Pollingreport.com reports on three Gallup polls, all in 2003:
CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. July 25-27, 2003. N=1,006 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3. "Do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal?" Poll date Should Should Not No Opinion % % % 7/25-27/03 48 46 6 7/18-20/03 50 44 6 5/5-7/03 60 35 5So the most recent poll shows a majority of Americans think homosexuality should be illegal. Presumably they also think schoolteachers should not engage in sodomy. This is of course not to say that the American public is correct (and the polls differ so much over so short a space of time that I wonder if they are reliable), but they are evidence that my position is the mainstream one, not the "ultraconservative" position some people have called it. It is ultraconservative only if the starting point is an ultraliberal group such as a university.
UPDATE-September 8-9. I misread my own graph above-- by 48 to 46 percent, Americans thinks homosexuality should be legal. That doesn't alter my point, of course, which is that a substantial number of people think it should be illegal. I could have phrased things as "Only a minority of Americans think homosexuality should be legal--which is also true, since it's only 48%-- but the message of the polling data is that opinion is mixed and fluctuating.
That's the nice thing about web-logs-- and footnotes, for that matter. You shouldn't take things on my authority-- if anybody does, which is unlikely-- you should see what data and arguments I have.
Here's what the Gallup news
service has to say (better than the graph I had up yesterday in this spot):
Gallup has asked the question numerous times since then, and at the last asking in the
May 2001 poll, a majority -- for the first time -- agreed with the "legal" perspective.
Fifty-four percent of those interviewed said that homosexual relations should be legal,
42% not legal, with 4% unsure. The percentage saying that homosexual relations should be
legal dropped to as low as 32% in 1986, perhaps due to either the conservative
environment ushered in by the Reagan administration, or the beginning of widespread
publicity surrounding AIDS and its prevalence in the homosexual community.
Gallup first asked about the legality of homosexuality in 1977, with a basic question
worded as follows: "Do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should
or should not be legal?" At that point, Americans were evenly divided on the issue: 43%
said yes, 43% said no and 14% weren’t sure.
So opinion is divided, and has been for many years. It would interesting to see how
opinion breaks down by other variables such as location, though, since I suspect that it
is polarized. Remember the Manhattan woman who said in 1972--"How could Nixon have won
the Presidency? Everybody I know voted for McGovern." Remember, too, though, that
McGovern, a far-left candidate, and Goldwater, a far-right candidate, both facing
centrists with big advertising budgets, each won about 40% of the popular vote--- not a
small minority.
[ permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.09.06b.htm ]
To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.