UPDATE: SO this came across my Twitter feed and it didn’t even occur to me to look at the date. This poll came out last year! That being said, it’s there. We’ve been talking about the tipping point a lot the past couple of weeks, and really, it’s an ongoing process. These years, themselves, are the tipping point. So we’re going to have a poll here that looks good, one there where we’re under by a couple of points, and then, in the next couple of years, it’s going to break off in our direction for good. The rest of the post stands.
A new ABC News/Washington Poll has been released was released last year, and something has changed:
Take gay marriage, legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut and now Iowa, with Vermont coming aboard in September. At its low, in 2004, just 32 percent of Americans favored gay marriage, with 62 percent opposed. Now 49 percent support it, vs. 46 percent opposed – the first time in ABC/Post polls that supporters have outnumbered opponents.
More than half, moreover – 53 percent – say a gay marriage held legally in another state should be recognized as legal in their own state.
The surprise is that the shift has occurred across ideological groups. While conservatives are least apt to favor gay marriage, they’ve gone from 10 percent support in 2004 to 19 percent in 2006 and 30 percent now – overall a 20-point, threefold increase, alongside a 13-point gain among liberals and 14 points among moderates. (Politically, support for gay marriage has risen sharply among Democrats and independents alike, while far more slightly among Republicans.)
The tide has turned. There is no reasonable indication that these numbers won’t continue to rise and rise. Maggie Gallagher and everyone who thinks like her has lost. Last night, Argentina welcomed marriage equality. Today, a DC Court of Appeals told Harry Jackson and Tony Perkins to shove off in their quest to put minority rights up to a vote. And now we have our first poll with a majority of Americans expressing support for full marriage equality for LGBT citizens. (The bigots are having a really bad day!)
The fight, of course, is not over. The professional anti-gay set will get more extreme in their rhetoric over the coming years, and there’s a possibility that they’ll incite violence from the lowest common denominators of our society. But the war is, essentially, won. Now we just have to stay engaged as it plays out to its conclusion. The crazy thing is that it’ll be done without one fundamentalist losing her rights to be as bigoted as she wants.
Argentina has just passed the United States in terms of equal rights for its citizens, becoming the first Latin American nation to have full marriage equality. They told their radical religious clerics (Catholic bishops) to take a hike, and they got it done for all their citizens.
“What an unelected, activist country!”, Maggie Gallagher might have just said as she pounded her paws on the table.
In order to express His displeasure with this decision, the Lord plans to fire an asteroid in the general direction of Argentina, but it will miss and land in the ocean somewhere, because His throwing arm just isn’t what it used to be.
Timothy Kincaid points out that Argentina is now the tenth nation in the world with full equality. None hit by asteroids, you see:
2001 Netherlands
2003 Belgium
2005 Spain
2005 Canada
2006 South Africa
2008 Norway
2009 Sweden
2010 Portugal
2010 Iceland
2010 Argentina
Argentina’s Senate is scheduled to vote today on a bill allowing gay couples to get married. The marriage bill has caused a fissure between the Roman Catholic Church and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who is in support of marriage equality.
The Church hierarchy (no doubt packed with closeted homosexuals) has staged large protests around the country. On Sunday, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, had declared it a “destructive attack on God’s plan.”
No, Cardinal, the systematic rape of children and evil cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church is what is a “destructive attack on God’s plan.” You want destructive? Read HERE and HERE and, well no more links because we could fill and burn out the entire server with examples of extreme moral turpitude.
What I’m basically saying Cardinal, is you have absolutely no moral authority to say one word against any issue that deals with sex and morality. Shame on you for such hypocrisy and moral posing.
Fortunately, polls show that nearly 70 percent of Argentines support giving gay people marriage equlaity. According to The New York Times, President Kirchner harshly criticized church leaders on Monday, saying that their discourse on the issue resembled “the times of the Crusades” and that they failed to acknowledge how socially liberal Argentina had become.
“They are portraying this as a religious moral issue and as a threat to ‘the natural order,’ when what we are really doing is looking at a reality that is already there,” the president said from Beijing. “It would be a terrible distortion of democracy if they denied minorities their rights.”
Note to President Obama — this is what a “fierce advocate” for LGBT equality looks like and sounds like. Please take note.
If you speak Spanish, here is an interview with the President of Argentina:
Two Argentine men were joined Monday in Latin America’s first same-sex marriage, traveling to the southernmost tip of the Americas to find a welcoming spot to wed. Argentina’s Constitution is silent on whether marriage must be between a man and a woman, effectively leaving the matter to provincial officials.
The ceremony upset the Roman Catholic Church, which had to take a break from its pedophile priest scandal to condemn the love of this happy gay couple.
“The decision took me by surprise and I’m concerned,” Bishop Juan Carlos, of the southern city Rio Gallegos, told an Argentine news agency. He called the marriage “an attack against the survival of the human species.”
I just checked my newspaper and took a walk around the block. Apparently, the human species is still alive and well. I don’t suppose, given the facts, that Gallegos will issue a “correction” for his embarrassingly idiotic statement. In my view, the church is inviting violence against this couple by claiming they will essentially destroy the world.
Same-sex civil unions have been legalized in Uruguay, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and some states in Mexico and Brazil, but marriage generally carries more exclusive rights such as adopting children, inheriting wealth and enabling a partner to gain citizenship.
Only seven countries allow gay marriages: Canada, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium. U.S. states that permit same-sex marriage are Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and New Hampshire.
Earlier this month, lawmakers voted to make Mexico City the first in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. Leftist Mayor Marcelo Ebrard was widely expected to sign the measure into law.
Well, it appears the United States continues to fall behind other civilized nations as our Religious Right continues to drag this country down in its quest to take us back to the Dark Ages.
Argentina’s Senate is scheduled to vote today on a bill allowing gay couples to get married. The marriage bill has caused a fissure between the Roman Catholic Church and President 
