not mention the religious exemption would be due to a lack of factual information known to respondents to the latter. Surely, the question including the mention of the religious exemption gives a ‘truer’ picture of peoples feelings on the matter?

By: TampaZeke

TampaZeke — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:45:21 +0000

I think the first thing to question would why they would poll Maine residents to gauge the opinions of Rhode Islanders. :)

By: F Young

F Young — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:50:55 +0000

“Greenburg Quinlan Rosler has conducted a poll of MAINE residents…”

This must be a mistake.

“…it does not appear to be conducted in a way that would provide significantly invalid results.”

I have no particular qualifications regarding polling, but I personally think that any poll on LGB issues that is done with human callers will overestimate support for LGB’s.

I think polls done by robot callers produce lower and more accurate results because respondents are not as embarassed expressing their true opinions when they deal with anomymous computers.

This particular poll seems to go out of its way to create empathy between the caller and respondent, by asking about warm and cold feelings, and by using the first person. So, I suspect that it overestimates support more than most.

F Young

By: Richard Rush

Richard Rush — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:35:15 +0000

Timothy, in your first sentence, didn’t you mean to say,
“a poll of ~~Maine~~ Rhode Island residents?”