Political Reality Shifting Under Conservatives’ Feet … Again
posted 23rd November 2009 in Liberty, Politics, Sex and Gender, State and Local by Jim
Those of you with feelings in your guts that attitudes toward same-sex marriage will never change may want to visit the doctor and have your guts checked. Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips have a great new paper out in the American Political Science Review in which they track in various ways the changing attitudes of Americans in the 50 states toward gay and lesbian political rights. On the one hand, Lax and Phillips find that currently,
…the preferences of religious conservatives are “over-represented.” Their share of the population shapes policy even beyond directly affecting public opinion and the composition of state governments. Powerful conservative religious interest groups also strongly affect gay rights policy at the expense of majoritarian congruence.
On the other hand, even in the face of religious conservatives’ disproportionate influence the American people are becoming less and less inclined to restrict same-sex marriage as time goes by. Much of this change occurs as younger, more open-minded people are born and older, more closed-minded people die:
This is a pattern called a “cohort effect” that America has also experienced with regard to racial attitudes and housework allocation. Attitudes have shifted between generations farther back in history too, all the way back to 1633, when the Catholic Church threatened Galileo with torture for sharing scientific observations at odds with Catholic teaching. Attitudes regarding the structure of the universe opened up in the population over time, with heliocentrism becoming an accepted understanding of reality hundreds of years before the year 1992, when the Vatican finally admitted it was wrong. As time passes, it seems people are becoming more open and accepting of others. But the example of the Catholic Church shows that institutions need not follow that rule. Will we have to wait until 2390 for the Catholic Church or American government to finally step up and admit what 20 year-olds recognize today, that Adam and Steve walking down the aisle is harmless and nobody else’s business?
Tags: age, attitudes, catholic, change, cohort, cohort effect, conservatives, demographics, equality, galileo, jeffrey lax, justin phillips, marriage, opinion, same sex
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So, the bad news is that a lot of Americans are against same-sex marriage.
The good news is, they’re older, and they’ll die.
Somehow, that doesn’t seem like very good news . . . but could be far worse!