April 13, 2004

Polling Marriage Convictions - Americans polled on marriage in society, same-sex marriage, and civil unions.
posted by f8xmulder 20 years ago
  • The Pew Forum did a similar study a while back.
  • The numbers differ quite a bit in the two. I'm sure some of that's margin of error, but maybe six months has changed some minds. Not sure, though.
  • These gut issues heat up with media exposure and polling methods vary. Many people hate answering pollsters questions. I think a lot of that has to do with the scourge of telemarketing scams dressed up as polls. That leads to a self-selecting pool whose answers may not be representative.
  • The polling methods used in this survey are certainly open to question. 800 respondents doesn't seem like a very big sample, and I'd have thought the margin of error could be considerably more than 3.5%. Also, the proposition that "traditional marriage between a man and a woman should be protected because it is a cornerstone of our society" is a loaded one, because it implies that the debate over gay marriage is essentially about "protecting" traditional marriage. (Even so, I'm intrigued to observe that 10% of people "strongly disagreed" with the proposition.) But let's say for the sake of argument that the survey is generally accurate, and that the majority of the population is strongly opposed to same-sex marriage. What then? Personally I don't see any moral or practical objection to same-sex marriage, but I do believe that in a democracy, law and public opinion should be broadly in alignment with each other. So I am caught in a dilemma. Can somebody help me out of it?
  • Why does the HSLDA care? They seem (based on a superficial skim) fairly focused on homeschooling-relevant issues.
  • Because, goetter, while a chunk of the home schooling movement is people wanting a better education for their kids, or forced to by distance from schools, a very large driver in modern home scholing in the US is the group of parents who wish to reclaim their children from the Godless Communism that is the eeeeevil public school system. So it's quite possible the HSLDA are more closely aligned, politically speaking, with Pat Roberson than Middle America (tm).
  • That's certainly the case for these folks. Still doesn't explain why they'd be wasting their money on a same-sex union opinion poll. Unless.... (If they want to take their children back from governmental indoctrination, fine with me. Fortunately, they're not the only alternative.)