The Majoritarian Difficulty: Same-Sex Marriage Edition
By Good news all around:
Half of all Americans believe that gay men and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which a large majority also said businesses should not be able to deny serving gays for religious reasons.
Fifty percent say the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection gives gays the right to marry, while 41 percent say it does not.
Beyond the constitutional questions, a record-high 59 percent say they support same-sex marriage, while 34 percent are opposed, the widest margin tracked in Post-ABC polling.
The boldfaced part is particularly encouraging; Damon Linker’s concern trolling notwithstanding, using embarrassingly specious “religious freedom” arguments as a pretext to continue the longstanding conservative war on civil rights doesn’t appear to be fooling anybody. But here’s one reason they’re riding this dead Thurmond so hard:
According to a new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, only 41 percent of Americans oppose allowing same-sex couples to marry. But that same 41 percent has a highly skewed perception of where the rest of the country stands: nearly two-thirds of same-sex marriage opponents erroneously think most Americans agree with them. And only two in 10 same-sex marriage opponents realize that the majority of Americans support marriage equality.
Schiavo II: Electric Boogaloo. Only in 2004, I think the media was much more likely to take conservative overestimation of their own support at
face value.