I’m not sure if it’s true, but it has the folks at the Conservative Voice all atwitter.
The press release comes complete with an approving quote from Exodus rep Randy Thomas. It’s a good reminder that the real agenda of the Ex-Gay movement is to halt advancing civil rights for gay people.
We at XGW fully support the right of ex-gay people to live as they wish and to define their sexuality in whatever way they choose. We respectfully request that they not try to deny us that same liberty.
Nationally, gay marriage has polled ~32% for gay marriage, ~28% for civil unions, and ~40% against either without much apparent change since last fall in ‘hard’ polling, where the options are presented in stark contrast and hostile to each other. It reflects how people would vote in a strongly contested referendum. This from the NYT bimonthly polling on national issues.
In ‘soft’ polling, where the contrast isn’t made strongly and is more or less polling for what people find acceptable or tolerable, the split is 5-10% better for gay marriage and 5-10% worse for nonrecognition. This from the miscellaneous national pollings and Massachusetts polling.
In an up-down choice between gay marriage or nonrecognition, civil union supporters in the past year have tended to go to the latter by roughly 80-20 on average. It seems pretty sensitive to events and political climate, but hasn’t been better than 70-30 in any polling I’ve managed to analyze.
Right now events are such on the national scene that the Religious Right has lost its standing with nonpartisan voters on a lot of issues in very rapid succession. The Schiavo matter has destroyed the political positioning on Roe v Wade, the DeLay corruption scandal is wiping out the RR rationale for backing Republicans as a (‘godly’) party, Bush’s attack on the social safety net has cost him, the fight for right wing federal judges is too abstruse and suspect, they’ve lost Anthony Kennedy and their majority on the Supreme Court. The gay marriage of Arthur Finkelstein is also a sign of the larger political Right starting to fray in general way on the remaining social issues, part of a series that had Bush Sr. admitting he wasn’t personally against abortion rights, Dole selling out Gingrich’s McCarthyist agenda, Republican Senators voting not to remove Clinton over a half dozen blowjobs, and Bush Jr appointing black people into his Cabinet.
Gay marriage is the remaining major political issue/object on which the RR has not suffered major self-inflicted wounds yet. It’s evidently the fallback position for its national political ambitions. In (ragingly bitter, as in 1999) overall retreat, as a matter of political course they have to reintensify efforts and, as a matter of maintaining morale, win on something- the Kansas referendum on gay marriage seems to have been the useful coincidence. That will have been the emphasis on Christian radio and right wing talk shows and church email lists this week, even if not very loudly, which had an audience with an inherent fortress mentality desperate at their defeats of the past month. No doubt they pushed the point at church meetings and such.
So, I think the Gallup polling probably essentially correct that there’s a net peaking of anti-marriage support though probably- certainly- they squeezed results to the limits of what their polling permitted with any legitimacy. But the political logic behind the surge says that it’s probably pretty shallow. In a long term sense, it has positive aspects, just as conservative ‘backlash’ surges on issues tend to have when they collapse: the people changing their minds “back” are overcoming their internalized conservative bias and ignorance, which their initial halfhearted benevolence masked and was always in conflict with.
So the silver lining is that this surge will quite certainly collapse, and the net outcome of this Culture War political pattern of semibenign halfheartedness-cruelty/’backlash’-positive toleration is that people who saw a halfhearted and insufficient solution (civil unions) as the best idea will, on fully reconsidering their views, give up their resistance to gay marriage legalization. The dark part of the cloud is that these peakings of unprincipled opposition and resentments can last for months and their rate of decline, while fairly constant once begun, are not predictable in advance.
Finally, as last piece of context, there was a study I saw posted somewhere a few weeks ago and regrettably forgot to bookmark. It was a comprehensive examination of the anti-gay marriage movement literature, websites, legal briefs, and other statements. Their conclusion was that that the movement is at bottom a political projection of blame for the present failure of “family values” in the Bible Belt.
The gloating over this poll has been unsurprising yet also kind of pathetic. I don’t know how these bigots can shrug off any poll that has support for gay rights and then jump up and down when they see a poll that goes their way.
If we are supposed to believe this poll (and since the only “major” publication that has covered it is the Washington Times, I have a hard time believing it), there has been a major shift in anti-gay sentiments in only the past five or six months. I don’t buy that a few court cases would cause that. Most people already have their minds made up.
Many polls want a specific result and they get that result through pointed questions. CNN and Gallup have little use for gays, to put it kindly, and they wanted this type of result. They also split the question up so that people could only choose between supporting marriage OR civil unions. That way ,they have less support for both while they have a big chunk of support for nothing at all.
The problem with opinion polls is that politicians and many in the public believe that they reprsent the true opinion. They actually wind up molding public opinion instead of representing it, because people are too insecure or gullible to trust their own judgment. Instead they say “oh so and so poll says….” And that causes even more hostility towards gays, which is what the people behind this poll probably wanted.
There has been an increase in hostility and violence towards gays, no doubt. Constant media coverage of people who say that gays are the lowest lifeform on the planet will do that. But I just don’t buy that there would be such a huge change in support for the anti-gay amendment in such a short time, and the fact that the only people who are trumpeting this poll are those who desperately want to believe it makes me even more sure of that.
The poll is likely to be a short term spike and nothing more. What I’m more interested in is the result with the younger generations since they’re a good indication of long term trends.