UPDATE: SO this came across my Twitter feed and it didn’t even occur to me to look at the date. This poll came out last year! That being said, it’s there. We’ve been talking about the tipping point a lot the past couple of weeks, and really, it’s an ongoing process. These years, themselves, are the tipping point. So we’re going to have a poll here that looks good, one there where we’re under by a couple of points, and then, in the next couple of years, it’s going to break off in our direction for good. The rest of the post stands.
A new ABC News/Washington Poll has been released was released last year, and something has changed:
Take gay marriage, legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut and now Iowa, with Vermont coming aboard in September. At its low, in 2004, just 32 percent of Americans favored gay marriage, with 62 percent opposed. Now 49 percent support it, vs. 46 percent opposed – the first time in ABC/Post polls that supporters have outnumbered opponents.
More than half, moreover – 53 percent – say a gay marriage held legally in another state should be recognized as legal in their own state.
The surprise is that the shift has occurred across ideological groups. While conservatives are least apt to favor gay marriage, they’ve gone from 10 percent support in 2004 to 19 percent in 2006 and 30 percent now – overall a 20-point, threefold increase, alongside a 13-point gain among liberals and 14 points among moderates. (Politically, support for gay marriage has risen sharply among Democrats and independents alike, while far more slightly among Republicans.)
The tide has turned. There is no reasonable indication that these numbers won’t continue to rise and rise. Maggie Gallagher and everyone who thinks like her has lost. Last night, Argentina welcomed marriage equality. Today, a DC Court of Appeals told Harry Jackson and Tony Perkins to shove off in their quest to put minority rights up to a vote. And now we have our first poll with a majority of Americans expressing support for full marriage equality for LGBT citizens. (The bigots are having a really bad day!)
The fight, of course, is not over. The professional anti-gay set will get more extreme in their rhetoric over the coming years, and there’s a possibility that they’ll incite violence from the lowest common denominators of our society. But the war is, essentially, won. Now we just have to stay engaged as it plays out to its conclusion. The crazy thing is that it’ll be done without one fundamentalist losing her rights to be as bigoted as she wants.
(h/t David Badash)
