Reader Doug sent me two links: one to a Langer Research Poll conducted for ABC News and the Washington Post, and the other to a Politico story about the poll. But the poll pretty much tells it all, and the figure in the poll is striking:
The general question about equality trumping religion shows a stronger preference for equality than does the specific case of Kim Davis and gay marriage licenses in Rowan County, Kentucky. This is not surprising: people often become more sympathetic when real human beings are involved. But in both case over 60% of Americans prioritized legal requirements above religious convictions. That’s a ratio of about 2:1 at a minimum, and it’s heartening.
Politico notes, though, that these results differ a bit from a July poll:
The results contrast with the findings of an Associated Press/GfK survey conducted in July, weeks after the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional. In that poll, 49 percent said that local officials should not be required to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples if they have religious objections, while 47 percent said they should be. In the same poll, 56 percent to 39 percent said it is more important for the government to protect religious liberties than gay rights
That is a huge difference, especially for the general philosophical question. Now it’s possible that this reflects a sample size difference (I always wonder how pollsters derive their “sample error” estimates), or how the questions were asked. But it’s also possible that the truculence of Davis, the blatant cross-waving and God-osculating of her supporters, and the anger and sadness of gay couples in Kentucky, all combined to harden American hearts against privileging religion when it conflicts with principles of democracy. Let us hope so. It would be interesting to see the AP/GfK repeat their survey, using identical methods, four months after the first one.
I think Davis’ hypocrisy/selective piety may have contributed as well.
I would bet, though, you can move people over to the correct side of the issue if you pose other scenarios to them, like the Wal-mart meme you posted the other day. Once they see how inconvenienced they would be if this were indeed the law of the land, they would change their views. The gay marriage thing just doesn’t affect the lives of most people.
I think the comparison to interracial marriage is possibly the most powerful argument.
That’s still an inconvenience to other people, which is less powerful than an inconvenience to one’s self.
And I’m not sure how on board people really are with interracial marriage. I know the polls say they are, but they seem to behave differently. An interracial couple that I know who moved here from California say they ran into hostility all the time.
Davis’s lawyers, Liberty Counsel comes from Falwell’s Liberty University. Falwell was the one using religious liberty as a justification for all forms of racial segregation. He promoted whites-only academies and shared what he swore was his god’s will to justify it.
The same BS coming from the same bulls.
What an Orwellian use of the word “liberty”.
That’s something that I only learned recently….the Moral Majority really had its roots in segregation, not moral issues.
I think that type of consciousness raising is needed; otherwise, attitudes too often turn on whether it’s your religion inconveniencing me, or our religion inconveniencing them.
sub
The rule-of-thumb is that the error scales as the square-root of the sample size.
Thus for 1000 people polled, the error will be sqrt(1000) which is about 3% of the 1000.
(Though the full story is a bit more complicated. This also doesn’t take into account any bias in the construction of the sample, only the statistical sampling error.)
As the polling companies discovered in the 2015 UK General Election.
I’m just reading an entire book on calculating error bars for this sort of thing, but yes the standard normal-approximation interval gives a 95% CI of plus or minus 3% for a sample size of around 1000 and an estimated percentage in the range 20-80.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence_interval
Just noticed that the pic explicitly says “including the design effect” and gets the error bars up to 3.5%. Following the links to here (and kudos to ABC news for giving the info)
http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/sampling-error-means/story?id=5984818
the inflation from 3% to 3.5% is a correction due to using mobiles and landlines, though they’ve not said exactly how they’ve done it.
Design effect (or variance inflation) is due to weighting of survey responses to compensate for disproportionate sampling. The 3% margin of error for a sample of 1000 assumes that each sampled individual had an equal probability of selection. For myriad reasons, including cost efficiency, polls oversample certain groups, such as listed phone numbers, for which surveys are easier to complete than, say, cell phone numbers from sparsely allocated number blocks. But to regain representativeness, responses from the oversampled groups have to be weighted down and undersampled groups weighted up. But this weighting concentrates computed statistics, like sample averages and percentages, around the responses of the undersampled (and hence up-weighted) groups, causing a decrease in the effective sample size.
To see this, consider an extreme example. You sample 100 people, but then give 99 of them weights of 1/1000000 and one of them a weight of 1000000. When you then compute the weighted average of their responses, the average will be essentially equal to the response given by the one respondent with the weight of 1000000. You might as well have interviewed just that one person. Your effective sample size is 1, and since your margin of error is a function of the (effective) sample size, the margin of error will be the same as if your sample size was 1. More realistic, less drastic, weighting, similarly, but less drastically, affects the effective sample size, and hence the margin of error. This effect is quantified by the design effect.
Yes, the inflation from 3% to 3.5% is roughly what you get if group A is twice as common as group B, but group B is much easier to sample so that in fact you sample twice as many from B as from A, and then correct for that.
Of course, it may be overconfidence (in the non-technical sense) in this sort of correction that led to the pollsters getting it so wrong in the UK General Election.
I don’t know the mechanics of the UK voting process, but I do know that the voting process in the States has multiple vulnerabilities that makes it highly susceptible to untraceable systemic fraud. Exit polling is not an exact science, but it has a superb historical record of getting its error bars right — and, in proto-democratic elections we monitor elsewhere, disparities between the two, especially when significant, are considered one the best indicators of fraud.
Make of that what you will.
b&
The exit polls for the UK election were accurate, as usual, it was the pre-election polls that were very wrong.
“Equality under the law” is more positively loaded than a more neutral “Following the law.” That slight difference might also explain the disparity.
I think that would make quite a significant difference to how people respond.
I wonder what percentage of Americans would want a full-fledged theocracy. 19% think G*d’s law is more important to follow; that doesn’t necessarily mean the 19% want a theocracy, but it is still a little unnerving. I wonder what European countries would poll. I’d bet less than 5% would favor religious law.
Even on Fox, the majority consider Kim Davis is in the wrong. While some will vacillate about accommodating her and try to find a way to criticize the judge, most say she should follow the law.
Yesterday I watched ‘The Kelly File,’ which interviewed the equally revolting Judge Andrew Napolitano and Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, of course, supports Davis, and has been saying over and over that the SCOTUS decision is invalid and not real law. One of his excuses for it being OK to not follow it is that if SCOTUS had gone the other way “liberals would be complaining.” He considers a 5-4 decision makes it less legal, and that’s one of his reasons it’s not proper law.
Napolitano, who also opposes same-sex marriage, said it is the law and Davis must follow it. He thought the “liberals” argument from Huckabee was silly. He said “they” would continue to activate for SSM, but to refuse to issue marriage licences would be equally wrong.
His position is the same as most at ‘Fox News’ who oppose SSM. Many there also support SSM. Whether they reflect or influence wider conservative opinion I don’t know – maybe someone else does?
I think it is funny that I, living in the US, get my Fox News updates from a person who lives in New Zealand. Thanks for watching so I don’t have to!
And, Vive la Internet!
ditto!
They’re around sheep all day, so they are better than Americans at standing the smell and constant bleating.
🙂
I haven’t seen a sheep for days mate! And they smell and sound a lot better than turkeys anyway. 🙂
There were some dead ones (sheep I mean) on the News last night – does that count?
I’m often surprised to see how closely you follow us in the U.S. Must be NZ is just too tame to hold your interest. 😉
NZ politics is pretty boring. Most of our politicians have got this ghastly habit of being reasonable and cooperating to make legislation better through the select committee process.
I’m interested in international politics, so I follow it more than average, and the US is the most powerful country in the world, so it dominates.
We do find the US fascinating though – you’re sort of like us but not like us at the same time. We find the gun obsession a bit weird, and politicians really weird, and it’s weird how most of you notice skin colour so much, and seem to be obsessed with sexuality. And then there’s religion. That’s completely weird. We have religious people here, we even have cults, but religion is a mostly private thing.
Read somewhere that NZ has the best designed electoral system in the world.
That’s interesting. It’s not perfect, but it is pretty good I think.
I think it’s not if the most democratic. Canada’s first last the post is awful.
Haha I mean “past” but last is funnier.
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6831777/new-zealand-electoral-system-constitution-mixed-member-unicameral
Thanks. 🙂
We used to have FPP, but we changed it at the beginning of the 90s. We had a referendum. We were getting some really unfair results with FPP, and NZers are really anti-unfair.
As an American, and with elections approaching, I could use a good dose of ‘boring’ and a little ‘anti-unfair’.
And as for the Australian system?
Another day, another Prime Minister.
This one looks alright, although I thought Gillard was OK too and they got rid of her.
Aliens! I knew it! They really are here!
🙂
Uh oh!
Actually, I think it’s more to do with the wording of the question.
Compare:
Should Kim Davis have to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples?
with:
Should Kim Davis have the right to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples?
Even I could agree with the first; no, Kim Davis doesn’t have to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She doesn’t have to be the county clerk, either. What she doesn’t have is the right to obstruct justice and deny citizens the equal protection of the laws…
…and the poorly-worded poll question reflects that ambiguity.
b&
There is hope after all
A new hope, even…though the evil empire may yet strike back before the return of…
…erm, sorry ’bout that…got carried away for a moment there…fortunately caught myself before the stereotypically racist comic relief sidekick showed up….
b&
It’s too bad that the poll results, showing that people favor equality under the law, isn’t reflected in the laws themselves. Exemptions for religion from laws permeate the legal system, way beyond the obvious tax laws, to include virtually every facet of modern life. Whether it’s zoning, pensions, health and safety, medical issues, copyright, immigration, lobbying, and on and on and on, it is very difficult to find a legal area where the religious are not privileged. And it’s not slowing down – religious exemptions are constantly inserted into bills, almost always without debate, for there is no quicker way to political suicide in the US than to oppose a religious exemption in just about any law that is passed.
“Separation of church and state was certainly part of American law when many of today’s public opinion makers were in school. But separation of church and state is no longer the law of the land.” — John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the Emory University law school. (This from a scholar on the religious side of the divide.)
If you can’t beat ’em…etc.
If everyone had their own church, we could all take advantage of the loopholes.
One thing this poll reflects, I think, is the underlying shallowness of American religious commitment. A large majority of Americans identify as belonging to a particular religion, but most spend little time thinking about it. For them, it’s a matter of group identity and participating in occasional ceremonies — weddings, funerals, baptisms — and maybe something to turn to in times of personal crisis (which always struck me as akin to seeking a favor from an alderman you’ve never supported).
Most Americans couldn’t tell the Book of Numbers from a math book, the Book of Judges from Judge Judy, or First Corinthians from a Corinthian column.