America Shifts Away from Homosexual Marriage Agenda
Email This Post
- 
Print This Post
- 
Only hours after the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, a voter approved constitutional ban on homosexual marriage, two prominent lawyers have filed a federal lawsuit Homosexual marriage advocates lament the filing calling it premature. There have been many demonstrations, mostly against the Supreme Court’s decision, and so far they have been peaceful exceptm for vulgar shouts on both sides.
Advocate and adversaries agree on one thing — that 2012 will be a better chance to reverse the ban at the ballot box. The issue of homosexual marriage still trails in California and nationwide - the gap is narrower in California.
A new nationwide USA Today/Gallup poll shows that 57 percent of Americans oppose legalizing same-sex marriage while 40 percent are in favor.
The poll results reflect the highest opposition to the controversial issue since 2005, when a similar survey produced a 59-37 percent margin against same-sex marriage.
In 2008, a Gallup poll showed 56 percent of those surveyed were in opposition to gay marriage while 40 percent supported it; and in 2007, the numbers were 53 percent in opposition to 46 percent in support.
The new poll shows nearly half of Americans (48 percent) believe allowing two people of the same sex to marry will “change our society for the worse,” while only 13 percent say it will “change society for the better.” Thirty-six percent of those surveyed said it would have no effect at all.
“While Americans have become increasingly likely to believe that the law should not discriminate against gay individuals and gay couples, the public still seems reluctant at this point to extend those protections to the institution of marriage,” Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones said.
“Public support for gay marriage appears to have stalled in the last two years, even as the gay marriage movement has scored a number of legal and legislative victories at the state level in the past year,” he added.
Gallup found that 75 percent of self-describing liberals support legalizing gay marriage, while only 19 percent of self-describing conservatives support it. Gallup also found that “younger Americans have typically been more supportive of same sex marriage than older Americans.”
“A majority of 18- to 29-year-olds think gay or lesbian couples should be allowed to legally marry, while support reaches only as high as 40 percent among the three older age groups,” Gallup reports.
A Quinnipiac survey conducted last month produced similar results. When asked if they would oppose a law in their state that would allow same-sex couples to get married, 55 percent said they would while 38 percent said they would not.
Further results from the Gallup poll show:
- Sixty-nine percent of Americans are in favor of military service by openly gay men and lesbians, an increase from a 1993 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that showed only 43 percent in favor of allowing gays to serve in the military.
- Sixty-seven percent say gay and lesbian domestic partners should have access to health insurance and other employee benefits.
- Seventy-three percent believe gay and lesbian domestic partners should have inheritance rights.
- Twenty-eight percent believe that gays or lesbians should not be hired as elementary school teachers.
- Sixty-nine percent believe gays or lesbians should be allowed to teach children.
- Fifty-four percent support adoption rights for gay couples, an increase from Newsweek polls conducted in 2002 (46 percent) and 2004 (45 percent).
Same-sex marriages are legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, and Iowa, and will be legal in Vermont in September.
Comment by Joker on 30 May 2009:
I’ve pointed out in several posts, mostly on Deb’s blog, that Civil Union is the answer here. They get all the legal and financial rights and protections of traditional marriage couples under a different name.
They don’t want to admit it, but they are different, and what they want is different. Common sense dictates that it should therefore be called something different, and when you really get down to it, what is so wrong about that?
They say that marriage is marriage, but it isn’t. Marriage is one man and one woman.
Just like killing is not killing. There is murder by degrees, and there is manslaughter, both voluntary and involuntary. There is vehicular homicide. There is suicide.
Things have different names and titles for obvious reasons, to separate and identify so we can tell what is what. If we change marriage from one man and one woman to one man and one woman and one man and one man and one woman and one woman, it’s not marriage anymore.
So what do we do? Will it be “Tradtional Marriage and Gay Marriage” now, or just plain old marriage for anyone. What do we call it when the polygamists jump into the fray? What about incest? What happens when the minimum age of 18 is challenged? Do we create “Teen Marriage” now? Why stop there; why not classify it even more? We can have Irish marriage and Irish Gay Marriage. Dwarf and “Little People” marriage. Why not Pet Marriage? After all, Scruffy and Fluffy have rights too you know!
This whole thing is absurd. The only issue that really means anything here is that spouses have their legal rights. Fighting over what to call it is insane. Re-defining a two-thousand year-old religious institution to mollify a minority special interest group is crazy. We have seen the divisiveness it has caused, and we can predict that it will only escalate. Much time and money will be wasted unnecessarily.
The solution is clear, simple and fair to all: Marriage is one man, one woman. Civil Union is anything else. The sooner this is set policy in all 50 states the better. The needs of the many are supposed to outweigh the needs of the few.