Numbers on Gay Marriage

Mark Stricherz writes in the April 5 Weekly Standard that the Republicans have everything to gain by making gay marriage an election-year issue: “opposition to gay marriage is a far less narrow phenomenon than supposed. The Republican position is, in fact, at least a 60-40 issue, one that unites their base AND attracts swing voters.” Peter Beinart’s TRB editorial in The New Republic cites a poll that found that “75 percent of blacks oppose same-sex marriage, compared with 59 percent of whites. Fifty-eight percent of blacks think sexual orientation ‘can be changed,’ according to a November Pew Research Center study, versus 39 percent of whites. And, according to Pew, 60 percent of blacks hold an unfavorable view of gay men, compared with only 50 percent of whites.” Beinart goes on to argue that this is unlikely to help the GOP, since black voters are more hostile to the Republicans than they are to gay marriage. Perhaps. But the numbers are telling. The stage is set for another conflict between popular American opinion and the courts. If the courts ignore popular opinion and push through gay marriage, we are facing another Roe, and it will have similarly corrosive effects on our polity.