The Political is Personal: Same-Sex Marriage and the 2004 Presidential Election by Susan Pinkus page 2

But acceptance only goes so far, and acceptance of same-sex marriage is over the limit for most Americans. More than seven in ten said they were following the news about same-sex marriage in this country. And whether someone had been paying close attention or not, their opinions remained the same. In the March poll, only a quarter believed gays should marry. (In October that was down to a fifth among registered voters.) Roughly two out of five of those surveyed believed same-sex couples should be allowed legally to form civil unions but not marry, and a third didn't want either of these things to take place.

Liberals, liberal Democrats, and Democrats with a college degree or more were the only groups with sizable pluralities who agreed gays should be allowed to marry, while most other groups hovered around the national average. (The exceptions were conservatives, Republicans, married respondents, non-Catholic Christians, more religious respondents, rural dwellers, and southerners.)

Civil unions, however, were more acceptable to the population at large, especially among Democrats, nonliberal Democrats, older men, single men, the elderly, Catholics, the less religious, respondents who were affluent and highly educated, and suburbanites.

Americans who did not accept either of these forms of partnerships were overwhelmingly Republican, conservative, and conservative Republican. Other groups less staunchly opposed than the conservative right were married respondents, those with less education, married women, more religious respondents, rural and small-town residents, and those living in the south.

How might these divisions have played out on election day?

In a November 8 article in the Washington Post, Alan Cooperman and Thomas B. Edsall wrote that "The untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign… Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon. This was particularly true of the same-sex marriage issue." Same-sex marriage, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term.

Do the survey data support these assertions? Though no firm conclusions can be drawn, the numbers are suggestive.

In an L.A. Times preelection poll conducted in late October, half of the registered voters in the sample favored an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would legally define marriage as a union between a man and a woman only and prevent states from legally recognizing same-sex marriages, including 40 percent who strongly favored the amendment. Forty-three percent opposed, including 32 percent who strongly opposed. Those voters who favored the amendment strongly were Republicans (68 percent), conservatives (72 percent), conservative Republicans (75 percent), married women (56 percent), non-Catholic Christians (60 percent), respondents who attend religious worship weekly or more often (68 percent), rural voters (71 percent), and voters who own guns (61 percent).

Voters who opposed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage were Democrats (56 percent), liberals (67 percent), liberal Democrats (69 percent), voters with higher education (58 percent), unmarried voters (49 percent), single men (54 percent), voters who never attend religious services (62 percent), suburban voters (56 percent), voters who believe the country is heading off in the wrong direction (55 percent), and voters who don't own a gun (50 percent).