Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 29th, 2011
Over the past year or so, we have had several polls showing increased support for marriage equality. While we know the trend has been in our favor for quite some time, it’s been hard to take some of these polls seriously. Many of us remember all too well the polls showing Prop 8 going down in defeat, only to wake up on the day following election day to see the equal rights of millions of Californians stripped from them.
Today, Freedom to Marry had announced that two leading pollsters, one Republican and the other Democrat, have reviewed the polling data over the past fifteen years and have seen a very notable shift in support over the past two years specifically. According to their study (PDF: 136KB/4 pages), that increased support in the past two years has been across the board, including among older Americans and Republicans.
This isn’t a new poll, but rather an analysis of other polls which have already been published, including Gallup, Quinnipiac University, Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), CNN/Opinion Research Corp (CNN/ORC), ABC News/Washington Post, and Pew Research Center.
This study confirms what Rob Tisinai noticed a few weeks ago by looking at the ABC/WaPo poll alone. Rob noticed that “For the most part, older people are more supportive of marriage equality in 2011 than younger people were in 2005.” And that increase in support among older Americans cannot be explained by older people dying off alone. His analysis is worth revisiting here. The authors of the Freedom To Marry study agree:
Ultimately, things are changing very quickly because support levels are up in all age and party categories. This allows one to conclude that many adults are rethinking their position, and it is taking place at all age levels and among all partisans, including older Americans and Republicans. Attitudes are changing at a slower pace among older adults and conservatives, but they’re changing.
More encouragingly, they notice that “the intensity of opinion is changing at a rapid pace. As of today, supporters of marriage for gay couples feel as strongly about the issue as opponents do, something that was not the case in the recent past.”
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Richard Rush
July 29th, 2011
Leave it to me to find a troubling aspect in these favorable polling results:
They seem to illustrate that, ultimately, the only way to end tyranny by the majority against an unpopular minority is for that unpopular minority to become popular.
And the US Constitution doesn’t really matter all that much. The Supreme Court has often shown they won’t decide in favor of expanding rights until a significant level of popularity, or at least public acceptance, has been achieved.
Timothy Kincaid
July 29th, 2011
This confirms something that we have been noticing for a while. In April 2009 we noted that the rate of change in support for marriage equality had taken a sharp uptick and began considering if a tipping point had been reached.
By May of this year it appeared that this uptick was not an anomaly and I speculated on a cultural shift and what may have been its triggering event.
T.J.
July 30th, 2011
I would be interested to see these poll questions expanded to questions about the perceived morality of gay relationships and gay marriage. The reason I state this is that I’ve done a lot of research in my masters and doctorate degrees in psychology that shows that though there is a shift in support for equal rights, there is not as great a shift in people’s personal beliefs about the morality of our life choices. While I think the American cultural belief in equality for all people is a large reason for the shift in public sentiment, I don’t think we can end our efforts at convincing the public that our relationships and love are MORAL and not just entitled to legal protection. This is necessary to reduce prejudice, discrimination, and violence against our community which will remain a serious problem if all we win is the legal and political debate. Hopefully, gay marriages will be public enough in the lives of ordinary Americans and more folks in our community will come out and demonstrate that we are good people who love each other, our families, and our nation. This will go a long way toward achieving this end.
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