Voters on S-S Marriage

Today’s Boston Globe includes poll results of 501 Massachusetts adults conducted by the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Survey Center March 5 through 8. It had questions on both same-sex marriage and stem-cell research. Let’s assume that neither topic nor the question phrasing skewed the results.

Note: These links may disappear. I’ll try remove them if I find that they do.

The article's conclusions include:

Support for gay marriage comes primarily from Democrat's, those under 35 years of age, people with post-graduate educations, and those with no religious affiliation. Republicans are more likely to oppose gay marriage. Protestants were split on the issue, and Catholics opposed legalized gay marriage by 49-44 percent, within the margin of error.

(Andrew E. Smith, the UNH center’s director) said that the strong support from the 18-to-34-year-old age group shows that controversy over gay marriage will fade as older people who tend to oppose gay marriage begin to due.

The following results are for the same-sex-marriage set. I have paraphrased the much longer questions.

SHOULD SAME-SEX MARRIAGE BE LEGAL?

	YES	NO	DON'T KNOW
OVERALL	56	37	7
PARTY AFFILIATION
Democrat	63	32	5
Republican	39	56	5
Undeclared	52	40	8
GENDER
Female	60	33	6
Male	51	41	7
AGE
18-34	71	26	3
35-49	53	37	10
50-64	57	37	5
65=	42	52	6
RELIGION
Protestant	47	47	6
Roman Catholic	49	44	7
Other	60	35	5
None	80	12	8

POTENTIAL 2006 SAME-SEX BALLOT QUESTION

	YES	NO	DON'T KNOW
Should question be on ballot?	54	41	5
Would you vote for it?	45	45	10