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.