US Changes in Opinion Regarding Gays.

Great Debates
1

Recently, and for the first time in US history, a majority of Americans support the legalization of gay marriage. (I don’t have too many cites for this. Wikipedia has an article on it, but I didn’t bother to read it thru.)

My question: What caused such a sudden and abrupt shift? Why, just 10 years ago, most Americans thought homosexuality was immoral–and should be illegal (according to a survey I read once in comm. college)!

Also, does the fact our population has expanded with more immigrants have anything to do with this shift? I know when I was still a kid, in the late 70s or early 80s, McDonald’s had a commercial. “200 million people, no two are quite the same, etc.” Now, our country has expanded to 300 million. That obviously wasn’t just caused by the birth rate. (And if I may inject my personal opinion, I am glad if this is the reason. WASP’s have had a strangle hold on the US for far too long.)

Well, what is the reason:)?

2

Ten years of old conservatives dying for one thing, and kids without the old attitudes growing old enough to be polled for another.

3

I really do credit tv shows like Ellen and Will & Grace with changing popular public opinion. And while the vitriol of the opposition reached Armageddon proportions they’ve been able to produce fuck all evidence that it will adversely affect society in any way. It’s just easier to not care about other peoples sex lives and once the ‘ick’ washes away everyone is just happier to go about their lives and let everyone else do the same.

4

Which is no different than any other 10 years of history, something socially in America drastically changed.

5

I suspect that immigration is not the impetus behind that change. A large portion of our immigrants are from cultures that are actually more socially conservative than the rest of the U.S.

I would guess that a more likely cause would be post-2004 rebound along with a snowball effect.

In 2004, the Republican party pushed a very strong anti-gay and anti-SSM platform, including numerous referenda in the states. The active campaigns were generally successful in passing anti-SSM legislation. However, several states since that time have continued to move in the pro-SSM direction. There may have been some backlash from those efforts. (For example, the Ohio law was broad enough to penalize siblings and co-habitating elderly, and has earned the ire of people who thought they were just voting to keep gays in their place.) As the various states that have passed SSM or civil union legislation have not imploded or turned into caricatures of The Castro, more people who did not initially have strong feelings on the topic began wondering what all the hoopla was about.

The snowball effect comes into play as more gay people come out of the closet, meaning that more people know actual gay people, (and know that they are gay), and realize that they are just people, not perverted monsters. That encourages other gay people to come ut in an expanding circle. Behind that first wave of attitude changes is the next change in viewpoint that asks, “if it is OK for my neighbor to be gay, why not let him or her suffer the same pangs of marriage that I have to go through?”. And that, too, snowballs, with an increasing number of people changing their attitudes on that topic leading even more people to also change their views.
It probably does not hurt that a number of staunchly Right wing spokespersons have publicly supported the change. I would be interested to see how many factory workers modified their views when Dick Cheney announced his support for his daughter to marry a woman.

The snowball effect is most noticeable among the young, which is the demographic that keeps feeding into the electorate and brings with it far fewer members who have the age-old feelings of tabu against homosexuality.

6

It is different simply because anti-homosexual sentiments are strongly correlated with age. 10 years of the old dying and young growing up means 10 years of homophobes dying and largely not being replaced.

I also agree with tomndebb that there appears to have been a snowball effect; some critical threshold was reached and support started rapidly feeding upon itself.

7

Here are some numbers on the shifting views:

Note that from 2009 to 2012, support from our largest immigrant group, Hispanics, actually fell 4%.

8

Ten years ago, the Republicans decided to make gay marriage a “wedge issue” for the 2004 election. They basically promoted it into a major controversy.

9

Close. The trends have been pretty linear – it’s not a question of everybody waking up and waving rainbow flags. It only seems sudden because after the 50% threshold was passed in March 2011, Democratic politicians recognized that they had to evolve and soon. And Republicans realized that they wouldn’t get as much traction out of bigotry as they used to.

Chart here: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/chart-day-gay-marriage-goes-mainstream

Same chart from Nate Silver: Gay Marriage Opponents Now in Minority - The New York Times
Nate Silver: But this does put Republicans in a tricky position. Their traditional position on gay marriage is becoming less popular. But to the extent they disengage from the issue, they may lose even more ground. One way to read the trends of the past few years is that we have passed an inflection point wherein it is no longer politically advantageous for candidates to oppose same-sex marriage, which in turn softens opposition to it among the general public, creating a sort of feedback loop and accelerating the trend. Nate Silver 2013 updated chart and discussion: How Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage Is Changing, and What It Means - The New York Times “In the past, we have sometimes considered the possibility that support for same-sex marriage is increasing at a faster rate than before. The data seems to suggest, however, that the increase in support has been reasonably steady since about 2004.”

ETA: IIRC, an astonishing 28% report that they’ve changed their minds on gay marriage. Pew poll. <b>Poll: </b>Acceptance of same-sex marriage on the rise

10

There’s been no sudden and abrupt shift. People’s attitude have gradually changed in my lifetime, since the '50s, and there have been many steps along the way . . . with the issue of same-sex marriage being merely the latest. Obviously, there’s no single source for the growing acceptance; it comes from quite a few directions. But I believe the biggest impetus has come from people coming out . . . coming from an inner evolution, leading to an outer one. The more openly gay people around, the more people understand that we’re just like them. This has huge ramifications, as people discover that they have a gay family member or coworker or friend or clergy person or favorite entertainer . . . or themselves.

I remember a time when there was no such thing as being openly-gay (I’ve never heard of anyone coming out before I did, in 1963). And most people would say they never met a “homosexual.” But one by one, fewer people could honestly say that.

11

I’m reminds of this amusing cartoon I recently ran across.

12

IIRC, ten years ago most Americans were fine with “let gay couples get official recognition of their civil union for results identical to marriage, whether you call it a marriage or not”; a decade later, Americans were still okay with granting those same rights, but had gradually approved of calling it “marriage”.

I welcome the change, but it honestly doesn’t strike me as a terribly profound shift; IMHO, the profound shift was much earlier, back when “let gay couples get official recognition of their civil union for identical results, whether you call it a marriage or not” went from being a minority position to being the majority one.

13

I think it was because homosexuals decided to risk being out. I’m not saying they didn’t get harshly treated when they dared it, plenty did, and it still happens of course. But once people had a chance to see the reality - that they are just regular people with a different sexual orientation I think things began to change.

Ultimately people’s opinion changed because they knew someone who was gay, who was a good person and deserved a life free of persecution and bigotry.

Regardless of religious influence, (whether waxing or waning, whatever flavour), most people’s deepest beliefs seem to involve some measure of ‘live and let live’ along with a healthy dose of ‘judge not lest you be judged’, thrown in.

In times of less openness people would discover, way late, that their ‘friend’ was ‘that way’. How would it make you feel about all the homophobic things/jokes you’d made? How would you feel about yourself if someone close to you felt you couldn’t be trusted to know this about them?

Things changed for the same reason interracial marriages stopped being illegal, segregation was ended, and beating your wife/children became a crime - because we evolved, our consciousness was raised as to the unfairness and cruelty of such things.

Just because something traditionally ‘always was’ is such a silly argument, for this very reason.

If a vast majority of people feel it’s time to shift this, then it’s time, no matter how much it sucks to be in the minority, holding fast to the more traditional view. When women sought voting rights, black Americans sought equal rights, etc, the traditionalists with the more conservative view always swore that these things would surely produce the downfall of society, as we know it. Fortunately these lame arguments are recognized as such today because, of course, they were wrong then as well.

Gay marriage only affects you if you are gay, all attempts to assert otherwise are nonsense. If Kim Kardashian’s fake profit seeking marriage for TV ratings and fame doesn’t diminish traditional marriage, I’m not seeing the threat from Adam and Steve getting married.

I do have empathy for people who were once but a tree in a thick heavy forest of others, on this issue, and now suddenly find themselves a single tree on a vast open plain. That’s gotta suck, to be sure.

14

I think the internet deserves some of the credit. Thanks to the internet—the SDMB, for example—I “know” a lot more gay people than I would otherwise.

15

What amazes me is the noticeable shift in the CPAPOF* data. I don’t mean the trivial “change your profile pic to look like an equals sign” thing, although that did reveal a surprisingly large amount of support. No, I mean that the hardcore conservatives amongst my Friend cohort (mostly relatives I can’t unfriend) have suddenly gone all “I don’t understand why liberals are making such a big fuss over gay marriage. It’s a non-issue! Shouldn’t we be talking about guns instead?” which suggests that they’ve seen the writing on the wall and are busily pretending that they were okay with it all along.

*Crap People Are Posting On Facebook

16

You have to be kidding. You think most people were for SSM before it became an issue? The GOP didn’t make it an issue-- it became an issue when the MA Supreme Court legalized SSM in 2004.

The GOP didn’t have to promote a controversy. It was one from the git-go. Now, they certainly exploited it, but it was already there.

I agree with those who say that TV had a lot do with it, and also people coming out so that more and more people knew someone who was gay.

17

Why focus on the Republicans? Instead look to the Democrats. 20 years ago, the Democratic leadership had no interest in legalizing marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Most liberal opinion-makers didn’t either. Most of the people who now insist that opposition to gay marriage is bigotry and hatred were, in fact, opposed to gay marriage in the past, if they were old enough to have an opinion a generation ago. In the decade or so just gone by, those same people have made gay marriage their #1 issue, and they’ve been able to produce changes as a result.

By contrast, the issues which those people have chosen to ignore, such as reducing carbon emissions or stopping American jobs from going overseas, have gone nowhere.

18

I think this is it, but I have my own opinion about another mechanism for how it works. Years ago, when people would see two gays together, it would often get a reaction of revulsion, because people would then imagine the kinds of sexual things that these two people will do.

But the thing is, we see straight couples all the time whom we would not want to picture having sex together, and no one has that reaction because being straight is so common that you just see them as two people.

So now that being out and gay is much more common, even people who have a disgusted reaction to the idea of gay sex aren’t bothered, because they no longer automatically jump to picturing what those people do in the bedroom.

19

There’s a difference between not addressing it positively and addressing it negatively. The 2004 RNC platform specifically went after it.
for example, in instances where judges are abusing their power
by banning the use of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance or prohibiting depictions of the Ten Commandments, and potential actions invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Or go back 21 years ago where the RNC said:
Republicans oppose and resist the efforts of the Democrat Party to redefine the traditional American family.
Compared to the Dems in 2004:*We support full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and seek equal responsibilities, benefits, and protections for these families. In our country, marriage has been defined at the state level for 200 years, and we believe it should continue to be defined there. We repudiate President Bush’s divisive effort to politicize the Constitution *

[quote=“ITR_champion, post:17, topic:656573”]

Or 21 years ago:
provide civil rights protection for gay men and lesbians and an end to Defense Department discrimination;

Random hijack there.

20

And almost immediately after post #15, too. :smiley: