Search results for support gay marriage

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

It can take a while to find the right word.  But a mot juste may be crucial for framing a political issue. If you like the idea of men being able to marry men, and women women, what should you call the new laws that would allow that?

The trouble with “gay marriage” and even “same-sex marriage” is that these terms suggest – especially to conservatives – some kind of special treatment for the minority.  It’s as though gays are getting a marriage law just for them.

At last, the gay marriage forces seem to have come up with a term that invokes not special treatment but a widely-held American value that’s for everyone – equality.  A bill in  New Jersey has been in the news this week, mostly because Gov. Christie says he will veto it.  The bill is a “marriage equality” law.

The governor is in a bit of a squeeze.  As a Republican with ambitions beyond New Jersey’s borders, he can’t very well be for gay marriage.  But if his opponents can frame the matter their way, he now has to come out against equality.  Which is why the governor continues to refer to the issue as “same-sex marriage.”*

It’s like “abortion rights” or even “women’s rights.” A phrase like that might rally women to your cause, but if you want broader support, you need a flag that every American can salute.  I’m not familiar with the history of abortion rights so I don’t know how it happened, but those who want to keep abortion legal have managed to frame the issue as one of freedom to choose.   They have been so successful that the media routinely refer to their side as “pro-choice.”   To oppose them is to oppose both freedom and individual choice, principles which occupy a high place in the pantheon of American values.

It’s not clear that the “marriage equality” movement has been similarly successful, at least not yet.  I did a quick Lexis-Nexis search sampling the last week of the months January and July going back to 2007.  I looked for three terms: “same-sex marriage,” “gay marriage,” and “marriage equality.”

The general trend for all three is upwards as more legislatures consider bills, with big jumps when a vote becomes big news – that blip in July 2011 is the New York State vote.  But the graph can’t quite show how “marriage equality” has risen from obscurity.  That first data point, July 2007, is a 4.  Four mentions of “marriage equality” while the other terms had 25 and 50 times that many.  As of last week, “gay” and “same sex” still outnumber “equality,” but the score is not nearly so lopsided.

Here is a graph of the ratio of “equality” to each of the other two terms.  From nearly 1 : 20 (one “marriage equality” for every 20 “gay marriages”) the ratio has increased to 1 : 3 and even higher when the discussion gets active.

If the movement is successful, that upward trend should continue.  When you hear Fox News referring to “marriage equality laws,” you’ll know it’s game over.

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* Christie is usually politically adept, but he’s stumbling on this one.  He referred to a gay legislator as “numb nuts” (literally, that might not necessarily be a liability for a politician caught in a squeeze).   Christie also said that he’s vetoing the bill so that the matter can be put on the ballot as a referendum – you know, like what should have happened with civil rights in the South.  

I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.

Several critics, including Numb Nuts, responded that, yes, Southern whites would have been happy to have civil rights left up to the majority.  African Americans not so much.  (If you’re looking for an illustration of Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” the post-Reconstruction South might be a good place to start.)  The analogy is obvious – race : 1962 :: sexual orientation : 2012 – even if it was not the message the governor intended.

Yesterday a federal circuit appeals court upheld an earlier ruling by a lower court that Prop 8, the law banning same-sex marriage in California, was unconstitutional (the law was passed as a ballot measure in 2008). According to the court’s ruling, Prop 8 “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.” You can read the full ruling here.

The ruling did not address whether any ban on same-sex marriage was inherently unconstitutional; instead, it focused on the fact that same-sex marriage had been (at least briefly) legal in California, and Prop 8 was designed to specifically take away a recognized status that was in existence at the time it passed.

After the ruling, Talking Points Memo posted a map showing the current legal status of same-sex marriage throughout the U.S.:

Does anyone know what’s going on with New Mexico?

UPDATE: Reader Anonymous Bosch explains, “Gay marriage is de facto illegal in New Mexico, since licenses won’t be granted to gay couples. There hasn’t been enough legislative support for either bans or civil unions…”

Since its release in November, Get Up!’s commercial supporting gay marriage in Australia has garnered substantial social media interest (over four million views on Youtube). The U.S. LGBT news magazine The Advocate called it “possibly the most beautiful ad for marriage equality we’ve seen” (source). Take a look:

From a sociological point of view, what is interesting about this ad is how it avoids the powerful, but charged language of equality and rights. Supporters of same-sex marriage typically frame their cause in terms of non-discrimination (“all people are equal”), non-interference or privacy (“how is my gay marriage affecting yours?”) or in terms of freedom of speech (“I should marry who I want”). See images of posters using this frame here and here.

Rights language such as this, however, comes with the potential of conflicts and trade-offs. Accordingly, opponents of same-sex marriage have often capitalized on this in their responses. This poster, for instance, expresses a fear or mockery of assertive, unbridled individualism. Posters with this frame here.

 This “Yes to Proposition 8” video is another good example. In it one woman claims that, if gay marriage is legal, her religious identity will be subject to discrimination and her freedom to speech will be contested.

The language used by the marriage equality movement, then, enables its opponents to re-frame their responses in the same type of language.

This is why the Get Up! commercial is a game changer. Instead of using “rights talk,” it keeps both words and slogans to a minimum. It uses visuals to embed the couple in a network of family and friends.  At the end, for example, the camera steps back to show not just the couple but a wider network of people who happily witness a marriage proposal. This approach implicates the happiness of not just two individuals, but a community.  The message is that gay marriage is not just about individual rights, but about collective celebration and social recognition.

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Ridhi Kashyap is a researcher in the Migration Group at the Institute for Empirical and Applied Sociology in Bremen, Germany. She studied interdisciplinary social sciences at Harvard University, and was a human rights fellow there after graduating in 2010. She is actively interested in human rights, particularly as they implicate issues of gender, migration, and development.

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Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Yesterday I posted some videos from a story Anderson Cooper did about so-called “sissy boy” therapy, meant to train boys not to act in gender non-conformist ways and, thus, to keep them from being gay (I have now updated the original post with the final segment from the series). The videos provide a horrifying look into the damage that can be done when children are brutally punished and criticized for any signs that adults interpret as evidence of homosexuality.

This type of therapy is still available, and some of the researchers Cooper discusses continue to have lucrative careers assuring parents they have the key to preventing, or eliminating, gayness in their kids. But that said, it’s also clear the cultural attitudes about gays and lesbians have shifted greatly, both within the psychiatric community (the APA no longer defines homosexuality as a mental disorder and does not advocate therapies meant to “cure” gays and lesbians) and among the general public.

For instance, Peter N. sent in a link to a set of graphs by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life illustrating the major changes in attitudes toward gay marriage. Overall support for same-sex marriage has gone up significantly over the last few decades (with polls increasingly showing more people favoring it than opposing it and a few even showing a slim majority of respondents supporting same-sex marriage rights). Attitudes toward same-sex marriage vary widely by age; among those born since 1981, support is quite high:

Not surprisingly, support also varies by religious affiliation:

The Pew Forum also has graphs of differences by political affiliation, etc.

We can also see this change in some instances of corporate marketing that include gays and lesbians or discuss gay rights — something that would have been unthinkable for mainstream corporations to do openly until fairly recently for fear of public backlash. David F. sent in Google Chrome’s contribution to the “It Gets Better” series of videos:

Similarly, Megan B. was struck by this Sealy mattress ad, which, though not unambiguous, she thought would be interpreted by many viewers as implying support for same-sex couples:

Finally, Jacob G.sent in a segment from the ABC News “What Would You Do?” series, in which a waitress openly harasses a lesbian couple to see how other customers will react, and found that about half of onlookers actively intervened:

Nate Silver, at Five Thirty Eight, has a new post up about the increasing support for same-sex marriage in the U.S. In the past few months, four polls Silver deems credible have found, for the first time, more than half of Americans supporting legalizing same-sex marriage. Here’s a graph Silver created showing the results of polls on the topic over time (an update of his earlier graph):

Of course, as Silver points out, results of public opinion polls don’t necessarily translate into immediate changes in politicians’ positions. Support for same-sex marriage is surely unevenly distributed, meaning some politicians will still find opposition to it to be a winning electoral strategy in their districts. Or they may count on the fact that many voters may support same-sex marriage but not view a candidate’s position on this issue as a deal-breaker. And, of course, sometimes politicians take a position and stick to it regardless of opinion polls.

That said, as with public opinion about gays and lesbians serving in the military, the trend line is clear, and it seems likely that fewer politicians will see opposition to same-sex marriage as a sure-fire winning strategy, as many have in the past.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight posted this graph that shows changes in attitudes toward same-sex marriage over time (each dot represents a poll Silver considers reliable). As he points out, there seems to be an acceleration in positive attitudes toward same-sex marriage:

CNN just conducted the first poll showing that a majority of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal. That’s just one poll, and we’ll need to see more data, obviously. But we can clearly see that an increasing number of polls show the % favoring same-sex marriage at or above 45%. A regression of all the polls shows a 4 percentage point increase in the last 16 months alone. If this trend continues, we should be nearing the point where differences in support for and opposition to same-sex marriage would fall within the margin of error.

Silver suggests that activism among gay and lesbian rights groups, including a specific push for recognition of same-sex marriages, has led to more acceptance:

Something to bear in mind is that it’s only been fairly recently that gay rights groups — and other liberals and libertarians — shifted toward a strategy of explicitly calling for full equity in marriage rights, rather than finding civil unions to be an acceptable compromise…it seems that, in general, “having the debate” is helpful to the gay marriage cause…

Of course, presuming this trend continues and we soon have a majority (even if not an overwhelming one) of Americans supporting legalization of same-sex marriage, that does not necessarily translate into legalization. Acceptance of same-sex marriage is surely unevenly distributed across the U.S. If legalization is left to the states, we can assume some will be much more likely to accept same-sex marriages than others, continuing the patchwork system we have now where gays and lesbians may find themselves married in one state but unmarried if they go on vacation to a neighboring one. National legislation to legalize same-sex marriage would be strongly opposed by a number of legislators from districts where acceptance is below the national average; I’m guessing that even many Democrats, who are usually depicted as more friendly to gay and lesbian rights than Republicans, would not go so far as to vote to legalize gay marriage in the near future. During the campaign, Obama and Biden clearly stated that they supported civil unions but not marriage for same-sex couples.

On the other hand, the federal judicial system could take this out of the hands of Congress and the Senate, or individual states; same-sex marriage could be legalized whether or not a majority of Americans supported it. But short of that, while changes in public attitudes toward same-sex marriage certainly present an encouraging picture for supporters, I think legislative action to actually legalize it is likely to lag significantly behind overall public acceptance.

Michael Kimmel forwarded me a blog post at Gallup updating their data on acceptance of homosexuality in the U.S.  In 2009, “morally acceptable” eeked out a win over “morally wrong” and, in 2010, it took a resounding lead:

Who is driving this increase in acceptance of homosexuality?  Other than young people, that is, and the move to the words “gay” and “lesbian.”

Gallup offers some really interesting answers to that question.

First, men are driving it.  Women are only marginally more supportive of homosexuality today compared to 2006.  But men, especially young men, but older men too, are significantly more supportive.  A full 14% of men have changed their mind in the last four years!  Women started out more supportive than men, but men have caught up.

Second, while members of all political parties and religions reported show increases in their level of acceptance of gays and lesbians, it is the politically moderate that are really pushing the percentages up.  Eleven percent of independents and 14% of moderates changed their mind about homosexuality between 2006 and 2010.  They are now as likely as democrats to endorse homosexuality (but still fall behind self-described liberals).  One in 20 Republicans and conservatives also changed their mind, though in overall acceptance rate they still fall far behind everyone else.

Finally, among religiously-affiliated Americans, Catholics were the most likely to change their mind to favor homosexuality.  They are as likely as political Democrats to support gays and lesbians.  Religious non-Christians and the non-religious, however, kick everybody’s asses with 84% and 85% of them saying that gay and lesbian relations are “morally acceptable.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Pew research foundation recently released some data comparing generational cohorts.  Data on the acceptance of interracial dating shows that acceptance is increasing among all groups and is higher for each successive cohort:

C.N. Lee, at Asian Nation, interprets:

I am also not surprised that the Millennials are the most supportive of interracial dating, as the graph illustrates. However, in looking at the graph, it shows that somewhere around 2007, the approval rates for interracial dating actually declined slightly for Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the Millennials. Further, at this point, we do not yet know whether the approval rate for interracial dating will continue to decline, or whether it will rebound and continue its upward trajectory.

See also our post on rates of support for gay marriage by age.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.