Marriage Poll! (because it worked out so well last time)
I can only imagine that TNG readers and the queer community more broadly must not be huge fans of polls anymore... after almost every poll leading up to Prop 8 showed the measure failing, and then, whoops, it passed. I myself (along with lots of smarter people) dubbed this a new Bradley Effect and noted that Californians were apparently more comfortable telling a pollster they'd support equal rights than they were actually voting that way.
However, I am a political junkie and therefore a polling junkie, and when I saw this new set of data I couldn't help but share it with you. A new nationwide Newsweek poll suggested that (a) most people support some kind of civil rights/unions for gay couples, (b) most people don't approve of actual Jesus-sanctioned marriage for Los Homos, and (c) either most people see this as a complicated matter of states versus federal rights, or they are largely homophobes who will screw us over, a la California.
Numbers and analysis beyond the fold!
Newsweek / Princeton Survey Research Associates
12/3-4/08. 1,006 adults. 3.7 margin of error. National.
Mode: Live Telephone Interviews
via Pollster
Do you think there should or should NOT be...
Legally-sanctioned gay and lesbian unions or partnerships?
55% Should be
36% Should not be
Legally-sanctioned gay and lesbian marriages?
39% Should be
55% Should not be
Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. constitution that would BAN gay marriage IN ALL STATES?
43% Favor
52% Oppose
Suppose YOUR STATE held an election where you could vote for or against an amendment to the state constitution that would ban gay marriage. Would you be more likely to vote "yes" in favor of OR "no" against a ban on gay marriage in your state?
45% Yes, favor ban
49% No, against ban
As you can see, my points (a) and (b) - that a majority of people support some kind of unions but not marriage - are pretty self-explanatory. On the one hand, this isn't terribly surprising. People recognize that gay couples should probably have some rights, but are still taking a moderate stance. On the other hand, this is pretty severely screwed up. If you are willing to say that gay couples should have some kind of civil union, why would you not just want to call it the same thing as hetero marriage and give everyone the same rights? The answer, in most cases, is probably religious- or tradition-based, to which I say: if marriage is a Christian institution, get it the hell out of government. Let hetero couples get civil unions at town halls, and if they want to call it a marriage, they can pay $20,000 to have a priest read 1 Corinthians. Not to preach to the choir, but this is why TNG hosted a Ban Marriage party! It wasn't just so I could get an "I bleed when fucked" name tag stuck on my back.
Point (c) is my way of explaining the fact that a lot more people would vote to ban gay marriage in their own states than would want to see it banned on a federal level. This could be a states rights thing - even though they might want gay marriage banned, some folks might view it as an issue that each state should decide on its own. This has actually been the view of a lot of Republican politicians, so it's not out of the question.
The other explanation is that even when being asked by a pollster people don't want to take a grand stance against gays and sound unreasonably homophobic. When asked if gay marriage should be banned everywhere, they say no. But when asked if they actually had to vote on it, just for their state, fewer can actually say that they'd stand up for equal rights. Even that little change, that little move from it being big and hypothetical to a bit more real and personal, might have been enough to sway people's opinions. They don't want to make decisions for everyone else in the country, but hell, they can at least do it for their state. It's not hard to see that when people actually have to vote on these issues, their support often fades pretty quickly - even if they don't mind acting like they're in support of "some" rights for gay persons.
Then again, who knows what these polls tell us. Polls often don't really mean anything, especially when there's nothing actually being voted on. However, even if this data doesn't correspond with what Americans as a whole believe, it at least tells us what these one thousand adults think and makes me wonder how they're formulating their logic.
My conclusion: most people don't see gay rights as a black-and-white issue. If they did, they'd either be for marriage or for banning it everywhere. This is good news, in that it gives the gay rights movement room to breath, change minds, and find ways to get things done. It is also bad news, in that it shows that even many people who support some amount of gay rights don't view it as a necessity or a real issue of justice - just as another hazy measure on which to waffle back and forth on without direction or conviction.
Glass half empty or glass half full, we're still half way there at best.
3 comments:
The one thing that continues to confound me is the inability of the public to understand the difference between civil & religious marriage -and the inability of anyone to explain it! The poll questions above don't even imply that there's a distinction!
Sometimes I think that the solution is to no longer permit churches to consolidate the two marriages, civil & religious, into one ceremony; and instead do as they do in many other countries (France comes to mind) and require folks to have their civil wedding at the courthouse and, on a different day, the optional religious ceremony at their place of worship. That would truly be a separation of church and state and would invalidate the religious right's argument!
Gene
DC
Ban marriage party?! I love it!
And I totally agree with Gene. Why is the issue of gay marriage obfuscated by the religious definition of marriage? It sure didn't help that our "pro-equality" presidential candidates were against "gay marriage"...
I think Corey is exactly right that people don't see this as a clear cut, black-and-white issue. The reality is that most people are truly ambivalent about it. This makes a great deal of sense given the speed with which the concept of gay rights in general and same-sex marriage in particular have emerged on the political scene. Stonewall was not that long ago. Harvey Milk died only 30 years ago. The onset of the AIDS epidemic was not that long ago. And if you suggested to anyone 15 or 20 years ago that a couple of states would have same-sex marriage by now, you would have been laughed at. People of a certain age (not even that old of a certain age, say about 40) are still trying to reconcile the dissonance that occurs when the gays they meet in their daily lives don't fit all of the negative stereotypes that they grew up with. This is why we all need to come out and be unapologetically out to our families, co-workers, and friends. The first step is to get people to feel ambivalent when someone like you or me doesn't conform to their stereotypes. The next step is to get them on our side. Last week, I finally, after 6 years of being out to everyone else in my life, wrote letters to my extended family, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and came out to them. Thank you, Milk, for reminding me that this is necessary. I have a big family, and most all of them are older than me (I'm 27). Who knows if my family in particular can overcome their traditional notions of family life and their outdated stereotypes of gays, but I may have at least made them stop and think about what kinds of people they assume gay people are. I may have at least made them ambivalent. Ambivalent voters are better than voters that firmly oppose us.
Part of getting people on our side is to explain the differences between religious and civil marriage. Gene, in the above comment, laments that people don't appreciate this distinction. Well, we haven't tried to frame the issue that way yet. Maybe once we do, we'll present a more compelling argument. A lot of this is our responsibility.
About the Bradley Effect stuff, I think it's possible, but if you look at the Pollster graph above, you'll see that there was a dearth of polling on Prop 8. If we had more polls on which to base expectations heading into the actual vote, it would be easier to make that claim. And while there may be people who do not want to appear too hostile to gays, there are also people on the other side, who do not want to appear too friendly to gays, but when they go into the voting booth, side with us. So, that Bradley Effect can go both ways depending on the social context of the voter and whether being hostile or friendly to gay rights is the norm.
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