Public Support for Gay Rights is Ahead of Policy

Sorry, FiveThirtyEight, I'm going to crib off of you again; this time I want to talk about a post by Andrew Gelman on public support for gay rights in the US. Gelman points to a post by Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips (pdf is here, but it's reproduced at FiveThirtyEight) that uses "multilevel regression and poststratification" (which I think is statisticsese for 'educated guess') to represent public attitudes about various gay rights issues in all 50 states.

It's a cool graphic, and very illustrative in itself. But I wanted to try to build on it a little by mappifying the data. Lax and Phillips looked at seven civil rights issues which are represented on the chart as same-sex marriage, 2nd parent adoption for same-sex couples, civil unions, health benefits for same-sex partners, job antidiscrimination, hate crimes protection, and housing antidiscrimination. The chart shows support for each of these for every state. The order I listed them in is generally the order of increasing popularity; for instance, same-sex marriage only has majority support in 6 states, but hate crimes protection and housing discrimination have support in all 50. So here is a map showing public support for gay rights policies:



It's the usual pattern: support for civil rights for gays is strongest in the Northeast, followed by the West, then the Midwest, and finally the South (and Utah).

But Lax and Phillips also include the actual status of those seven gay rights policies in each of the states, which creates quite a different looking map:



The trends are similar, but overall the map is just a whole lot paler, which is to say: public policies are lagging behind popular sentiment. I don't know whether this is because politicians tend to be behind the curve on gay rights issues, or because the legislative gears just need time to turn to catch up to public opinion, or what. But it does suggest there's a lot of room for gay rights legislation to advance in most states.

Here's one more way to look at it: the map below shows the number of Lax and Phillips' gay rights policies that have majority support but haven't been enacted.


The states in the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Upper Mississippi Valley don't just tend to have stronger support for gay civil rights - they've generally made more progress in legislating them. (Maine, Iowa, and Oregon have actually enacted more policies than have majority support.) But the biggest laggards aren't confined to the South; areas in the northern Interior West and the Rust Belt also tend to be behind the curve of presumed majority support (Alaska's the farthest behind, with support for five policies and none of them enacted).

It will be interesting to see how this map fills in over the coming years. I imagine we'll see consolidation for civil rights in areas outside the South first. And if the history of anti-miscegenation laws is prologue, it may take a Supreme Court decision to extend these rights throughout Dixie. Anti-miscegenation laws were obviously tied in to a very different history of discrimination; but nonetheless, if progress for gay rights were to follow a similar path, I wouldn't be surprised.

The Spread of Marriage Equality in the US

The LA Times has a nice interactive map of gay marriage rights by state that shows the many changes that have taken place over the past decade or so. Here's how things stood in 2000:



And here's where things stand today:



The scale represents the range of rights denied or afforded to gay couples, from "constitutional amendment ban[ning] gay marriage and other legal rights for gay couples" (dark red) to "domestic partnership legal" (pale green) to "gay marriage legal" (dark green). You can mouse ove states for details. They also have a timeline depicting the various votes, judicial rulings, and other events that have produced the civil rights hodgepodge depicted on this map.

On the face of it, it looks like there's been a lot of movement both for and against legal recognition for gay marriage; while some states have extended full marriage rights, others have retrenched with constitutional amendments banning the same. But I think it makes sense to see these as two sorts of steps that are actually fundamentally moving in the same direction. After all, prior to 2000 or so, marriage equality wasn't really seen as conceivable - not in the foreseeable future, at any rate. But then - possibly because of a genuine sense of a shifting ground in public sentiment - a bunch of states amended their constitutions. This was a defensive move which anticipated the possibility that gay people might be allowed to marry which, like most changes in social institutions, tended to freak out people with more traditionalist orientations. But even though the effect was that a bunch of anti-equality measures got written into law, this was a symptom of a general progressive movement on the issue of gay marriage.

In retrospect, I think you might even say that the big movement earlier this decade to amend state constitutions to explicitly ban gay marriage actually spurred further progressive movement. Those votes - many of which were orchestrated in an effort to get more people to come out and vote Republican in 2004 and 2006 - raised the profile of the issue, certainly, and perhaps placed a veneer of plausibility on the concept of gay marriage. After all, if it was a concept that had to be fought at the ballot box, it must have been a concept that needed to be taken seriously, right? And with several states approving gay marriage this year, following the high-profile loss of gay marriage rights in California last November, I wonder if all the efforts at thwarting gay marriage have just had the net effect of telescoping the timeline of the spread of marriage equality.

6/3 UPDATE: And New Hampshire officially becomes the 6th state to sanction gay marriage, and the third to do so legislatively, after Vermont and Maine. Rhode Island is the only New England state without marriage equality.

Anti-Miscegenation Laws: A Precursor to Gay Marriage Bans?

So I was thinking about this map of the future of gay marriage, and wondering about what sort of precedents there might be in American social history for the sort of change involved in allowing gay couples to marry. And the best parallel to the legalization of gay marriage I can think of is the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws. Here's a map of the history of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws.



There are obviously a ton of differences between the social acceptance of interracial marriages and the social acceptance of same-sex marriages. For one thing, the history of relations between races varies considerably between different regions of the country. But the basic shift in perceptions that undergird both expansions of social acceptance is pretty much the same: in both cases, the institution of marriage expands to include relationships that had once been seen as taboo. And the maps of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws and the predicted failure of gay marriage bans (shown below) show a lot of correlation. In both cases, the socially progressive view takes hold first in the Northeast, and the South is the last holdout. In fact, every single state in the South continued to ban inter-racial marriage until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if a lot of Southern states continue to hold out against same-sex marriage until a comparable future Supreme Court decision.

But there are differences, too. The Western states - hypothetical early adopters of the legalization of gay marriage - were relatively slow to sanction interracial marriage. And the Midwest, especially the "prairie populism" states of the Upper Midwest, were early in sanctioning interracial marriage, but are predicted to be slower on the same-sex marriage front. (Of course, Iowa has already become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage - before any Western state - so history may yet repeat itself.)

And, of course, the time scales are radically different: it took nearly 200 years between the first state ban on interracial marriage to be lifted (Pennsylvania, in 1780) and the Supreme Court decision that ended such bans once and for all. And the progress was very fitful. After Pennsylvania, no marriage ban was lifted until 1843; 44 years later, ever Northern Union state other than Indiana had lifted their bans. But then - nothing, literally for generations. The post-Reconstruction period of racist retrenchment, aka Jim Crow, saw a total lack of progress in the states on interracial marriage. It wasn't until the modern Civil Rights era that interracial marriage bans again started to be overturned. And even by the time of the Loving decision, the country was still deeply bifurcated: every single non-Southern or border state had repealed their marriage bans, and every single Southern state still had a ban on the books.

Are there lessons to be drawn here about the future of same-sex marriage? One would seem to be that progressive change is not inexorable; or if it is, it can still be delayed by quite a lot, as the 1887 to 1948 lacuna in repealing marriage bans shows. And, though the generational divide on gay marriage is really stark, according to polls like this one, which found that 41% of people under 45 support same-sex marriage, as opposed to 18% of people over 65, even young people are only split on the issue, so it would seem wrong to view the inexorable spread of marriage equality as a fait accompli.

Nonetheless, I think there are good reasons to think that an outcome in which same-sex marriage becomes broadly accepted within a generation is likely. In particular, that same poll shows 60-35% support for either same-sex marriage or civil unions. That seems to suggest that, despite some lingering apprehension about what some people see as a re-definition of marriage, there is broad support for the principle of equality for gay couples. There's no reason to expect that support to reverse itself. The taboo on gay relationships is on the way out the door, and I can't help but think that it's only a matter of time before the law reflects this reality.

Here, by the way, are the dates when anti-miscegenation laws were repealed, according to Wikipedia.

Pennsylvania - 1780
Massachusetts - 1843
Iowa - 1851
Kansas - 1859
New Mexico - 1866
Washington - 1868
Illinois - 1874
Rhode Island - 1881
Maine - 1883
Michigan - 1883
Ohio - 1887

California - 1948
Oregon - 1951
Montana - 1953
North Dakota - 1955
Colorado - 1957
South Dakota - 1957
Idaho - 1959
Nevada - 1959
Arizona - 1962
Nebraska - 1963
Utah - 1963
Indiana - 1965
Wyoming - 1965
Maryland - 1967

Alabama - June 12, 1967
Arkansas - June 12, 1967
Delaware - June 12, 1967
Florida - June 12, 1967
Georgia - June 12, 1967
Kentucky - June 12, 1967
Louisiana - June 12, 1967
Mississippi - June 12, 1967
Missouri - June 12, 1967
North Carolina - June 12, 1967
Oklahome - June 12, 1967
South Carolina - June 12, 1967
Tennessee - June 12, 1967
Texas - June 12, 1967
Virginia - June 12, 1967
West Virginia - June 12, 1967

Mapping the Future of Gay Marriage

Yesterday, same-sex marriage in Iowa was rendered legal by that state's Supreme Court (two days after it was made legal in Sweden). The United States seems inexorably headed towards marriage rights for gay couples - but how long will it take to get there across the board? Nate Silver has an answer. Based entirely on his hard work at fivethirtyeight.com, here is the future of gay marriage in the US:



The years indicated are those by which a gay marriage ban would be defeated by voters in a given state, according to a regression model designed by Silver. (Again, all the math and hard work is Silver's; I just made the map.)

How did Silver come up with these results? Here's the explanation:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

These variables collectively account for about three-quarters of the variance in the performance of marriage bans in different states. The model predicts, for example, that a marriage ban in California in 2008 would have passed with 52.1 percent of the vote, almost exactly the fraction actually received by Proposition 8.

The more religious a state is, and the more white evangelicals it has, the higher the percentage of voters who would be likely to support a gay marriage ban. However, according to Silver marriage bans "are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we'd project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year." So it's possible to extrapolate, given the current religious demographics of a state and the trend of decreasing support for bans, when a gay marriage ban would fail.

There are 11 states where a marriage ban would already be expected to fail: all of New England and New York, plus several states in the West (all of which are among the least religious states in the country). California wouldn't be likely to reject a ban until next year. (Side note: despite California's status as a sort of poster boy for social liberalism, most of the Northeast tends to be more liberal on these kinds of social indicators.)

Over the next couple of years, majority opposition to gay marriage bans will spread quickly through the Northeastern and Western states, then through the Midwest - claiming a majority of all states by 2013 - and finally through the South, with Mississippi bringing up the rear in 2024.

Of course, history rarely moves in a straight line, and there's a big element of speculation in simply extrapolating from current trends. As Silver notes, a backlash against gay marriage might mount, delaying or reversing the trends that have been evident over the past few years; or by a sudden gestalt shift gay marriage might find broad acceptance. What seems much more likely than the precise dates given here, though, is the chronology of the geographical spread of acceptance. Same-sex marriages are already legal in the New England states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, with the Vermont legislature recently voting overwhelmingly to allow it (though the Governor may veto the bill [UPDATE: the legislature overrode the veto, so Vermont is the fourth state to make gay marriage legal, and the first to do so legislatively rather than judicially]). And even among states where gay marriage bans have passed, some of the most narrow margins were in Western states like Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and, of course, California. Meanwhile, it is certain that the South will be the last region in the country to become amenable to gay marriage.

As for Iowa? According to Silver, an amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage in that state would require passage in two consecutive sessions of the state legislature, and then would have to be ratified by the voters. So it couldn't come up for a vote at the ballot box until at least 2012. According to Silver's regression model, such a ban might pass in Iowa until 2013 - but who knows; maybe 3 years of being neighbors with happily married gay couples without having their social fabric torn asunder will cause Iowans' tolerance clock to speed up just a bit.

5/19/09 UPDATE: This map was never intended as a prediction of when gay marriage would actually become legal. But it is interesting that, as of a month and a half later, gay marriage is now legal in 4 states (MA, CT, VT, ME), will soon be legal in a 5th (NH; just waiting for a technicality in the bill to be worked out), and is making progress in a 6th state (NY) which, according to Nate S., would vote against a hypothetical gay marriage ban as of this year. In other words, gay marriage may actually be legal in at least half of these 11 states by the time the year is out, and will definitely be legal in at least 5 - plus Iowa, of course. Again, the point was never that these would be the dates by which gay marriage would actually be legal - but it almost seems to be turning out that way, to some extent.