Voters Deadlocked on Same-Sex Marriage Ban in California

Posted on October 21, 2008
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SAN FRANCISCO—The red-hot issue of same-sex marriage continues to sharply divide Californians, according to a poll conducted last week. If a vote were held today on Proposition 8, a state ballot initiative that would reverse the decision of the state’s Supreme Court earlier this year and eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry, 48 percent of likely voters say they would vote yes, supporting a ban, while 45 percent say they would vote to leave the law alone. Seven percent of voters remain undecided. The initiative, which will appear on the ballot in two weeks, requires a majority to pass.

Pollsters caution that the poll may not be a perfect measure of where California voters currently stand on the issue. “Polling on ballot measures in general is an inexact science, and polling on homosexuality in general is a tricky business,” says a description of the SurveyUSA poll, which has a margin of error of 4 percentage points. “SurveyUSA urges all who examine these results to not put too fine a point on the 3 points that separate ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ today.”

As television advertisements for and against Prop 8 have begun to flood the airwaves here over the past month, garnering almost as much attention as the presidential race, it has become increasingly clear that California voters remain deeply divided on same-sex marriage. In a half-dozen separate polls conducted over the past month, likely voters have been deadlocked on Proposition 8 each time. Through September, supporters of same-sex marriage appeared to be ahead by more than 5 points. But over the past several weeks, as the first pro-Prop 8 advertisements began to appear on TV—drawing criticism from legal experts, who have said their claims about same-sex marriage’s impact on churches’ tax exemptions and public-school education are misleading—the polls began to swing the other way.

In 2000, more than 60 percent of California voters approved a measure with wording similar to the initiative on this year’s ballot. That law, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, was challenged on constitutional grounds after Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. The state Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional earlier this year.

Voters Deadlocked on Same-Sex Marriage Ban in California
U.S. News & World Report - Washington,DC,USA