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Published: November 13, 2009

Voter fatigue

Poll says Californians don’t want to revisit same-sex marriage issue anytime soon

Nearly 60 percent of California voters say they don’t want to see an initiative seeking to overturn Proposition 8 on the 2010 ballot, a recent poll by the Los Angeles Times and the University of Southern California reveals.

In a Nov. 6 story about the poll, the Times reported “almost three in five Californians did not want to revisit the issue in 2010.” The poll surveyed 1,500 registered voters between Oct. 27 and Nov. 3, said the newspaper, and was conducted by “two nationally prominent polling firms, the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies.”

Proponents of same-sex marriage are divided on when to attempt to place a measure before voters to overturn Proposition 8, an initiative approved by California voters in November 2008 by a margin of 52% to 48%. Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment, overturned a 4-3 state supreme court decision declaring unconstitutional legal restrictions on same-sex marriages. Prop 8 added a provision to the state constitution restricting marriage to between one man and one woman. The proposition survived a post-election challenge before the state’s high court, but is now being contested before a federal judge.

Supporters of same-sex marriage have split on whether to push for repeal of Proposition 8 next year or to wait until national elections in 2012, when many more voters are likely to go to the polls than in 2010’s off-year election. On Sept. 29, those seeking to place a repeal initiative on the 2010 ballot submitted a letter to the attorney general with the proposed wording of their measure. The letter was signed by Fr. Geoffrey Farrow, the former Fresno diocesan priest suspended from his parish and banned from the diocese for defying his bishop over Proposition 8, and eight others representing a coalition of same-sex marriage supporters. Petitions seeking to qualify another repeal initiative are already being circulated by a group calling itself Yes! On Equality, but the group appears unlikely to garner the nearly 695,000 signatures required before the Nov. 19 deadline.
Meanwhile, Equality California, the group that spearheaded opposition to Prop 8 in 2008, announced in August that its leaders had decided it would be better to wait until 2012 to seek repeal.
“The survey showed that same-sex marriage continues to reverberate differently along racial and generational lines,” the Times reported. “A little more than half of whites backed it, while slightly fewer than half of African Americans and Latinos did. All three groups, however, opposed having to vote on it in 2010.”

Fifty-one percent of those polled expressed support for same-sex marriage, while 43% said they were opposed, according to the LA Times/USC poll. But polling on the issue has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable. For example, polls taken before the vote on Proposition 8 indicated the measure would be defeated. More recently in Maine, pollsters said a measure to repeal same-sex marriage there was a dead heat, but on election day, voters rejected same-sex marriage by a margin of 53% to 47%. The issue has been put before voters now in 31 different states, and in every instance voters have rejected same-sex marriage.

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