Its looking like the effort to overturn the California Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage isn’t going very well:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Californians are likely to uphold the right to gay marriage in the state by voting against a ballot measure that seeks to override a court ruling allowing same-sex unions, poll results showed on Friday.
The Field Poll survey firm found 51 percent of voters oppose the measure, which proposes an amendment to the state’s constitution recognizing marriage as only between a man and woman, while 42 percent were in favor.
Californians will vote on the initiative, which requires a simple majority to become law, while casting ballots in November’s U.S. presidential and congressional elections.
What’s most striking about these numbers is how much public attitude seems to have shifted in just eight years:
The biggest measure of how the marriage issue has faded is, I think, the lack of interest in this California measure. Go back and read media clips from this point in 2004: it was like firecrackers had been placed under every church pew in America. Yet California opposition to gay marriage has dropped 20 points in eight years (61 percent voted to define marriage as one-man-one-woman in 2000) and, eh, the “Protect Marriage” folks seem lost. Initiative supporters have raised $2.3 milion in a state where the last serious contested statewide race (the 2004 Senate race) cost about $22 million.
That, and the fact that California is likely to attract a heavily pro-Obama, and presumably pro-gay marriage, voter turnout in November, would seem to indicate that the nation’s largest state may be the beginning of a sea change on this issue.
July 19th, 2008 at 9:07 am
There’s also the reciprocal of the “heavily pro-Obama” vote: The national umbrella conservative groups (RNC, CPAC, etc.) are not going to devote a single dollar or person-hour in California; they can’t afford to. Even the full-time bigot groups (FoF, AFA, Eagle, etc.) are more likely to deploy to Florida and Arizona, where there are also bigot amendments on the ballot.
Meanwhile, every gay advocacy organization is throwing everything they have at California (and don’t forget Justice Scalia’s insightful observation in Lawrence that we gays already have disproportionate money and political power, which is why we don’t need “special rights,” etc.).