PROP 8 TRACKER - A new study conducted by four political scientists has found that concerns of a backlash following a pro-marriage equality Supreme Court ruling are largely unfounded, Think Progress reported Tuesday.
Writing at The Monkey Cage, the four scholars–Benjamin Bishin, Thomas Hayes, Matthew Incantalupo and Charles Anthony Smith–describe their methodology:
We investigated this question by conducting on-line survey experiments in which people were asked to react to a state Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. The experiment was conducted just before the Supreme Court oral arguments in the Perry and Windsor cases. We randomly assigned people to see vignettes containing a fictitious news story about gay marriage in Oregon being legalized by the state court, a story about gay marriage being legalized by the state legislature, a story about a gay pride parade, or a story about an unrelated issue (gun control policy).
After seeing one of these stories, people were asked to rate gays and lesbians on a “feeling thermometer” where 100 indicates very warm feelings and 0 very cool feelings. If backlash occurs, we should see that opinions of gays become less favorable for each group that read about gay marriage or gay rights, relative to the group that read about gun control policy. Backlash might be stronger among groups that past research suggests might be more likely to experience backlash—Evangelical Christians and those dissatisfied with the country’s direction.
The study found no proof of backlash in any of the groups polled, including evangelicals and those who believed the country was on the wrong course. Hypothesizing that the Oregon-specific example might have colored their findings (by not presenting a sizable enough ‘threat’ of national marriage equality to invoke backlash), the political scientists conducted a separate survey after oral arguments in the Prop 8 and DOMA cases to use the prospect of Supreme Court action as a more dramatic background. In discussing their results, the scholars found that there was no evidence of backlash, and that respondents’ support seems to skew positively rather than negatively after reading the articles:
These results appear to undermine a central argument made by those who suggest that advocates of gay rights should “go slow” in pushing for gay rights and especially marriage equality. While there may be costs associated with pushing for equal rights for gays and lesbians, such as the creation of negative precedents that may result from court rulings that go against gay rights, those costs seem unlikely to come in the form of public opinion backlash.
The backlash argument is likely due in great part to the cautionary tale of Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court decision that many believe to have deepened divisions on abortion policy and contributed to the issue’s continued prominence in the public sphere.
I’ve written before about the false equivalence between Prop 8 case and Roe v. Wade–it is wildly simplistic to say that a pro-marriage equality movie would effect a Roe-style backlash. Bishin et al.’s new study simply underscores that fact, and should allay the fears of LGBT advocates as the nation awaits the Supreme Court’s final decisions in the next week and a half.
(Jacob Combs writes at prop8trialtracker.com where this report was first posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 50
Pub: June 21, 2013
