CNN Poll is First To Show Majority Support for Gay Marriage
Five Thirty Eight
by Nate Silver
August 11, 2010A landmark of sorts was achieved today as CNN just came out with a poll showing a 52 percent majority of Americans agreed with the statement that "gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married and have their marriage recognized by law as valid." Some 46 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement.
CNN also asked the question in a slightly different way to half its respondents, omitting the term "should" from the question above, i.e. "Do you think gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to get married and have their marriage recognized by law as valid?". Using that phrasing, 49 percent said yes and 51 percent said no.
Combining the two subsamples has 50.5 percent of Americans in support of gay marriage and 47.5 percent opposed: just about the barest possible majority. But a majority nevertheless, something that no previous poll had shown. An ABC/Washington Post poll from April 2009 had come the closest, showing a 49/46 plurality in support of gay marriage rights; a few other polls had also shown gay marriage to the plurality position when respondents were given a three-way choice of marriage, civil unions, and no legal recognition. But no national poll, save for one debatable case with highly unorthodox phrasing, had shown it to the the majority position…
It will be so funny when I’m old and kids ask me, "You mean people couldn’t marry their partners just because they were gay? Were people just stupid back then?""Yes, kids, that was pretty much it. Stupid and hateful."Have previous polls phrased in terms of "right" as opposed to just saying "should gays be allowed to get married" or "should gay marriage be legal"? I would think that including the word "right" or "constitutional right" in the question would predispose people to favoring it, compared to just saying "gay marriage" in a vacuum without reference to rights or equality.
I would bet dollars to donuts that Ted Olson’s really well-spoken comments on Fox News had something to do with it. Here is someone who may still be respected in Republican circles giving a conservative case for gay marriage. And given the particular viewership of Fox News being more "no" votes than "yes" votes previously, I’d hazard the guess that that particular interview was particularly persuasive.
Looking back on struggles about Civil Rights, it seems to me that there’s a process that any Civil Rights Movement has to go through – much longer than I would’ve imagined. In my early memory, I was in a department store. I was old enough to read, because I remember being disappointed that there was something wrong with the water fountain. Above it, it said "colored," but the water was as clear as a bell. I was disappointed. The memory is etched because my mother, the source of most knowledge at the time, seemed flustered by my questioning. As I grew older in the segregated South, there were a number of similar instances. Now I know that she had a dilemma. She felt strongly that segregation was wrong, but wasn’t able to explain to a small child why something that was wrong was the basis for the society [societies] we lived in.
In that Civil Rights Movement, what I recall first was knowing that segregation was wrong [she was able to convey that]. But it took a while to really see that the impact of its wrongness was devastating to a lot of people. And I was in college before I really got the point about "rights" [I had a lot of help with that from the loud Civil Rights Movement that was becoming the defining issue of our generation]. It was the fight over "rights" that lead to change. Now, I doubt that many in the South I now live in would question "rights," but the long journey is still not over and there’s still plenty of prejudice. That will take generations. I expect one could plot a similar course for the evolution of women’s rights – equally tortured, equally slow.
So the "rights" come first. That’s where the fight is. Then comes the long, slow process of change that exposure to a new order brings. And it’s not just slow for the people who previously were on top. The people on the bottom have to change too. Winning the "rights" battle brings out a lot of very understandable anger about the past, or about the continued prejudice, or some kind of reactive reverse prejudice. I learned a lot about that from my father who had grown up as an immigrant in a place where that definitely wasn’t a good thing to be. He came South and never looked back, paradoxically finding a freedom from prejudice here. But those scars never really healed.
It will be so funny when I’m old and kids ask me, "You mean people couldn’t marry their partners just because they were gay? Were people just stupid back then?""Yes, kids, that was pretty much it. Stupid and hateful."
I’ve come to prefer the word "ignorant" to the word "stupid." It literally means something like being in a state of ignoring – ignoring the plight of the other in this case. The jump to "what would you feel like if you were black, or a woman, or homosexual, or a latino" seems simple after you’ve made it, but is apparently as wide as the Grand Canyon before you do. That was the brilliance of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Put yourself out there where you cannot be "ignored," but don’t be scary – thus the non-violence. Sooner or later, enough people are going to get it that you’re a person too and be less afraid.
It will be so funny when I’m old and kids ask me, "You mean people couldn’t marry their partners just because they were gay? Were people just stupid back then?""Not stupid exactly. They were ignorant and they were scared. People always seem to be afraid of things they don’t understand"
Good for Nate Silver. I have saved a NYT David Brooks column from 1993, when he made “the conservative case for gay marriage.” Unfortunately, he never followed through or wrote about it again that I know of. He concluded by saying:
“The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn’t just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.
“When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote.
“Marriage is not voting. It’s going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination.”