I’d say she’s lying here, but I’m not sure she’s that smart:
Well, several polls have been showing that lately, so we’re certainly at the tipping point, if nothing else.
Major meme alert: A majority of Americans now allegedly support gay marriage! This is very hard to believe given, say, November exit polls showing just 40 percent support SSM (and 54 percent oppose it).
Yeah, please, Maggie, crow about exit polls from the midterm elections, you know, the ones that are always old and white.
It’s also very hard to believe given that gay marriage is having a hard time gathering majority support even in deep-blue states, from California to Maine to Maryland.
Yeah, it’s amazing what happens when the National Organization for Marriage comes in, spends massive amounts of money lying to the stupid, and manages to muck things up/get rights taken away from gay people at the last minute. It’s a fun game while it lasts, Maggie, but it’s not a career. Get one.
One major poll shows no upward trend in support for gay marriage: the PPP/Daily Kos poll, which shows just 31 percent of Americans support gay marriage (when offered the alternative of civil unions or no recognition at all). That’s a 3 percentage-point decrease since January, by the way.
Now, at this point, she of the bare wedding ring finger forces us to follow her over to the NOM blog, where she conducts “analysis”:
Back in August, the PPP poll, asking a question similar to the recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, found 57 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage and just 33 percent support it.
Aha! Really, Maggie? Okay, in that same poll, another 11% are “not sure.” Here is the thing, though. When all the polls are going in one direction and only one shows what you want it to show, it is not called “The Best Poll,” it is simply called an “outlier.” But Maggie has a grand theory as to why her favorite poll, which is only her favorite poll because it shows what she wants it to show, because otherwise it is a Liberal Polling Company (GRRR!), shows this favorable result! It is simply that the other polling companies are talking to people on the phone, and people are so scared of gay people that they won’t tell a stranger that they’re bigots, like Maggie Gallagher, and thus skew all the other polls over to our side, or at least to 50/50-ish:
Gay marriage advocates are no longer persuading, they are intimidating and silencing. If people are afraid to tell the strange person on the phone their real views on marriage, that in itself is evidence of a culturally significant shift–but not one to crow about.
Aww, that’s cute. Keep telling yourself that, Maggie. I’m wondering more and more if she’s really such a fool that she actually thinks she’s going to win this in the long run. And what do her son’s theater friends think about his mother’s lifelong campaign of hatred? And still, why won’t she bring her unequally yoked Hindu husband to NOM events?
To be fair, Public Policy Polling did say something along the same lines as Maggie on the subject, but they more interpreted it that some people are still uncomfortable with gay people, but they know that they are wrong for that. If there is any truth to the idea that people show their true colors more in automated polling, PPP’s explanation makes more sense.
Because here is the thing about true bigots like Maggie Gallagher: Yes, they do fear gay people. A lot. In a weird, neurotic, unreasonable way. No one knows why. But they are not silent about it. On the contrary, they tend to yak their mouths about it to anyone who will listen. No, the people Maggie is so hopefully referring to are those who are slowly but surely moving over to our side. The younger generations are already solidly in the camp of fairness and equality. Among the older generations, some will be persuaded by friends, children, grandchildren, neighbors, and others will simply expire. Them’s the sad, brutal facts, Mags.
Thanks for the link Evan!
If someone took a poll, I wonder how many of NOM’s supporters would consider a marriage of one Roman Catholic and one Hindu to be a traditional marriage. It’s easy to understand why Maggie is wedding-bandless, and doesn’t reveal that she is actually Mrs. Raman Srivastav.
I also wonder if they would realize that an “unequally yoked” marriage (one to a non Christian believer) is EXPRESSLY forbidden by the Bible.
One of those passages she chooses to ignore or interpret differently, since it affects her family.
Maggie should have been stoned to death a long time ago according to her buybull…she wasn’t a virgin when she got married and was in fact an unwed mother previous to that marriage.
Hey Scott, the answer to your question is YES. Anything that comes out of Mags is poison.
[...] whether the majority of Americans really do support marriage equality – and Truth Wins Out nicely deconstructs her [...]
NOM is nothing but a lie factory. For example, here in RI they were running an ad stating that 80% of RI’ers (voters) wanted to put marriage equality to a referendum.
I pulled the stats from from the RI Central Voter Registration System, then applied the percentage that voted in 2010 and 2008 elections (I took the mean of the two.) and what I arrived at was only 29% of RI voters would like to see it on a referendum.
it reinforces what I’ve always said, NOM is nothing but a small group of vocal bigots.
Some errors in this post: “Old” is associated with an anti-SSM posiiton, but “white” is not. Whites consistently poll more favorably toward SSM than any other racial group, with the exception of Asian Americans. The 2010 exit polls that Maggie loves so much don’t reflect reality not b/c whites are overrepresented, but because Republicans and older Americans are overrepresented. I hope that your immediate association of “white” with “anti-gay” is not some sort of reflexive prejudice.
Although Maggie is a professional liar and although NOM has a sordid history of conducting sham polls with bogus methodology or with the wording deliberately skewed, I don’t think that she is off base on this latest poll. We can’t be at 53 percent nationwide if we are only just over 50 percent or just under 50 percent in the bluest states like NY, CA, ME, and MD. We would need to see support levels in these states go up into the 60s in order to get a national figure of 53 percent. The trend is clearly heading that way, and every poll shows that. But I don’t think it is there yet.
Maryland polling was at 51% statewide some months ago in 2010, and has not been updated since, AFAIK. (Maryland is not a heavily polled state.)
So Maggie is wrong when she says that marriage equality is having a “hard time” getting majority support in MD.
While I personally believe that NOM and its lies and propaganda could have overcome as slim a margin as 51% if marriage equality came to a referendum (and it would have and and will!), I do not believe that we will see any reputable poll ever again show less than majority support for equality in marryland.
(P.S., as always, note that this was not 51% to 49% — it was more like 51% to 38% when you take into account the non-responders who are suddenly Maggie’s and Brian’s BFFs.)