I was writing a Diary Entry about Orwellian political language yesterday when the news broke that Federal Judge Vaughan Walker announced the lifting of the stay on his ruling against Prop. 8, to take effect on August 18th.
Also yesterday, by some strange coincidence, came other news on gay marriage: Polls have always shown that a clear, though shrinking majority of Americans opposed gay marriage. But we may have just tipped. And if not quite yet, we are about to.
You are going to see a lot about the legalities and politics of gay marriage and other gay rights here on Daily Kos. This Diary is primarily about the numbers.
8.12.2010
Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage Appears to Shift at Accelerated Pace
August 12, 2010
Poll: Support for same-sex marriage now the majority viewpoint?
One statistic is meaningless. One article about one statistic, doubly so. Look at the rest of the numbers. And complain at any media source that quotes a poll and doesn't give a link to fuller data.
Before we get to the numbers, one legal comment. The legal argument that immediately follows Judge Vaughan's decision is whether the Prop. 8 proponents even have standing to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court, since the defendant in the case, the State of California, declined to defend it. Both Gubernator Ahnuld Braunschweiger and Attorney General Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown joined with the plaintiffs in favor of gay marriage and against Prop. 8. The one-week extension of the temporary stay allows proponents time to ask the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to extend it pending a full hearing (appeal filed today, Friday, August 13, 2010. Good luck with that.), and possibly all the way to the Supreme Court, if that's how it goes, most likely in 2012. We'll come back to that.
A fair number of Kossacks and other Progressives/Liberals/Lefties are angry with the Obama Administration for not pushing harder on our agenda, particularly after Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's rant against the "Professional Left". I will not rehash the debates over health care, stimulus, jobs, energy policy, and the even more divisive debates on torture or war crimes. Maybe another time I'll weigh in on bipartisanship, majorities among the population and in the Senate, the November midterm elections, and leadership on such issues. Today, I'm sticking to gay marriage.
And there, in short, my advice is to have at the President, the rest of the Administration, the Congress, and anybody else obstructing progress. Politely but firmly, if possible; with ridicule rather than anger otherwise. In particular, over Federal recognition of gay marriage, specifically repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Why? Because it's past time. Most Americans are ahead of the President, who favors Civil Unions (that is, discrimination, segregation, and continued denial of Federal marriage benefits) and explicitly opposes Gay Marriage. And also because the President told us to. You may tell Robert Gibbs that directly from his boss.
Before we discuss policy further, we need data, and we need to know how to dig into data and interpret it. Apparently, only about 10% of the articles and blogs accessible on the Internet that discuss the CNN poll give links to PDFs of the other data from the CNN analysis. Google is your friend in such cases. There are about 753,000 hits for &lcnn poll gay marriage>, and about 72,700 for <cnn poll gay marriage pdf>. Of those that did, RawStory ranked the highest.
Majority support same-sex marriage rights for first time: CNN poll
I first read about the new poll here in BREAKING - Prop 8 - "I now pronounce you..." Free to Marry, and first saw details on FiveThirtyEight.com, where Nate Silver had already run the numbers to combine this with previous polling data, giving the following plot, including fitted curves of both approval and disapproval trends.
Here is part of what Nate Silver had to say about it.
The LOESS regression line now shows 50 percent opposed to gay marriage and 49 percent in support -- basically too close to call.
One caveat is that LOESS regression tends to be fairly sensitive on the endpoints, and so yesterday's CNN survey, which showed the pro-gay marriage position leading 50.5-48.5, makes a fair amount of difference. But even if we ignored that survey, support for gay marriage would instead be in the range of 45-46 percent (and opposition between 51-52 percent): that would reflect acceleration in the rate of support for gay marriage, about a 4-point gain over the past 16 months, faster than the long-term rate of increase, which has been between 1 and 1.5 points per year. [emphasis added]
You can see the acceleration where the curve turns up at the righthand end. As Nate points out, we can discuss the exact rate of increase, using different data sets and different tools. However, we cannot doubt that there is an increase, nor that the rate is faster than before. Likewise, we cannot doubt the continued rise in support for gay marriage shown in these polls for more than 20 years. It is possible to doubt that that increase will continue, but it is not possible to argue convincingly that it cannot happen or will not happen.
Nate also noted today that another newly released poll disagreed, showing overall opinion 57-33 against, but with several differences in methodology that call the result into question.
Here's what I think it's safe to say: it is dangerous, and probably even a little irresponsible, to say "Americans think so-and-so" based on the results of one individual survey—especially when it's your survey.
What we have, in any case, according to all other polls, is a classic tipping point, either quite recently or quite soon. Opinion on gay marriage overall has reached equality within the limits of measurement error, and shows every sign of continuing to advance. Which means that if SCOTUS takes up the case and decides it in 2012, there will be a clear majority in the US in favor of gay marriage as a constitutional right. This is very different from the situation when Loving v. Virginia, on anti-miscegenation laws, reached the Supreme Court in the 1966–1967 term. At that time, a clear, indeed overwhelming majority of the US was against allowing Blacks and Whites to marry, and only 11 states permitted it, as compared with the six states currently allowing gay marriage.
If reaching the tipping point were all, it would be game over on bigoted opposition to gay marriage, with some years' delay while opinion worked its way through the political system. It would take several election cycles to clear out the dead wood on this issue. However, we are in Court, and that is not how the Courts are supposed to work, leaving aside the fevered dreams promoted by the Originalist hypocrites.
Although the Ninth Circuit has the greatest diversity of Liberal and Conservative judges, nobody expects it to overturn Walker's findings of fact or legal conclusions. It is possible that the three judges selected at random to hear the question of the stay would by chance be anti-gay enough to extend it (with full protestations of merely following Constitution, law, and precedent) for some months until they can hear actual arguments and render a full decision. Probably not, though. So we rather expect gay weddings to go forward in California Real Soon Now.
If the Ninth Circuit even accepted the case, granting appellants standing and finding some reason to suppose that they might overcome the solid factual record in the trial and decision, the Court would have to take some time over the issue before it could possibly go to SCOTUS, which has its own long and involved processes to work through. The big question at the end is whether swing Justice Anthony Kennedy would go against a very strong legal case laid out by Judge Walker, and also go against the popular will, to search out a Constitutional theory by which to invalidate the court judgment. Given the findings of fact in the case, specifically that defendant intervenors produced no evidence of harm and cited no compelling state interest in preventing gay marriage, it would take some work for Kennedy to find reasons for buying into whatever legal theories Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts might adduce, or to invent another. His record on gay rights is mixed, and shows evidence of following the law rather than ideology. (Feel free to argue this point.) There is also Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley on the issue.
No matther whether th’ constitution follows th’ flag or not, th’ Supreme Coort follows th’iliction returns
possibly at some distance.
As Judge Walker's judgment proceeds toward the Supreme Court, we have the same process for the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, recently declared unconstitutional in Boston. After which, according to the Constitution, all of the states would have to give full faith and credit to gay marriages in any other state, and the Federal government, specifically Social Security, Medicare, the IRS, and so on, would have to provide full spousal benefits to same-sex spouses.
But even if we get Kennedy on our side both times, full compliance won't happen immediately. We can expect the same kind of Massive Resistance in the homophobic states as we saw in the segregationist states back in the 1960s and for a long time afterward. Because the Federal government is, as we all know, a tyrannical conspiracy against all that is Good and True in the Southern Way of Life, especially the Purity of Southern Womanhood. No matter what Fried Green Tomatoes said, this ickiness Will Not Stand. Homophobia today, homophobia tomorrow, homophobia forever!—Not. Of course! But we will have to wait for another generation of bigots to die of old age before that changes completely.
Talking only of US national averages conceals a multitude of such sins. Racism exists everywhere, but is politically dominant only in the former Confederacy and what Conservatives are pleased to call the Heartland, north from Texas to the Dakotas and over to Utah. Homophobia, ditto. That means that we need to dig deeper into the latest data, and into past polls.
You can get a PDF of the CNN survey results. The following cross-tabulations, from page 6, give us some of what we need.
CNN/OPINION RESEARCH CORPORATION POLL -- AUG 6 to 10, 2010
Question 37
Do you think gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to get married and have their marriage recognized by law as valid?
Note the form of the question. Do they have a constitutional right. This is not the easiest form of the issue to agree with. One could ask whether LGBTs should have such a right, even if it would take a Constitutional amendment to give it to them, or whether we should just pass a law granting marriage equality without making it a fundamental right. So we might suppose that polling other forms of the question could show even higher support. In fact, putting in the word "should" before "have" resulted in
Yes 52%
No 467%
Don't know 2%
Base = Half sample
The overall sample got two different forms of the question, with slightly different results. The data below deal with the first, more difficult form.
Each of the following tables breaks down the sample in some dimension of interest. We start with the gender gap.
| Total | Men | Women | White | Non-White |
| ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | --------- |
Yes | 49% | 45% | 52% | 50% | N/A |
No | 51% | 55% | 48% | 50% | N/A |
No opinion | * | * | * | * | N/A |
Sampling Error | +/-4.5 | +/-6.0 | +/-6.0 | +/-5.0 |
Men are on average against gay marriage still, and women for. There were evidently not enough non-Whites in this survey to give statistically meaningful results. We know from other studies that this is a divisive issue in Black churches and among Latinos, Catholic and other.
| Total | 18-34 | 35-49 | 50-64 | 65+ | Under 50 | 50+ |
| ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ------ |
Yes | 49% | N/A | N/A | 39% | 36% | 58% | 38% |
No | 51% | N/A | N/A | 61% | 64% | 42% | 62% |
No opinion | * | N/A | N/A | * | * | * | * |
Sampling Error | +/-4.5 | | | +/-7.0 | +/-8.5 | +/-7.5 | +/-5.5 |
* percentage less than 1%
No information is provided about the lack of data for respondents in the 18-34 and 35-49 age brackets, while totals are provided. Young people are for gay marriage by 16%, and older people strongly against, by 24%. This 40 point swing is consistent with historical polling on other social issues. For gay marriage specifically, see .
| | Under | $50K | No | Attended |
| Total | $50K | or more | College | College |
| ----- | ----- | ------- | ------- | -------- |
Yes | 49% | 50% | 47% | 48% | 49% |
No | 51% | 49% | 52% | 51% | 51% |
No opinion | * | * | * | * | * |
Sampling Error | +/-4.5 | +/-6.5 | +/-6.5 | +/-7.0 | +/-5.5 |
Income is a wash, as is college education, although there is a suggestion that higher income might correlate faintly with opposition.
| | Demo- | Indep- | Repub- | Lib- | Mod- | Conser- |
| Total | crat | endent | lican | eral | erate | vative |
| ----- | ----- | ------ | ------ | ----- | ----- | ------- |
Yes | 49% | 56% | 57% | 27% | N/A | 55% | 27% |
No | 51% | 44% | 43% | 73% | N/A | 44% | 73% |
No opinion | * | * | * | 1% | N/A | 1% | * |
Sampling Error | +/-4.5 | +/-7.5 | +/-7.5 | +/-8.0 | | +/-7.0 | +/-6.5 |
There is no question about the politics, and about the alignment of the parties. Only Conservative Republicans are firmly against, by a whopping 46 points. Independents are indistinguishable from Democrats on this issue.
| Total | Northeast | Midwest | South | West | Urban | Suburban | Rural |
| ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- |
Yes | 49% | N/A | N/A | 43% | N/A | N/A | 54% | 36% |
No | 51% | N/A | N/A | 57% | N/A | N/A | 46% | 64% |
No opinion | * | N/A | N/A | * | N/A | N/A | * | * |
Sampling Error | +/-4.5 | | | +/-7.5 | | | +/-6.5 | +/-7.5 |
We are missing important data here on non-Southern regions, so we cannot conclude from this survey that the extended South (up to North Dakota and west to Utah) is the center of US homophobia. But we have other data on that, such as the graph at Opinions on Gay Rights Vary a Lot by State. As expected, CNN finds that it is in rural areas where opinion is most against gay marriage.
So we have, in sum, the nearly complete stereotype confirmed. Old Conservative rural Southern White men appear to be the heart of the problem, if it is legitimate to combine these separate results. Well, it isn't mathematically legitimate to do such a thing in general, but in this case, it turns out that we have plenty of other data to support that conclusion. We could add importance of religion to the respondent, membership in Evangelical churches or the LDS church, and other known factors. Rich old etc. men might be very slightly more of a problem, but that isn't worth fussing about.
Looking back, we can talk about updating the analyses from
See also
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