The Sixty-Seven Percent Solution

Last week, a CBS News/New York Times poll of 973 adults nationwide found that 67 percent - that's two-thirds of those interviewed - support legal recognition of same-sex couples.

Only 28 percent favor no legal recognition, down 7 points in one month from a similar poll in March. The Iowa-Vermont effect?

The interesting thing to me is that support for equal marriage is nearly double that for civil unions - when you might have expected more people who are squeamish about the M-word would have gone the other way. But obviously the idea of "second-class marriages" doesn't hold nearly as much appeal as it used to among the great straight majority. That's wonderful. Sure seems like we are reaching a tipping point here, if other polls bear out this same finding.

Actually, it's breathtaking to someone like me, who is old enough to remember reading the morning headlines when I was in high school about cops raiding the one gay bar in town, hauling the patrons off to jail for "lewd and lascivious conduct" - i. e., groping an undercover cop who deliberately enticed somebody into touching him.

I was deep, deep in the closet back then, of course; and reading about things like that in the local newspaper was very scary - terrifying - to a very isolated gay kid like me, with absolutely no one to confide in.

But how times have changed. Wow.

(Honk to Joe.My.God.)

P.S. - Something I just noticed, looking at the CBS pie chart above: it seems to be subtly biased. Notice how the "no legal recognition" segment is placed in the dominant position at top, and is lighter colored; moreover, the marriage segment is cut away slightly next to the NLR segment: all of these little things make the NLR piece look a little bigger than it really is, don't you think? A little homophobia in the CBS art department, perhaps?