Friday Gay Blogging: Marriage: The Backlash Continues

In New Jersey:

A new poll finds about half of New Jersey voters support allowing gay couples to marry.

The Quinnipiac University Poll results are similar to a Monmouth University poll in
February.

The latest poll finds 49 percent support gay marriage while 43 percent are opposed. Women and whites tend to favor a gay marriage law, while blacks, men and those who attend religious services weekly are more likely to oppose it.

In New York:

A majority of New Yorkers support a bill legalizing gay marriage, according to a poll released on Monday, but the measure still faces an uphill battle in the state legislature.

By a margin of 53 to 39 percent, New York voters said they backed Governor David Paterson's proposal enabling same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses, said the poll by the Siena Research Institute at Siena College in Loudonville, New York.

And in Maine:

The poll, conducted by a Portland-based firm earlier this month, showed that 47.3 percent of those surveyed support changing Maine statutes to allow marriage licenses to be issued to any two people regardless of their sex while 49.5 percent oppose it. The rest of the Maine residents polled hadn’t made up their minds on the issue. The poll has a margin of error rate of 4.9 percent.

That's a statistical dead heat.

And in Iowa, on the eve of the Iowa Supreme Court's ruling:

A new University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll released Thursday shows 60 percent of Iowans under age 30 support same-sex marriage, and three-fourths of Iowans under 30 favor some formal recognition of same-sex relationships. That indicates that passion objection could fade over time. . . .

Overall, only one-third of Iowans polled say they are opposed to any form of same-sex relationships. The rest either favor same-sex marriage or civil unions, although the court’s ruling clearly eliminated civil unions as an option.

Consider other aspects of the backlash:

In Massachusetts, opponents of same-sex marriage weren't able to get a constitutional amendment through the legislature, at least in part because legislators who opposed SSM lost their seats in the interim election.

Opponents of SSM in Illinois weren't able to get enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot -- in two successive elections. (Illinois only permits an advisory referendum, which makes it even worse.)

The legislature of Vermont overrode the governor's veto of SSM-enabling legislation.

The opposition in California to SSM dropped from 62% to52% in ten years.

Yeah, there's a backlash, alright. The only question is, against who?