When it comes to polls about same-sex marriage, it's all about how you ask the question. A new national poll by Lawrence Research found that 64 percent of Americans feel that marriage should only be between one man and one woman. Thirty-three percent feel marriage should be redefined to include any two people.
... Maggie Gallagher, the president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy and the former president of the National Organization for Marriage, thinks Lawrence's poll results match the results at the ballot box when the question is put to voters. "People are becoming increasingly sensitive to not wanting to be perceived as hostile to gay people and that is affecting the polling," Gallagher said. She said this change has a lot to do with what she perceives as an enormous change in gay marriage advocates' rhetoric following the passage of Proposition 8. "In the past they acknowledged that not everyone who opposes gay marriage is a bigot or a hater or a discriminator. But the main message in the press now is that if you simply don't believe in gay marriage, that in itself, is enough to demonstrate that you have bigotry or animus," Gallagher said. "And people are becoming reluctant to tell pollsters what they really believe unless they have a signal from the pollster that it is safe to do so."
One thing in Lawrence's poll that may have made religious people feel "safe" was he was connecting the issue to religious questions.
New Poll: 64% Don't Support SSM
October 14, 2011 at 12:00 pm
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