Marriage Equality Rulings and Public Opinion
I think people don’t spend enough time dwelling on tests of hypotheses that don’t really pan out. So I was interested in this chart from Patrick Egan and Nathaniel Persily seen over at the Monkey Cage looking at how judicial decisions in favor of gay marriage claims impact public opinion on marriage equality:
The answer seems to be . . . not much happening here. If you just look at Vermont, you can tell a story about how judicial ruling in favor of marriage equality lent the cause legitimacy. But if you look at Iowa or Connecticut it seems like a story of a surge in public support for marriage equality leading to judicial action.
The moral of the story, if there is one, is that there’s no real evidence here for any handwringing concerns about backlash. The opinion trend in favor of marriage equality is pretty strongly favorable, and courts should do the right thing.
22 Responses to “Marriage Equality Rulings and Public Opinion”
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August 24th, 2009 at 11:31 am
The three charts that show a meaningful amount of time since the pro-gay-marriage ruling all show a sharp increase in support for gay marriage happening after the ruling.
Both National Review and Mass Equality got it right: legalizing gay marriage allows people to see actual gay married couples walking around, picking out paint colors, pushing strollers, etc., and the reality of living alongside married gay people causes opposition to crumble.
August 24th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Legalizing gay marriage confers legitimacy, and therefore should inrease support for it on average. These charts alone are not sufficient to test this hypothesis, since people are aware of what happens in other states, but an absolute timeline is not provided. Perhaps the uptics in certain states are due to people hearing that gay marriage has been legalized on other states, such as MA?
August 24th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Jim W.’s right. The states aren’t hermetically sealed; people’s opinions probably respond to the national debate at least as much as they do to the way the issue is playing out in their own state. How does Iowa’s uptick correspond to Massachusetts’ decision?
August 24th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Actually, looking at the enormous variation (assuming the dots are individual surveys) you can’t really tell anything from these data. If you can get a 60% difference between two surveys in the same timeframe then it just means the result is incredibly dependent on the question phrasing. Drawing a pretty trend line doesn’t solve that. Garbage in, garbage out.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
My hypothesis would be that there is a strong uptick after legalization but that the effect has a 2-5 year lag while the gays marry up and start introducing their husbands and wives to people in the state.
And the only state for which we have that data is Massachusetts.
August 24th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Perhaps the causal arrow is running the other way? Maybe increasing support produces the ruling. I’d like to see a comparison of these trends to trends in states that haven’t had a ruling (or even a ruling affirming discrimination in marriage law).
August 24th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
“[C]ourts should do the right thing.”
No, Matt no. Courts are not there to do the “right thing”, they are there to do the “law thing”, which is to impartially apply the law to the disputes that come before it.
The fact that liberals cannot distinguish between the two is perhaps the main reason why Americans don’t want liberals on the courts.
August 24th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
I don’t know, there is some evidence that legalizing gay marriage does lead to an increase in support. I think Joe’s right that once people realize that gay marriage doesn’t lead to dogs and cats living together then they become more supportive of it.
Public opinion leading to judicial action is iffier though. It’s not like Iowa has a whole bunch of hippies on their court.
August 24th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Perhaps the causal arrow is running the other way? Maybe increasing support produces the ruling.
That is surely at least part of the explanation. I know there’s research out there on other civil rights issues that basically finds U.S. Supreme Court decisions track pretty closely to popular opinion reaching some “critical mass” on the question right before the Court rules.
August 24th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
The 14th Amendment is law.
August 24th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
@7: In this case, given the Fourteenth Amendment, that’s a pretty much irrelevant concern. The liberal position on this issue IS what the law says – it was just ignored for years because of prejudice against gays.
Removing an outright de jure double standard is not really a constitutional stretch. It’s bending over backwards to preserve tradition against the text of the law that requires the mental acrobatics.
August 24th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Aren’t there still states where sodomy is illegal?
I’d like to see marriage itself reduced to a tradition rather than a state institution. We no longer have a patrilineal system of inheritence.
The responsibility of parents is a separate issue.
August 24th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
[...] Yglesias looks at the same data and comes to this conclusion: “The moral of the story, if there is one, is that there’s no real evidence here for any [...]
August 24th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Re: Aren’t there still states where sodomy is illegal?
No. Lawrence vs Texas in 2003 invalidated general sodomy laws. The laws still stand only in specialized cases involving sex with minors or public sex acts. To be sure a number of states have refused to repeal their now-unenforceable statutes, but nothing new under the sun there. Mississippi did not repeal its (unenforceable) miscegenation ban until a few years ago either.
August 24th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
@7: In this case, given the Fourteenth Amendment, that’s a pretty much irrelevant concern. The liberal position on this issue IS what the law says – it was just ignored for years because of prejudice against gays.
The fourteenth amendment was never intended to make marriage gender neutral. Your argument is like arguing that the fourteenth amendment requires states to give drivers’ licenses to ten-year-olds.
I find the term “marriage equality” to be interesting, as if gives a positive spin on what is mroe accurately referred to as “gender neutral marriage,” which essentially means the destruction of marriages.
There is no such thing as same-sex marriage. The state can pretend that the relationship between two men and teo women is a marriage, but it isn’t, anymore than a dog’s tail is a leg.
August 24th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
That should be “the destruction of marriage,” i.e., the institution, not “the destruction of marriages.”
August 24th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Nor was it intended to ban segregated schools. Nor was the ban on cruel and unusual punishment meant to ban the electric chair as a means of execution.
So?
The Constitution isn’t intended to foresee and delineate every specific circumstance in which one of its provisions applies. That is left for specific courts, as they rule on specific cases.
You’re entitled to define marriage however you’d like. According to the Vatican, the union of two adults who were previously married to others but got divorced isn’t a marriage, either. They’re entitled to their opinion, too. Our government, on the other hand, has an affirmative duty to provide equal protection under the law.
August 24th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
The framers intentions is almost always a lame argument. It’s really gob-smacking to hear people say things like the founders didn’t want Social Security. Yeah, well a society with a life expectancy of 36 didn’t think of retirement much. Do a lot of people want to live according to 18th century values, or what? Marriage is a nearly useless institution, as far as I am concerned. For women, the 18th century marriage was servitude. Historically, in the West, marriage transferred rights over the woman from the father to the husband.
As a woman, I know that having never planned even my own wedding puts me in a minority, but I have never understood the passionate attachment to this license. It seems that single-payer and better contract writing and negotiating skills would be superior to the big leap that makes being a divorce lawyer so lucrative.
August 24th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Re: There is no such thing as same-sex marriage. The state can pretend that the relationship between two men and teo women is a marriage, but it isn’t, anymore than a dog’s tail is a leg.
Glaivester, that’s true, in a Christian, sacramental sense. The union of two divorced people is, in the majority of cases, not a Christian marriage either. Nor is the union of two heterosexuals who choose to remain childless. Nor is the union of people who, for feminist, liberal, or other ideological reasons, are either unable or unwilling to accept the Christian conception of what a marriage is. None of these relationships is necessarily bad or evil, but they aren’t a marriage in the eyes of God.
However, the secular United States Government dignifies and favors all these other situations with the name of marriage, and so I fail to see why they shouldn’t do the same for gay couples. Civil marriage and sacramental marriage are two very separate things. I certainly don’t want religious marriage to be dumbed down in the same way that civil marriage has been, but I also don’t see why Christians should try to inject a Christian understanding of what marriage is into the United States Government, which is simply not a Christian beast and never has been.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Were there really six polls that showed Vermont with 0% support for same-sex marriage, and two showing it with 100% support? Seems like bad data …
August 25th, 2009 at 6:16 am
Re: That should be “the destruction of marriage,” i.e., the institution, not “the destruction of marriages.”
While you may be someone who is impervious to logic I’ll try anyway. It’s impossible to destroy a generality without destroying the particulars that comprise it. As long as particular marriages exist the institution of marriage will exist. And marriage is a human creation, so that therefor (unlike tails and legs) we are free to define it as we please, just as we were free to redefine “voter”to include women and Blacks.
Re: Yeah, well a society with a life expectancy of 36 didn’t think of retirement much.
Pre 20th century life expectancies were skewed down by high childhood mortality. Most people who lived to adulthood did not keel over at 36, but could look forward to the their “three score and ten”.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Whoa.
Didn’t see that coming.