Timothy Kincaid provides a good rundown of the latest numbers from the Pew Research Center on support for gay marriage. 42% support, 48% oppose.
As always, the story isn’t in the numbers, themselves, but the trend. The chart he provides shows support flipping around, but generally moving upward, even at the lower levels of support among Republicans. Nate Silver’s now-infamous graph of the polling on this question since 1988 illustrates the bigger picture. As Kincaid points out, Pew shows that, for the first time in their polling, opposition to same-sex marriage falls below a majority.
As we know from DADT, even a huge popular majority won’t necessarily result in political victories on an issue where the discussion is still so poisoned by fear and misunderstanding. That is how prejudice short-circuits politics.
But what I can’t help noticing in the Pew numbers, and what Kincaid is so smart to have pointed out, is that even among the groups whose fear and loathing of us taps directly into the mother lode of prejudice, there are green shoots of actual, bona fide support. And not just for a compromise measure like civil unions, but full-on marriage equality. It’s easy to vilify white evangelicals or “Southerners” or the elderly as bigoted and stubborn. But within all of those groups, we still have some very real, if invisible, support. And that support is up.
The growth of small numbers is easy to ignore. But it’s in those groups where we most need the support to grow. Those are seeds, people. Let’s cultivate them.