AnThe Unprecedented Shift In Attitudes About Gay Marriage

In a piece that will likely cause the anti-gay professional Christians and hate group leaders to wail and gnash their teeth, Business Insider looks at the huge shifts that have occurred in public support for same sex marriage.  And the piece gives a great deal of credit to Barrack Obama for the the shift in support even though he has done little substantively to champion gay marriage rights.  The article also notes that religious based bigotry remains the main predictor of opposition to gay marriage and anti-gay animus in general.  Here are some excerpts:

But despite the rhetoric, Obama has taken few steps to influence a change of policy. That changed Friday night, as his administration weighed in with a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court case on Section 3 of the DOMA case, urging it to be struck down as unconstitutional.

"The law denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples. Because this discrimination cannot be justified as substantially furthering any important governmental interest, Section 3 is unconstitutional," Solicitor General Donald Verrilli wrote.

Polls show that by weighing in, Obama and the White House are siding with the majority of Americans.  In the last decade — and especially in the last few years — Americans' attitude toward gay marriage has shifted dramatically.  . . . . ."The change in attitude is certainly unprecedented," Greg Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, told Business Insider in November. 

The shift has been similar at the state level. For example, in Iowa, a moderate swing state where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2009, two Public Policy Polling surveys show a 10-point net increase in support for gay marriage over the past 16 months alone. According to the PPP survey conducted this month, 76 percent of those surveyed said the state's legalization of same-sex marriage had no effect on their lives.

What's driving support? Self-identified independent voters. Here's a look at how they've shifted in Iowa from October 2011 to February 2013:

Religious attitudes continue to be the main driver of the opposition to gay marriage. Gallup found in a December poll that 63 percent of Americans opposed to gay marriage said they were opposed because of religious-related reasons. According to the same poll, 53 percent of respondents said they favored legalizing gay marriage, tying a record high..

The other big holdouts are conservatives and Republicans. According to Gallup, only 30 percent of Republicans think gay marriage should be legal. That compares with an astounding 73 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Independents. 

The tie cited between religious extremists and Republicans, of course, is due to the fact that the GOP has become a sectarian party  controlled by Christofascist extremists.