The Vanishing Gay Marriage Poll
Blogs for Bush
Back on April 3, we reported on a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll which showed opposition to gay marriage at an all time high. An alert reader at the time pointed out that he couldn't find reference to the poll anywhere except on the Washington Times report I had linked to; a search done by myself over at CNN and USA Toda also turned up no mentions of the poll. Finally, after searching hither and yon around the web, I found the poll also reported at Polling Report. Still, it appeared that this poll, which showed 68% of the polling respondents opposed, had dropped into a black hole.
Daly Thoughts has some interesting ideas on why this might be; being a bit generous, he points out that it might be that since the poll results are outside the normal results on gay marriage, the poll might have been non-reported as an inaccurate "outlier". I'm not so sure. If you check over at Polling Report, you'll see a total of 11 polls on the subject since 1996 and the average of these shows 62% opposed. This would still place the 68% opposed in the most recent poll outside the normal "margin of error", but given that gay marriage has heavily been in the news this past year it stands to reason there might have been significant movement on the issue.
What I've seen, greatly to my astonishment, has been a growing and hardening of opposition to gay marriage over the past few years. I was one of those conservatives who were resigned to gay marriage; I just didn't see how we could fight effectively against it when any efforts so mounted would invariably be condemned as "homophobic" bigotry. It seems to me, however, that the people have taken a hand; for whatever reason, the people just don't want to accord the union of same-sex couples the status of marriage; and they are unafraid to speak and vote their minds on the subject.
Given this I take a much less generous position on why the poll wasn't reported: it wasn't reported because it didn't help the MSM and the left in its earnest desire that gay marriage become the law of the land. This is just the rankest example of media bias we've seen in a while. Had the poll come out with, say, 51% opposed (thus showing a sharp drop in opposition) it would have been all over the news...but because it showed growing opposition, it became non-news.
Gay marriage is one of the killer issues of the next few years. As the more liberal northeastern States move to make gay marriage more and more a reality (and out-of-control California States judges diligently work to undo the will of the people of California on the issue) we'll start to reach crunch time. Some States will have gay marriage, most will not and by 2008 probably about 30 States will have written anti-gay marriage provisions into their State constitutions. Then will come the inevitible Supreme Court case - a decision will have to be made and it will either be made by 9 unelected Supreme Court justices, or it will be made (as the legal trend comes clear) by the people deciding to pre-emptively amend the US Constitution to ban gay marriage.
Mark my words; gay marriage will not become legal under federal law in the United States. If a Supreme Court case does manage to make it so, the amending process will happen so fast that the ink wont even dry on the first gay marriage license before the ruling is overturned by action of the people. I really can't put my finger on it; but someone recently pointed out that in the matter of gay marriage, the people have decided that there is a limit to the amount of hectoring they'll take from guilt-tripping gay rights activists. The backlash isn't a possibility; it is a current reality and anyone who tries to stand athwart a ban on gay marriage had better get used to losing, and losing badly, in the political arena.
Posted by Mark Noonan
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