A new survey from the Field Poll — the gold standard for polling in California — finds that approval of gay marriage has risen to 59 percent. This is a 6.7 point increase from 2009, when support in the same poll was 52.3 percent.
Disapproval has dropped to 34 percent, from 47.7 percent three years ago.
The new numbers also suggest an even more dramatic, double-digit increase in support from just four years ago, when voters passed Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to rescind marriage rights for gays.
During the campaign for Prop 8, support for gay marriage, which had hovered around 50 percent, was driven down by a barrage of negative advertising funded by outside groups, particularly the Mormon Church in Utah, much of which suggested that school children would be recruited into the gay “lifestyle” — specifically that gay marriage would be “taught in schools” — if Prop 8 failed to pass. (Marriage, straight or gay, is not a subject that is included in California public school curricula.)
Prop 8 passed on Election Day 2008, 52.4 to 47.76 percent. Based on that 47.76 percent figure, support has risen 11.24 percentage points in four years, to 59 percent today.
In 2010, Prop 8 was overturned in federal court, a ruling that was upheld on appeal by the Ninth Circuit earlier this month. The amendment’s proponents have appealed that ruling as well, but the court has not yet announced whether their latest appeal will be heard.
Prior to the vote on Prop 8, the Democratic-controlled California Legislature passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage on two separate occasions. Both bills were vetoed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.
On a national level, support for marriage equality has also been increasing. Last May, Gallup found support for gay marriage had exceeded 50 percent — 53 percent in favor, with 45 percent opposed — for the first time.
Of course, civil rights advocates have good cause to wonder why the right to marry is even being debated, much less polled. After all, in 1968, not long after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virgina overturned laws banning mixed-race marriages, Gallup found that the public still disapproved of mixed-race marriage by 52 percentage points — 72 to 20 percent.
With 53 percent approval today, gay marriage has two and a half times the support mixed-race marriage had when it was legalized in the 1960s.
