Just last week, the Los Angeles Times poll on an initiative being floated for the November ballot that would force an amendment onto the California constitution that banned gay marriage found that 54 percent of voters were in favor of the initiative while 36 percent opposed it.
Now a new Field Poll has produced the opposite results:
The Field Poll survey found 51 percent against approving a possible November ballot measure to prohibit gay marriage, with 43 percent in favor. A slightly differently worded question on the same issue found 54 percent opposed and 40 percent in favor.
The poll follows a state Supreme Court decision this month that barring homosexuals from marrying violated the California Constitution. [A majority of the justices who ruled in favor of gay marriage were Republicans.] Opponents of same-sex marriage have intensified efforts to put a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in November.
The poll found a strong generational gap on the issue, with those aged 18-29 approving of gay marriage by 68 percent and those 65 or older disapproving by 55 percent.
The poll found that in recent decades a growing number of Californians have approved allowing same-sex couples to marry, with 51 percent of those polled now approving, up from 44 percent in 2006 and 30 percent in 1985.
It’s hard to parse the meaning of the seesawing between these two polls — perhaps the Field Poll sample was younger. Still, the ballot initiative is being paid for by out-of-state conservative political operatives whose real intent is to gin up turnout for John McCain in November. They will spend lavishly on advertising this fall.
Supporters of gay marriage in California should not relax until these numbers stabilize, with opposition to the initiative polling in double digits in every poll between now and November.
Given the fact that the California Supreme Court — six of whose seven members were appointed by conservative Republican governors — relied on the precedent set by the court in 1948 on interracial marriages, there’s little doubt that any attempt to deny gay and lesbian couples the right to marry will ultimately fail.
The court’s 1948 ruling on interracial marriages — adopted 19 years later by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia — was based firmly on the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Combined with a 1996 ruling by the U.S. high court in Romer v. Evans that states cannot single out gays for exclusion from constitutional rights enjoyed by everyone else, it is inevitable that if a proposed amendment to the California Constitution outlawing same-gender marriage passes, it will be challenged in federal court on Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection grounds.
Those who oppose same-gender marriage have yet to prove that it harms opposite-gender unions. And they’ve yet to prove that to ban same-gender unions doesn’t constitute a government sanction of a religious doctrine that condemns homosexuality as a sin — a sanction that is barred by the First Amendment separation of church and state.
The question, therefore, isn’t IF same-gender marrriage will be legal in all 50 states, but WHEN.