paper_ariyawat

Abstract ~Ariyawat~

          Since the U.S Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages in June 2015, many conflicts have happened. There was a clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage, and there was a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. The argument about allowing same-sex couples to legally adopt children has become more serious. We in the ESL class made this survey to find the perception of TTU members of these problems. We collected data from 145 TTU members with about the same amount of males and females. Most of them were Americans. We found many interesting relations among support for same-sex marriage and adoption, genders, ages, religions and political party. 

Keywords: same-sex marriages, adoption

The perception of same-sex marriage and adoption from TTU members

          Since the U.S Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages in June 2015 (Vogue & Diamond, 2015), many conflicts have happened. Kentucky clerk Kim Davis refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses and she was imprisoned; many people opposed her while many people supported her, especially the pope, Francis, and many priests (Abbott, 2015). A baker in Colorado also refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The clerk and the baker said that they had the right to follow their religion’s order. And there also were problems about allowing same-sex couples to adopt children; a couple mentioned their struggles of their child if the child was not legally adopted (Pettus, 2015). Many surveys in the past have shown us the relations between support for same-sex marriages and time. Every survey we found had had the same common thing, which was that support for same-sex couple was increasing; a survey showed that almost half (47%) of the general Americans public supported same-sex marriages (Jones et al., 2011).

          We were studying in ESL-5301, an Advanced Writing class, at Texas Tech University in fall 2015. Although there were many surveys about the opinions from many types of people in the U.S. about same-sex marriages, we still wanted to know the feelings, perceptions and support or opposition from Texas Tech University members: undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty members and staff. 

          Texas Tech University, or TTU, is a public university in Lubbock, Texas. The university had more than thirty thousand students, of whom up to twenty eight thousand students were undergraduates (Sims, 2014). With the huge number of students, I believed that Texas Tech would have well distributed opinions.

          Our purpose for this research was to find the relations among same-sex arguments: legalizing of Supreme Court, adoptions and health of same-sex couples, genders, ages, religions and political parties. For example, we wanted to know how many Democrats and Republicans support same-sex marriages, how politics was significant in these arguments and how strong religion was related to support for same-sex marriages, etc.

Literature Review

          Same-sex marriage has caused many conflicts in not only the U.S., but also Mexico; Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, legalized same-sex marriage since 2009; the state of Campeche in Mexico stopped banning same-sex couple adoption (Tejas, 2015), while only 24 percent of Mexicans supported allowing same-sex couples’ adoption and the Catholic churches in Mexico were objecting to same-sex marriages.

          There are many surveys in the U.S. about support for same-sex marriages and their adoption. A survey in 2011 (Jones et al., 2011) shows that millennials (age 18–29 in 2011) supported legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption by more than 62 percent. Research from the Pew Research Center in 2013 (PewResearchCenter, 2013) showed that since 2003 the trend of support for allowing same-sex marriage kept increasing.

          There were some relations between political alignments and support for same-sex marriages; a survey from Public Religion Research Institute (Public Religion Research Institute, 2015) showed that the Democrats have more support than the Republicans, 71% and 58% respectively. A survey (PewResearchCenter, 2015) also showed that Democrats had always had more support than Republicans since 2001. However support for legalization of same-sex marriages of both Republicans and Democrats tended to increase all the time.

          The gender also had some influence. A survey from the Pew Research Center (PewResearchCenter, 2015) showed that women supported same-sex marriages (58%) slightly more than men (53%). Although, the difference of the support for same-sex marriages between males and females was not much, another survey (PewResearchCenter, 2013) also showed that women had always had more support than men since 2001; unless the gender had no influence, females should not always have more support than men for all those time. However the difference between support of men and women was almost the same all the time, which meant men and women kept increasing their support with the same growth rate.

          Legalization of same-sex marriage also was the cause of some other important arguments, which include whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children legally. Although same-sex marriages had been legalized nationwide, same-sex couples’ adoption had not (Beitsch, 2015), especially in Mississippi, the last state that didn’t allow same-sex couples’ adoption (Lewin, 2015). There was a case that same-sex couples sued Mississippi to allow them to adopt children (Pettus, 2015). However, the new generation of American support supported allowing same-sex couples to adopt children; a survey (Jones et al., 2011) showed that 62 percent of millennials and 47 percent of American public supported allowing same-sex couple’s adoption.

          One of the most critical conflicts after legalization same-sex marriage was religious conflict. There were many cases, which people opposing same-sex marriages refused to service gay couples because of their right to follow their religion. Kentucky clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses, and she was imprisoned for five days and was released on Tuesday, September 8, 2015 (Hanna, Payne & Shoichet, 2015). The imprisonment of the clerk caused many arguments from those who supported and opposed her. Pope Francis is backing County clerk Kim Davis; the pope blamed homosexual marriages as “destroying God's plan” in 2013 when he wasn’t yet the pope (Abbott, 2015); the pope also said in November 2014 that children raised by father and mother would grow up with good emotion and without a social wound. Many priests also support Kim Davis; a priest said that Kim Davis is fighting with Christ; another one said that the Clerk was right because she was a clerk since before legalization of same-sex marriages and she followed the constitution, in which people have the right to follow their religion. Some people called her a hero (Blinder & Fausset, 2015).

          Another example of religious issues is that a cake baker in Colorado refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Then the Colorado Court of Appeals decided that the baker disobeyed the law of Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (Hanna, Cadigan & Weisfeldt, 2015), while the baker said that his religion opposed same-sex marriages, and that the constitution would allow him to follow his religion.

          Although the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages, some states, like Florida, backed the religious groups’ opposing gay marriage (Gryboski, 2015).

          Although Christianity opposed same-sex marriages, a survey from British Social Attitudes surveys (Clements, 2011) showed that in every Christian denomination, the number of people, who disagreed that homosexual relation was always wrong, had kept decreasing since 1996. And the survey also showed that the support for allowing lesbian couple’s to adopt a child had kept increasing since 1993 in every Christian denomination.

Hypotheses

          Many surveys show that Americans tend to support same-sex marriages and adoption, especially young people, and the majority of Texas Tech students are undergraduates. Therefore, I believe that the majority of TTU members will support same-sex marriages and adoptions.

          Because a survey (Public Religion Research Institute, 2015) showed that the Democrats supported same-sex marriages more than the Republicans, I believe that I will have the same result from TTU members.

          A Pew Research Center’s survey (PewResearchCenter, 2015) showed that women had slightly more support for same-sex marriages than men; I believe that in TTU, women will also support same-sex marriages more than men.

          A survey (Jones et al., 2011) showed that the majority (53%) of the general American public supported allowing same-sex couples’ adoption; I believe that the majority of TTU members will not consider same-sex couples less stable than heterosexual couples.

          There is much opposition in religion against same-sex marriages: the clerk, priests, the baker, etc. I want to know in TTU how religion relates to supporting same-sex marriage.

Methods

          According to my hypotheses in this research, I wanted to know these: whether or not the majority of Texas Tech University members would support same-sex marriages and adoptions; which, Democrats or Republicans in Texas Tech University, would have more support for same-sex marriages; whether women would support same-sex marriages more than men in Texas Tech University; whether the majority of Texas Tech University members would not consider same-sex couples less stable than heterosexual couples; and how religion related to supporting same-sex marriage.

          To answer the first question, we had this question, “Do you agree with the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage?” and this, “Do you agree that gay couples should be able to adopt children?” in our survey. Moreover, the type of the answers of these questions was a Likert scale, in which their answer rank was the set of integers one to five; 5 = strongly agree, 1 = strongly disagree. We used a Likert scale because it is more flexible to explain how strong the feeling people have about these issues.

          To the second question, we added this question, “How do you identify yourself politically?” and its answers were “Republican”, “Democrat”, “other (specify)” and “independent”. We not only asked whether he/she was a Democrat or Republican, but we also had those other two answers because we believed that some would not be Republican or Democrat and some might prefer not to answer this question. Furthermore, we thought we might find more relations among other political alignments.

          To the third question, we also added two checklists to get the information about whether he/she was physically male or female: “___ Male        ___ Female”.

          To answer the fourth question, we also added this question, “Do you think gay couples are more stable or less stable than heterosexual couples?” and its answers were “More stable”, “No difference”, “Less stable” and “don’t know”. Because the word “Less stable” means not being equal or more, we will consider the persons who answer “No difference” and “More stable” to agree with our hypotheses (“TTU members will not consider same-sex couples less stable than heterosexual couples”).

          To correspond to our fifth hypotheses, we added this question “Do you consider yourself religious”, and its answers were “Yes, very”, “Yes, slightly”, “No”, “dislike religion”, “other: explain”. With this question, we believed that we could gather enough information to conclude how strong the religion related to supporting same-sex marriage.

In order to make this survey statistical, we had the rules that we would ask only TTU members, but we were allowed to ask outside campus as long as the answers came from Texas Tech University members. However, we found this later that these rules had some defects, because we allowed doing surveys in student Bible study, which might slew our results. Hopefully, only a few surveys’ answers came from this source.

          Our surveys came from 145 Texas Tech University members; 75 of them were from females and 70 of them were from males.  For the age, 25 of them were from ages less than 20, 76 of them were from ages 20-29, 30 of them were from ages 30-39, two of them were from ages 40-49, five of them were from ages 50-59 and seven of them were from ages 60-69, For nationality, 127 of them were Americans (91 of them were from Texas) and 18 of them were international.

After we collected data, we kept them in a Microsoft Excel file. Only few data can’t be interpreted, because some field was missing.

Result

          According to my first hypothesis, I believed that the majority of Texas Tech University members would support same-sex marriages and adoptions.

          I was right; the majority of TTU members support legalizing gay marriage. The result, as shown in Fig. 1, was that only 20% (29 of 145 persons) disagreed, 17% (24 of 145 persons) were neutral, and the majority, 63% (91 of 145 persons), of Texas Tech University members agreed or strongly agreed, whom we considered as support; the highest amount answers, which had 51% of total, was strongly agreed.

          For supporting allowing gay couples' adoption, I was also right that the majority of TTU support for allowing same-sex couple to adopt children. The result, as shown from Fig. 2, was that only 14% (20 of 145) disagreed, 15% (21 of 145) were neutral and the majority, 71% of Texas Tech University members agreed or strongly agree. The most popular answer was “strongly agreed”, which was 55% of the total people,

Fig. 1 shows support for legalizing gay marriage from TTU member.

Fig. 2 shows support for allowing gay couples' adoption

          In my second hypothesis, I believed that Democrats in Texas Tech University would be more likely to support legalizing same-sex marriages.

          My hypothesis was right. Texas Tech University Democrats had more support than Republicans significantly. The most agreement of Democrat was strongly agreement, of which the number was superior high, while Republicans’ number of strongly agreement was just minority. My result, as shown in Fig. 5, was that most of the Democrats in TTU (91%) agreed with legalizing same-sex marriages, while almost half (46%) of Republicans disagreed, and only 26% of Republicans agreed. For the independents, 71% of them agreed. For other political alignments, 67% agreed.

This result (Fig. 6) came from 145 TTU members, of whom 27% were Republicans, 23% were Democrats, 42% were independent and 8% were others.

Fig. 3 shows support for legalizing gay marriage from TTU Republicans.

Fig. 4 shows support for legalizing gay marriage from TTU Democrats.

Fig. 5 shows support for legalizing gay marriage from difference political orientation.

Fig. 6 shows TTU political distribution.

          According to my third hypothesis, I predicted that women would support same-sex marriages more than men.

          I was right. In TTU, females had more slightly support than males, and also female had less slightly opposition than males. From 75 males and 70 females and as shown in Fig. 7, 66% of females agreed with legalizing same-sex marriage, while 60% of males agreed. Only 21% of males and 18% of females disagreed. 19% of males and 15% of females were neutral.

Fig. 7 shows support for legalizing same-sex marriage from different genders.

          In my fourth hypothesis, I believed that the majority of TTU members would not consider same-sex couples less stable than heterosexual couples.

          I was also right. From 141 persons, as shown in Fig. 8, the majority, 71%, of Texas Tech University members considered same-sex couples not less stable. Up to 66% of Texas Tech University members said there were no difference, while only 5% considered them more stable; and only 12% considered them less stable.

Fig. 8 shows opinion about gay couple’s stability compared to heterosexual couple’s.

          In my last hypothesis, I wanted to know how religion related to supporting same-sex marriage.

          The relation was found that the more distant from religion people were, the more they agreed on legalizing same-sex marriage. As shown in Figure 10, 46% the people who consider themselves very religious disagreed with same-sex marriages, while 38% of them agreed. For slightly religious consideration, 6% of them disagreed, and 74% of them agreed. For no religious consideration, 8% disagreed and 78% agreed. For those who dislike religion, no one disagreed and 83% agreed. For others, 100% of them agreed.

          The data came from 143 Texas Tech University members as shown in Fig. 9, of whom 35% considered themselves very religious; 33% considered themselves slightly religious; 26% of them disliked religion and the last 2% were others.

Fig.9 shows TTU religious consideration’s distribution

Fig.10 shows the relation of TTU religious consideration’s distribution to support for same-sex marriages.

Discussion

          We thought that the majority of Texas Tech University members would support legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption, and that happened. The reason was that we had found from research (Jones et al., 2011) that the millennials trended to support same-sex marriages, and the most of our data came from millennails and younger. Therefore, we were not surprised that the Texas Tech University members supported same-sex marriage and adoption. We knew that the older people had less support for same-sex marriage than younger people, but even among the people aged 50 and over, it was found that the majority of them also supported legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption. This result agreed with the research from the Pew Research Center in 2013 (PewResearchCenter, 2013), which found that the more time passed, the more people supported same-sex marriage and adoption.

          We thought that Texas Tech University Democrats would have more support for same-sex marriage than Republicans. Our result also found that Texas Tech University Democrats had significantly more support. As we suspected, Republicans had always had less support, which agreed with our result. The distribution of Texas Tech University Democrats and Republicans we collected were mostly the same (they were not likely to be older or younger); the percentage of support from Democrats in Texas Tech University was significantly higher than from American public as shown from a survey (Public Religion Research Institute, 2015), while the support of Republican wasn’t higher significantly; therefore if our data was representative, we could imply that Democrats were trending to support same-sex marriages faster than Republicans. Although Republicans had less support than Democrats, the support of Republicans was almost half. Nevertheless, we found that the majority of Texas Tech University said that they were independent, which made us suspect whether the new generation of people had less participation in politics, or that people would participate more when they got older, or that they had participated, but didn’t identify with either party. For people who said that they were of other political alignments, the majority of them also support same-sex marriages, but there were only a few people in this group. So we could not focus on the result of this last group.

          We thought that in Texas Tech University, women would have slightly more support for same-sex marriages than men, and that happened. The research (PewResearchCenter, 2015) showed that American women had slightly more support than men, and our result agreed with it. Therefore, I suspected that Texas Tech University males and females might be able to be the representative of the whole population of American males and females. Although we did not focus on how Texas Tech University members could represent the whole country, it would be interesting to research more about it.

          We thought that Texas Tech University members would not consider same-sex couples less stable than heterosexual couples, and that also happened. It was straightforward that the majority of Texas Tech University members agreed with allowing same-sex couples’ adoption; therefore, they should not consider same-sex couples less stable. Nevertheless, most people considered same-sex couples’ stability no different from the heterosexual couples’, while a very few considered them more stable or less stable. The reason was that people tended to increase their support for same-sex marriages over time, so it was easier for them to believe that people were not restricted to love with the same gender; so the more people accepted the same-sex marriages, the more people thought they were no different. However, most people didn’t believe that their marriages was more stable, because it’s possible that they just believed in liberty of love, and did not necessarily believe in same-sex loving.

          We wanted to know the relation of religion to the support for same-sex marriage. And the result showed that the more people considered themselves religious, the less support people had. However, from the people who considered themselves very religious and the people who considered themselves slightly religious, the support of each was very different; the growth of the graph was not linear but exponential. Hence, we could see that the words “very” and “slightly” had much significance. However the result from people who considered themselves slightly religious, having no religion or disliking religion produced linear results, such that we could conclude that they were not very different. For adoption, we found that the people who were very religious had more support for allowing same-sex couples’ adoption than for same-sex marriages. The reason I believed was that although they didn’t agree with same-sex marriages, they agreed that a child should have a family. There was a question in our survey asking whether they agreed that pastors who don’t want to officiate a wedding had the right to refuse to serve gays; it was interesting that only half of people who said they were slightly religious agreed with the pastor, and also the half of non-religious people agreed with it, while there were up to 80% of people who were very religious who agreed; I suspected that slightly religious people had some things in common with non-religious people rather than in common with very religious people.  Moreover, the distribution of religious consideration was such that the numbers of people who were very, slightly and not religious were almost the same, so I wondered about this equality of these three groups, and I thought it would be interesting to find out the reason.

          For limitation, our research had some limitations about age and religious diversity. We could find a good amount of males and females (the ratio of the number of males to the number of females of the university (Collegefactual, 2015) was almost the same as the ratio of our data), which could be representative of the whole university. For age diversity, our diversity was also almost the same as the university’s diversity, but we had very few people who were over 40 years old. If we had the chance, we could collect more data to make sure that we had enough data to interpret and give reliable results in terms of a variety of ages. For religion, although we knew that some religions reject same-sex marriages (i.e. Catholic Christianity), some religions (i.e. Buddhism) didn’t mention being against same-sex marriage, but because our research had very few people in other religions and didn’t have them identify their religion, we could not conclude anything about them. Nevertheless, this might be a flaw of our survey, which didn’t mention that they should tell that their religion was Christianity. So it was possible that some people, who were very religious in other religions, answered in our survey that they were very religious. This meant we couldn’t distinguish very Buddhist people from very Christian people.

Conclusion

          After legalizing same-sex marriage, many issues related to it emerged in the whole country. We made this research to find how Texas Tech University member thought about these issues. And eventually, our research found that the majority of Texas Tech University supported same-sex marriages and adoption in almost every age. I wondered whether the number of people who supported would be increasing all the time. We found that the Democrats had more support than Republicans, but I interested in why the majority of Texas Tech University said they were independent politically. Women had slightly more support than men. People agreed that the stability of the same-sex couple and the heterosexual couple was not different. The more religious people considered themselves to be, the less support for same-sex marriage they had; however, their support for allowing same-sex adoption was quite high. In every aspect we included, we hoped that they could be the representative of the bigger scale, like state or the whole country,

Appendix I

Survey

ESL 5301-001                     

Gay Marriage & Issues Survey – answer them as you wish.

Thank you for filling out our survey!

1. ___ Male             ___ Female

2. Age:    ___ <20    ___ 20-29     ___ 30-39    ___ 40-49    ___ 50-59    ___ 60-69    ___70 & older

3. Where are you from?
___ Texas                ___ USA, not Texas             ___ international
___ Republican      ___ Democrat     ___ other (specify)     ___ independent
___ Yes                     ___ No
11. What matters most when finding an adoptive home for a child or children? Put 1 as most important, 2, 3, & 4, least important
___ Yes (she should follow her conscience)                             

4. How do you identify yourself politically?

5. Do you consider yourself religious?

___ Yes, very           ___ Yes, slightly                 ___ No       ___ dislike religion           ___ other: explain

6. Do you have family members who are gay?

7. Do you agree with the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage? 5 = strongly agree, 1 = strongly disagree

1               2               3               4               5

8. Did you change your mind on the issue of gay marriage over the past few years? If so, what changed your mind?

9. How do you think the decision will affect the lives of LGBT people? Check the ones you feel are true.

___ they will be healthier and have less stress

___ they will be happier

___ they will be less likely to hide their status

___ they will be more likely to participate in civic and religious activities

10. Do you agree that gay couples should be able to adopt children? 5 = strongly agree,

1 = strongly disagree

1               2               3               4               5

___ income, financial security                                          ___ having two parents that love each other

___ parental love for children                                          ___ having appropriate gender role models

12. Do you think children raised in a gay family are more likely to be gay than other children?

___ Yes    ___ Yes slightly     ___ No difference     ___ Less likely

13. Do you think gay couples are more stable or less stable than heterosexual couples?

___ More stable                    ___ No difference     ___ Less stable      ____ don’t know

14. How will it affect children to be raised by gay parents? What difference is there, if any?

15. Do you support Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples?

___ No (she should do her job)

___ No opinion/other opinion

16. Do you feel that the bakers had a right to refuse to bake a cake for gay couples?

___ Yes, they have religious freedom to refuse to do that

___ No, they should not be allowed to discriminate in who they serve

___ other (specify)

17. Which of the following, if any, do you feel have the right to refuse to serve gays? (check as many as you wish, or none)

___ pastors who don’t want to officiate a wedding

___ doctors/emergency responders

___ bakers who feel that their cakes are expression of their art

___ artists who don’t want to create a picture for a gay wedding

___ religious adoption agency which doesn’t want to place children in gay families

References

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Beitsch, R. (2015, August 19). Despite same-sex marriage ruling, gay adoption rights uncertain in some states. USA Today. Retrieved on September 8, 2015 from: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/19/despite-same-sex-marriage-ruling-gay-adoption-rights-uncertain-some-states/31992309/

Blinder, A., & Fausset, R. (2015, September 1). Kentucky clerk, a local fixture, suddenly becomes a national symbol. The New York Times. Retrieved on September 1, 2015 from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/us/kentucky-clerk-a-local-fixture-suddenly-becomes-a-national-symbol.html?ribbon-ad-idx=2&rref=us

Clements, B. (2011, August 8). Attitudes towards gay rights. British Religion in Numbers. Retrieved on September 17, 2015 from: http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/attitudes-towards-gay-rights/

Gryboski, M. (2015, August 12). Florida may protect religious groups that oppose gay marriage. The Christian Post.  Retrieved on October 8, 2015 from: http://www.christianpost.com/news/florida-may-protect-religious-groups-that-oppose-gay-marriage-142690/.

Hanna, J., Cadigan, W.J. and Weisfeldt, S.  (2015, August 13). Court rules against Colorado cake shop in same-sex marriage case. cnn. Retrieved on August 13, 2015 from: http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/13/us/colorado-same-sex-wedding-cake/index.html

Hanna, J., Payne, E. and Shoichet, C. E. (2015, September 8). Kim Davis released, but judge bars her from withholding marriage licenses. cnn, Retrieved September 8, 2015, from: http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/08/politics/kim-davis-same-sex-marriage-kentucky/index.html

Jones, R.P., Cox, D., & Cook, E. (2011, August 8). Survey: Generations at Odds: The millennial generation and the future of gay and lesbian rights. publicreligion. Retrieved on September 15, 2015 from: http://publicreligion.org/research/2011/08/generations-at-odds/#.VfiE4BFViko

Lewin, T. (2015, August 12). Mississippi ban on adoptions by same-sex couples is challenged. The New York Times. Retrieved on September 1, 2015 from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/mississippi-ban-on-adoptions-same-sex-couples-challenged.html?ref=topics&_r=0

Pettus, E.W. (2015, August 28). Judge is asked to block ban on adoption by gay couples. Djournal. Retrieved on September 1, 2015 from: http://djournal.com/news/judge-asked-block-ban-adoption-gay-couples/

PewResearchCenter (2013, March 20). Growing support for gay marriage: Changed minds and changing demographics. Retrieved on September 15, 2015 from: http://www.people-press.org/2013/03/20/growing-support-for-gay-marriage-changed-minds-and-changing-demographics/

PewReserchCenter (2015, June 29). Changing attitudes on gay marriage. Retrieved on October 8, 2015 from: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/07/29/graphics-slideshow-changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/

Public Religion Research Institute (2015, June 11). Survey: Majority favor same-sex marriage; two-thirds believe Supreme Court will rule to legalize. Retrieved on September 29, 2015 from: http://publicreligion.org/research/2015/06/survey-majority-favor-same-sex-marriage-two-thirds-believe-supreme-court-will-rule-to-legalize/#.Vgrg8_nBwXA

Sims, K. (2014, October 23). Diverse student population rapidly growing. Texas Tech Today. Retrieved on October 8, 2015 from: http://today.ttu.edu/posts/2014/10/diverse-student-population-rapidly-growing

Tejas, A. (2015, August 12). Mexico Supreme Court strikes down same-sex adoption ban. International Business Times. Retrieved on September 8, 2015 from: http://www.ibtimes.com/mexico-supreme-court-strikes-down-same-sex-adoption-ban-2049533

Texas Tech University Diversity. (2013, February 20). Retrieved November 5, 2015, from: http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/texas-tech-university/student-life/diversity/

Vogue, A.D., & Diamond, J. (2015 June 27), Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide. cnn. Retrieved on September 22, 2015 from: http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/politics/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-ruling/\