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Despite a slight 51% majority of Californians supporting marriage equality while 43% oppose, 60% of them do not want to revisit the issue in 2010 says the Los Angeles Times. Just last year 52% passed Prop 8 while 48% opposed it.The findings come from a new Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts & Sciences poll of 1,500 registered voters who were interviewed from Oct. 27 through Nov. 3. It was conducted by two nationally prominent polling firms, the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies.
Views on same-sex marriage were sharply polarized based on political party, with 66% of Democrats thinking it should be legal and 71% of Republicans in opposition. Nonpartisan voters were less enthusiastic than Democrats but still backed it, 59%-34%.This could raise some red flags for groups like Love Honor Cherish and Equality Network who among others are leading the charge to restore marriage equality to California in 2010 and are actively involved in the statewide organizing group Restore Equality 2010. (They were also the lead organizers behind Wednesday's march in remembrance of Prop 8's passage.)
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The survey showed that same-sex marriage continues to reverberate differently along race and generational lines. Just over half of whites backed it, while just under half of African Americans and Latinos did.
All three groups, however, opposed having to vote on it in 2010. (Asians were questioned by the poll and included in the overall sample, but their numbers were statistically too small to isolate.) Young voters continued to be far more supportive of gay marriage rights than their elders.
Among those ages 18-29, 71% said they supported same-sex marriage; among those 65 and older, only 37% favored it. Younger voters were also one of the few groups who backed putting it on the 2010 ballot, which will be dominated by the races for governor and U.S. Senate.
This Sunday, November 8, they will be holding a town hall meeting to discuss the signature gathering campaign to get language on the 2010 ballot to undo Prop 8.
The Facebook Event Page states:
For activists in: Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Century City, Chinatown, Culver City, Fairfax, Hollywood, Koreatown, Marina del Rey, Malibu, Mid-Wilshire, Pacific Palisades, Playa Vista, Santa Monica, Silverlake, Venice Beach, Westwood, West Hollywood, and West L.A.
√ Learn about Restore Equality 2010 and the movement to repeal Proposition 8
√ Help qualify our marriage equality initiative for the ballot by signing up as a volunteer
or Hub Coordinator
√ Get training on how to properly collect signatures
√ Meet and strategize with fellow activists
Funny how the real news in that study - that 51% of Californians support same sex marriage gets lost behind the 'want to wait' message.
ReplyDeleteLet's celebrate that people's hearts and minds are changing!
The straight community wants to tell LGBT people when they can go back to the ballot? Doesn't that seem outrageous?
What about all the LGBT couples who want to get married? Shouldn't their rights come before the public's current boredom with the subject?
Jane
Jane Wishon's comment is right on. I think we have to keep up the pressure. If the voters are tired of the issue, they can just vote for marriage equality and then it will no longer be an issue.
ReplyDeleteI used to be staunchly in the 2010 camp, but no more. Losing the help of committed Obama campaigners seems a pittance compared to how many more young and progressive voters will be likely to vote in the next presidential election.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, I'm for having it on the ballot every single election until people get so sick of it, they'll vote for it just to be rid of it. But I suppose there's not enough money or energy for that.
Closer to heart, I'm all for boycotting the ballot altogether. I'm finding it more humiliating and degrading to have my rights voted on by a tyrannical majority than to have those rights denied in the first place. Win or lose, it's a disgusting process that I'm beginning to think I can no longer support in any way.
jane and zlick may like getting bashed and bruised every november, without much of a fight from the sissy fags, but i, for one, am so sick of the sissies have just one ad approach - the hallmark approach.
ReplyDeletesure, the nice lezzies with a few kids were in ads in ME, but where were the ads showing the pain and anger of a lezzie on the street outside a hospital as her partner lies in a bed alone?
it was long ago time for fags to show how discrimination hurts us in the ads, but no, we either don't show fags, like in CA for prop 8, or it's hallmark lezzies.
in short, the lack of diverse ad approaches is a reflection of the dearth of good ideas from the gay inc leaders.
for all who say keep getting bashed every november until we win, sorry, but 31 electoral bashings and losses is enough for me.
one more point to the 2010 people: show me your statewide network. one year after prop 8, and lots of anger in the streets, summits and mea culpas from kors and all, i can't see a CA network in place. without that network, i don't expect the 2010 folks are gonna come even close to qualifying for the ballot.
ReplyDeleteI am not really interested in the "debate" over 2010, since there is no conceivable way a Prop 8 repeal will be on the ballot in 2010. It is 2012 or later.
ReplyDeleteHere is the best part from the LA Times poll:
"Among those ages 18-29, 71% said they supported same-sex marriage; among those 65 and older, only 37% favored it."
These numbers are comparable to those in Maine. In 20 years, almost everyone in the 65+ group will be dead; the very youngest will be 85 and even their ranks will have thinned dramatically. All of these people will be replaced by Millennials, who are very likely to be just as supportive of us as Gen Y. Gen Y will be middle aged and will be better represented in the electorate and Gen X will be the youngish senior citizens. All supportive of equality.
Absent some dramatic shift in generational attitudes, we will prevail.
If everyone retained the same attitudes as they had in their youth, we would have had world peace as soon as all the kids from the 60's came of age in the 70's. It didn't happen.
ReplyDeleteAttitudes harden along with your arteries, and you can't simply count on youthful attitudes of generosity, love, and empathy to continue wholesale into adulthood for an entire generation.
@Zlick:
ReplyDeleteIt is true that on some issues, attitudes can change. But there is absolutely no evidence of which I am aware that such hardening has occurred with respect to gay rights. The trend line has been very steady on this.
In general, the kind of issue where you will see hardening come with age involves a change in self-interest with age. Drugs, taxes and the draft would be examples. When you are young, you may want to take drugs, you don't care that much about taxes since you don't earn anything, and (in the 1960s) many disliked the draft and thus became anti-war. By the 1980s, those same people worried about their kids taking drugs, didn't want to pay taxes, and no longer cared about the draft, which was abolished in 1973.
None of this has applied to the gay issue over the past 30 years. If you have polling data to the contrary, please cite it.