The frequency of same-sex couples and opinions on same-sex marriage: how to reconcile the different patterns?

As I noted a couple days ago, gay marriage has had the largest recent increases in popularity in liberal states where the general population was already pro-gay.

But if you count the number of same-sex couples, you see something different, with the fastest increases in conservative areas of the country. Gary Gates writes:

You discussed the issue of social networks and knowing gay people as a possible explanation. You might want to look at some of the work of Greg Herek (a psychologist at UC-Davis) who is now saying that “knowing” someone is becoming a much less salient predictor of support for gay rights. Since nearly everyone now knows a gay person, he claims that the issue today is more whether or not you have a closer personal relationship with a gay person.

Your findings were also intriguing to me when comparing them to some of the work I [Gates] have done on the enumeration of same-sex couples in the US Census and the American Community Survey. This paper looks at changes in the counts over time.

I [Gates] find the largest changes (which I interpret as increased visibility of same-sex couples) in the most conservative parts of the country.

I looked at Gates’s report and it looks like good stuff. It would definitely be a good idea to reconcile his findings of the largest increases in conservative parts of the country, with Lax and Phillips’s findings that public opinion on gay marriage has changed fastest in liberal states.

2 thoughts on “The frequency of same-sex couples and opinions on same-sex marriage: how to reconcile the different patterns?

  1. I wouldn't underestimate the effect of seeing or knowing actually married gay couples on public opinion. From my experience as a gay rights organizer, it's quite common for people to be abstractly opposed to gay marriage ("marriage is between a man and a woman") yet, when confronted with actual gay couples, believe (or be convincable) that they should be allowed to marry.

    I think that has a lot to do with the tremendous upsurge in pro-gay-marriage opinion in 2004, when the actual marriages began. Even for those who didn't know a couple personally, the press coverage of specific couples did a lot to humanize the issue, I think. (Which, if it's right, bears heavily on the debate about whether issuing the marriage licenses was effective civil disobedience. I think it was uncontrovertibly crucial in swaying public opinion, but many — particularly Democratic politicians — continue to disagree.)

    That also means that the graphs you posted earlier, with a strong relationship between public opinion and gay marriage policy, may partially reflect causation going in the opposite direction from what you were surmising.

    Thanks for posting all these graphs; they're fascinating.

Comments are closed.