Abstract
This paper explores people’s perception
about the issue of gay marriage and adoption, particularly those who are
studying or working on the Texas Tech campus. Since the legalization of gay
marriage by the Supreme Court in June, 2015, the topic of gay marriage has
gained a lot of limelight with the people and the media talking about it more
openly. As a result, we decided to survey the people on the Texas Tech campus
regarding this issue in order to understand how they felt about it. A total of
145 Americans were surveyed where we asked them about their opinion regarding
gay marriage, gay adoption, and stability in the lifestyles of the homosexual
couples and the children adopted by them. Many hypotheses and assumptions were
made while constructing the survey questions and some surprising yet important
results were obtained from this survey.
Keywords: gay marriage, gay adoption, survey,
stability. -Harnoor
People’s Perception about Gay Marriage & Related Issues
Introduction
Gay marriage has always been a very controversial
topic in our society, but this issue has gained a lot of limelight in the past few
months. On the 26th of June, a Supreme Court ruling made same sex marriage
a right nationwide, with the polls indicating that most Americans now approved of
the marriage between two people of the same sex (Liptak, 2015). While the people
celebrated this day waving rainbow flags, there have been a few incidents which
highlighted that gay marriage is still not accepted by many people in the society
due to various religious beliefs. Some of such events which could be seen very actively
as headlines were a Kentucky Clerk’s refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples,
and a Colorado baker’s refusal to bake a cake for a gay couple. Another issue that
gained a lot of attention was regarding the adoption rights to gay couples.
The Kentucky clerk’s refusal to issue marriage
licenses to gay couples highlighted the fact that even though gay marriage has been
legalized, there are many people who are not ready to accept these rules. Her refusal
to issue marriage licenses to gay couples earned her a lot of supporters which included
some advocates and clerks from other counties as well. She was jailed for six days,
and even when she was released, she remained quite firm on her decision of not issuing
marriage licenses to gay couples (Bittenbender, 2015).
Another interesting issue has been regarding
gay adoption rights. It has been seen that despite gay marriage being made legal,
there are still issues relating to gay adoption rights in manystates. It has also
been highlighted in many newspaper articles that living with gay parents does not
negatively affect the emotional well-being of a child, yet they have been easily
de-prioritized and discriminated against adoption (Beitsch, 2015).
After we read about these issues, we decided
to ask Americans on the Texas Tech Campus about their viewpoints in this regard.
Texas Tech is one of the largest universities in Texas with around 2,554 academic
staff (Texas Tech University Institutional Research, 2012) and 35,134 students (Cook,
2014). After we read about these issues, we decided to ask the people on the Texas
Tech Campus about their viewpoints in this matter and we conducted a survey to collect
information. We wanted to find out whether the people in Texas Tech have similar
or different opinions to what the surveys conducted outside the campus have shown.
It might help us reach a common conclusion about people’s viewpoints regarding gay
marriage.
Literature
Review
Based on the articles and the surveys read
about various issues relating to gay marriage, we compiled a number of facts to
develop some hypotheses and assumptions. It was noted that people’s perspective
about gay marriage changed dramatically over the past many years. Statistics showed
that in the year 1996, about 68% Americans opposed gay marriage, while only 27%
supported it (Schulzke, 2015). In the year 2015, these figures changed a lot, with
40% of the population opposing gay marriage and an increasing 60% of the people
supporting it. It was observed through various statistics and surveys that one of
the basic reasons for the change in opinion could be due to generational change.
It was reported that 73% of the Millennial Americans (between the age group 18-34)
supported same sex marriage, whereas only 27% of the older people supported it (Schulzke,
2015). This issue also has a political angle, with the Democrats strongly supporting
gay marriage and adoption, and the Republicans not favoring this issue to a large
extent.
Of the many issues raised after the legalization
of gay marriage, the one issue which gathered the attention of the whole country
was a Kentucky Clerk’s refusal to grant licenses to gay couples. This matter came
into the news when Ms. Davis rejected five marriage licenses to gay couples, thereby
defying the Supreme Court’s decision (Tashman, 2015). Interestingly, after this
incident, many of the clergy and clerks from several states showed their support
towards Ms. Davis’s decision. She was jailed for six days but still she stood firm
on her decision, as she believed that supporting homosexual marriage was against
her religious beliefs. After she was released from jail, it was mentioned that she
would continue working in the same position, but it wasn’t clear if she would obey
the Supreme Court’s order (Hanna, Payne & Shoichet 2015). A survey conducted
with regards to this issue showed that 63% of people felt that the county clerk
should issue marriage licenses to gay couples regardless of her religious background,
whereas 33% did not agree with this idea (Somashekhar & Craighill, 2015). The
survey also showed that 80% of Democrats, 75% of independents and 66% of Republicans
felt that homosexual people should be treated equally.
Another important issue that created
caused controversy was of gay adoption rights. It was shown in a survey that 63%
of Americans were in favor of adoption by same sex couples (Swift, 2014). The major
support for the adoption rights came from Democrats (80%) which was followed by
independents (61%) and then by Republicans (51%). Also, it was observed that the
support for gay adoption declined with increasing age groups, with 77% of Millennials
supporting it and 51% of people aged above 65 favoring it. The previous studies
showed that in some states like Mississippi, where gay adoption has yet not been
made legal, gay couples were struggling a lot in events like registering their child
at a public school, emergency medical needs, etc. (Pettus, 2015). This was because
the state allowed only one gay parent to adopt a child, whereas the second parent
legally held no right on the adopted child. There has also been a debate on whether
a child can live happily with gay parents instead of living with a heterosexual
couple.
Based on the literature collected from various
articles and surveys, we made a few hypotheses. We believed that the Democrats and
the Republicans had completely different viewpoints in regards to this issue. We
assumed that the Democrats would strongly support gay marriage and adoption, whereas
the Republicans would oppose it. We also believed that the Millennials would show
more support to this issue in comparison to the people belonging to older generations.
However, we also realized that we could not make a clear cut assumption on the generation
gap hypotheses. Therefore, we suspected that maybe people belonging to older generation
who get to interact with young people on a daily basis, like the faculty members,
might strongly favor this issue. We believed that women might have different opinions
than men on gay marriage and we suspected that the number of women in the Texas
Tech campus supporting this issue would be more than the number of men supporting
it. The society in general sometimes has a stereotypical thinking that gay couples
are less stable than the heterosexual couples. Stability in terms of marriage can
be related to how long the marriage lasted and what has been the divorce rate in
these marriages. We believed it wouldn’t be justified to measure the stability of
a gay marriage by comparing it to the marriage of heterosexual couples, because
the divorce rates of heterosexual couples, particularly in the U.S.A. have been
quite high over the past few decades. A survey in 2012 estimated that the probability
of a marriage of a heterosexual couple ending in divorce was 40%-50% (Neill, 2012).
Looking at these statistics, we could not consider the marriage of a heterosexual
couple as a good reference state to analyze the stability of a gay couple. There
have been many articles which highlighted that there wasn’t any difference between
the upbringings of children raised by gay couples or heterosexual couples, provided
the children were given proper care and attention. It has been seen that the gay
couples have been quite willing to adopt a child and in many states like Mississippi,
the gay couples have been putting a lot of efforts to legalizing gay adoption. Although
these findings could not be directly related to the stability of gay couples, still
they provided a good insight into the fact that gay marriage might turn out to be
more stable than what people speculated in the past. So, we suspected that the people
on the Texas Tech campus who supported gay marriage and gay adoption might also
feel that gay couples were more stable than the heterosexual couples. With all these
hypotheses and assumptions, we surveyed the Americans on the Texas Tech campus to
see how many of these assumptions proved right and what people actually felt about
this issue, which has become a very critical matter over the past few months.
Methods
While constructing the questions for
the survey, each one of us wrote down 2-3 questions that we would like to ask
the people on the campus, and then all these questions were collected, modified
and put into the survey form comprising 17 questions (See Appendix A). The
survey had a variety of questions ranging from answering the question in yes or
no form, or answering them on a Likert scale, to giving open answers to a few
questions. While constructing these questions, a discussion was done about how
to find out the age of the people while doing this survey. This was important
because we wanted to know the response of people belonging to different
generations. So, instead of directly asking them about their age or the year in
which they were born, we mentioned various age groups like 20-29 years old,
30-39 years old, etc., so that we could get a general idea about the age of the
people.
In order to collect the surveys and to
make sure that we had sufficient information to capture and analyze some final
results out of it, we made an agreement that each student of our class would
collect at least 12 surveys. We decided that first, each one of us would fill
out a survey ourselves, and then each person would collect 12 surveys, 6 of
them from American men and 6 from American women on the Texas Tech campus. The
number of people to be asked to fill the survey was equally divided on the
basis of gender, so that we could find out whether men and women felt
differently about gay marriage. An agreement was also made in our class that
each of us had to survey only the people on the Texas Tech campus. We could,
however, ask the people living in our neighborhood to fill this survey provided
they worked or studied at Texas Tech.
A Likert scale was used in a few
questions which ranged from 5, symbolizing strongly agree, to 1, symbolizing
strongly disagree. The Likert scale was basically used to get a clear cut distinction
about the viewpoints of people in regards to various questions asked about gay
marriage. We believed that providing a wider range in a Likert Scale would help
us in obtaining more distinctive results while analyzing the data. Similarly,
in a few questions, instead of just giving the option to choose between yes or
no, we provided more options like “don’t know”, “Yes, slightly”, “Yes, very”,
“No difference” etc. This was done because we felt that maybe asking the
audience to choose directly between a yes and a no wouldn’t make them very
comfortable in answering questions, because they might not have a very strong
opinion about this issue. So, asking them to choose between black and white
wouldn’t be fair and as a result, we might not get accurate results in regards
to those questions.
There were two questions asked in the survey,
one of which asked about the political views of the people, and the other of
which asked about their religious views. These were included in the survey,
because we thought that the issue of gay marriage had both a political as well
as a religious angle to it. Since we wanted to know whether political and
religious views about gay marriage were interconnected or not, we thought these
two questions might help us in reaching some conclusion. Since there wasn’t any
literature or data collected in the past depicting the stability of gay couples,
we tried to construct a few questions comparing the people’s perception about
the stability of gay couples to that of heterosexual couples. We assumed that
it might not give us a very clear cut idea about whether people consider both gay
couples and heterosexual couples equally stable or not, but it might give us a
bigger picture. Also, we put in a few questions on gay adoption, and asked people’s
opinion about it on a Likert scale, so as to know how the people of Texas Tech felt
about this issue. A few open-answer questions asking people to write their opinion
were also included in the survey, because we wanted to gather some additional information
which might not have been covered by other multiple choice questions. One of these
open answer questions was asking people about their views regarding the upbringing
of children by gay parents. This question was asked so that we could somehow relate
the stability of gay marriage with gay adoption and ask what people of Texas Tech
felt about these two interrelated issues.
There were questions that asked about Kim
Davis’s refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and the bakers’ refusal
to bake a cake for gay couples, and how people felt about both of these issues.
Instead of just asking them to answer yes or no to these questions, we asked them
to specify if they had some other opinions or no opinions at all.
When this activity finished, we had to
discard a few surveys, because some people didn’t fill the back of the survey
form, thereby making it an incomplete piece of information. After getting these
surveys filled out and collected, we found that there were a total of 145 surveys,
which included almost an equal number of men and women and a few surveys filled
out by international people as well. The statistical analysis of the data collected
was not done on any licensed software. Instead, Microsoft Excel was used to capture
the entire data and different pie charts and graphs were then made on it. It was
noticed that since a vast majority of people whom we surveyed were students studying
in Texas Tech and only a few of the people were faculty or staff members, we couldn’t
collect a uniform proportion of surveys from all the age groups. We had about 90%
of the surveys filled by Millennials and the rest filled out by other generations
like Gen X, Baby Boom etc. So, while presenting our results, we believed that it
might not be fair to directly compare our results of older generations with that
of the surveys presented online, because we don’t have a vast amount of data to
give any strong conclusion.
Results
We asked the American people to fill
out the survey, and we found out that 63% of the people were from the state of
Texas whereas 25% of the people were from other states of the U.S.A., as could
be seen in Figure 1. We assumed that since Texas has a greater number of
Republicans as compared to Democrats and independents, we might see a similar
situation on the Texas Tech campus as well. However, from figure 2, it could be
seen that more number of the people (around 41%) were independent, whereas the
number of Republicans and Democrats were 27% and 24% respectively. From this
figure, we could postulate that maybe the people didn’t want to openly disclose
which party they supported, so they might have just considered themselves independents.
We hypothesized that the Democrats might strongly support gay marriage, whereas
the Republicans might oppose it. Our hypothesis turned out to be correct, as
depicted in Figure 3, which shows that 90% of the Democrats supported gay
marriage, whereas only 25% of the Republicans supported it.
Based on the literature, we
hypothesized that the Millennials would show more support in this issue than
the people belonging to older generations. However, as seen in Figure 4, we had
an uneven age distribution while collecting the survey. It could be seen that
out of 145 people who filled out the survey, 52% of them belonged to the age
group of 20-29 years, whereas the percentage of people belonging to various
other age groups like 30-39, 40-49 etc., who were surveyed, was much less. So,
it wouldn’t be justified to compare our results directly with the literature
data, particularly for the older generations. Another interesting point to note
is that we also suspected that maybe people belonging to older generations who
interact with young people every day might strongly be in favor of this issue.
It appears that our point was proved right, because most of the faculty and
staff members who were asked to fill out the survey strongly supported gay
marriage. So, the overall assumption which people mostly make that the support
for gay marriage decreases linearly as age increases doesn’t hold true in this
case. Since most of the people filling out our survey belonged to the age group
of 20-29 years, we assumed that they would support gay marriage and all the
related issues very strongly. This, in fact, turned out to be very true, as
seen in Figure 5. Around 59% of the people didn’t support Kim Davis’s refusal
to issue marriage licenses, whereas only 15% supported Kim Davis’s decision.
We also hypothesized that the women
might have different opinions than men on gay marriage, and we suspected that
maybe women in the Texas Tech campus would show more support towards gay
marriage in comparison to the men. It seems like our speculation turned out to
be somewhat true as could be seen in Figure 6. The graph shows that around 67 females
supported the legalization of gay marriage, which is slightly higher than the
number of males supporting this issue. On the other hand, the number of males
opposing gay marriage turned out to be slightly higher than that of females.
Although the total number of people surveyed was not a very large number, this
still gives some insight into the fact that maybe men and women don’t feel the
same way about this issue.
We hypothesized that the people
strongly supporting gay marriage would also support gay adoption. As could be
seen in Figure 7, around 33% of the people strongly believed that gay couples
should be able to adopt children, and another 27% of the people gave positive
answers towards the gay adoption issue. It appears that both the gay marriage
and the gay adoption right issues are strongly connected and dependent on each
other, with most of the young people supporting both the issues almost
equally. We made an assumption that the
people who supported gay marriage and gay adoption wouldn’t find any difference
between the upbringing of a child by a homosexual couple or by a heterosexual
couple. From the survey, we found out that our assumption turned out to be
correct, because around 67% of the people felt that children raised in either
of the two families would be equally happy and that it wouldn’t matter if
children were raised by the gay couples or the heterosexual couples. Only 1% of
the people, as could be seen in Figure 8, felt that the children would be less
likely to be happy in a gay family than in a heterosexual family.
Generally, people assume heterosexual
couples to be more stable than gay couples. However, there has never been any
definite method to compare or measure the stability of these couples. We didn’t
have any strong proof or literature data about people’s view of gay marriage
stability. So, we tried to make a correlation by assuming that if people
supported gay adoption and also felt that there was no difference between the
upbringing of a child in a gay family or a heterosexual family provided he/she
is given equal parental love and financial stability, then they might also feel
that gay couples are as stable as heterosexual couples. Our rough hypothesis
seemed to validate our point as has been depicted in Figure 9. It could be seen
that 64% of the people felt no difference between the stability of gay couples
and heterosexual couples, whereas only 12% of the people felt that gay couples
would be less stable than the heterosexual couples.
A very interesting point to note is that
even though most of the people who filled out our survey supported gay marriage
and gay adoption rights, and opposed Kim Davis’s refusal to issue marriage
licenses, they still believed that the pastors had the right to not officiate a
gay marriage, and the artists had the right not to create a picture for a gay
wedding if they don’t wish to do so. This indirectly showed that even though a
vast majority of people have been in support of gay marriage, they have also
been sensitive towards various religious issues and the sentiments of the
people who don’t approve of gay marriage.
Discussion
Based on the articles and the surveys
studied online on gay marriage, several hypotheses and assumptions were made
while conducting the survey on the Texas Tech campus. Some hypotheses turned
out correct, some were proved wrong and some hypotheses didn’t have sufficient
data to make any conclusion. Based on the data collected from the surveys
filled out by the Americans on the Texas Tech campus, we came out with some findings.
Some of these results could help us get a general idea about people’s
perception and viewpoints on gay marriage and similar related issues.
We hypothesized that since Texas has a
greater number of Republicans, a similar trend would be observed in Texas Tech,
and so ultimately most of the Republicans wouldn’t be in support of gay
marriage. However, this hypothesis turned out to be only partially correct,
because it was found that a larger number of people preferred calling
themselves independents instead of Republicans or Democrats. Our assumption
that the Democrats would show more support towards the issue of gay marriage
than the Republicans turned out to be true, as could be seen from previous
figures. We, however, couldn’t conclude that in general Republicans wouldn’t
support gay marriage, because we found many young undergraduate and graduate
students strongly favoring gay marriage, despite being a Republican. We believe
that political views and age have an indirect co-relation between them; it might
happen that a Democrat aged 60 might not support gay marriage, whereas a
Republican aged 20 might strongly favor gay marriage. So, reaching any
conclusion just on the basis of political views wouldn’t be accurate.
We also hypothesized that the Millennials
would support gay marriage more in comparison to the people belonging to the
older generations like Baby Boom, Gen X etc. However, we couldn’t prove this
hypothesis because of unequal distribution of age while filling out the survey.
A vast majority of people asked to fill out the survey belonged to the age
group of 20-29 years, whereas a much smaller percentage of people belonged to
older generations. Our hypothesis didn’t turn out to be very correct, as a
large number of people belonging to the older generation actually supported gay
marriage; this could be due to the fact that most of them were faculty and
staff members who interacted with students on a daily basis and thus, didn’t
believe in the conventional thought that marriage should only be between a man
and a woman. So, although we didn’t have the accurate data to conclude
anything, still it could be predicted that our hypothesis wasn’t completely
right and that the support for gay marriage doesn’t always decrease with the
increase in age.
We speculated that there might be some
difference in opinion between men and women in regards to the gay marriage
issue, and we suspected that women would support gay marriage more than men.
Our hypothesis proved correct, as we observed that a higher proportion of women
supported gay marriage and related issues in comparison to the men on the Texas
Tech campus. This finding can somehow be considered to be the most accurate out
of all our results, since we succeeded in getting roughly equal numbers of men
and women to fill out the survey. Since this survey was filled out by equal
number of American men and women on the Texas Tech campus, we can suspect that
our result could be extrapolated to analyze the overall scenario in the state
of Texas and U.S.A.
We hypothesized that the people who
supported gay marriage might also support gay adoption. A vast majority of
people felt the same way as we suspected, and showed a huge support towards gay
adoption rights. It was also observed that the people supporting gay marriage
and gay adoption found no difference in the upbringing of a child raised by a
homosexual couple or by a heterosexual couple. People supporting both of these
issues felt that a child would be happy living with any couple, homosexual or
heterosexual, provided he/she is given love, care and affection. We asked
people to write what they felt would be the difference if a child is raised by
a homosexual or by a heterosexual couple. The people who felt that there wasn’t
any difference in the upbringing of a child in either of these two families
wrote things like “No difference, love is love”, “No difference but children
would be more socially aware of LGBT issues”, “No difference as such, rather
children will be more open-minded toward family dynamic differences and gender
equality” and many other positive comments. This clearly showed that the people
who supported gay marriage also strongly favored gay adoption.
Discrimination against gay couples by
calling their marriage unstable is a big problem faced by homosexual people in
their lives. Generally, the stability of gay couples is measured by comparing
their marriages to the marriages of heterosexual couples. However, in today’s
world, where heterosexual couples are also not leading very stable or happy
lives, comparing the gay couples’ stability to that of heterosexual couples
wouldn’t be a fair analysis. Therefore, we assumed that if people supported gay
marriage and gay adoption, they might also feel that gay couples were as stable
as heterosexual couples. Our assumption proved right, as a vast majority of
people felt that there wasn’t any difference between the stability of
homosexual and heterosexual couples.
There have been many limitations, due
to which we couldn’t reach any definite conclusion, and in many areas we don’t
feel confident enough to generalize the findings of our survey. The major
limitation was that our survey was not representative of the entire TTU
community. The total number of surveys collected was just 145, whereas the
number of people working or studying in Texas Tech is above 38,000. So, we
simply can’t conclude or declare our results and generalize them on behalf of
the entire Texas Tech community. Our survey might be a good representation on
the basis of gender, since we collected surveys from equal numbers of men and
women, but it couldn’t be considered as a good representation on the basis of
race, religion, age, or college of education. As already mentioned, we didn’t
collect surveys from equal numbers of Millennials, Baby Boom, Gen X and various
other generation categories, so we couldn’t say that support for gay marriage
decreased with increase in age as we read in some of the literature surveys
online. Similarly, there are around 13 colleges in Texas Tech, such as arts,
sciences, engineering, architecture, medicine etc., but we collected surveys
only from the people who studied or worked in our departments. We don’t know
what people studying in other departments think about this issue. The questions
in the survey were very carefully framed keeping in mind not to hurt the
feelings of anyone filling out the survey. But, still we don’t know if people have
answered all the questions with sincerity. For example, most of the people
called themselves independents, but they might be a Republican or a Democrat
and might not be comfortable enough to reveal their political identity. So,
there is always a risk of getting false answers to some of the questions.
Although all the students and our
professor minutely discussed this topic before constructing the questions of
the survey, and we made efforts to know more about people’s perception towards
this issue, we still feel that we could have done better. We feel we can extend
the scope of our survey to a large population of Texas Tech and gather more
information about this issue if we are given more time and funding to conduct
this research. We believe we can reach some final and transparent conclusions
if we have uniform distribution of surveys on the basis of age, gender,
religion, race and education, but for that, we would need increased support and
grant from the authorities.
Conclusion
Based on the surveys filled out by the
people on the Texas Tech campus and the findings obtained thereafter, we could
conclude that there has been a growing support of the people towards gay
marriage and adoption and thus, a bigger proportion of people agree with the
Supreme Court’s order of legalization of gay marriage. Our survey was a good
representation on the basis of gender, so we could conclude that the women
supported gay marriage and adoption more than men on the Texas Tech campus. For
obtaining better and wider understanding about this critical issue, we need to
have accurate representation on our survey on the basis of race, religion,
culture, and age. However, our survey helped us in sketching a bigger picture
and even helped us in breaking some stereotypical statements and facts that
have been postulated in the past. For example, our survey highlighted that the
support for gay marriage might not always decrease with the increasing age and
also, political views of a person could not always help us decide whether that
person supports or opposes gay marriage. This survey examined some of the
topics related to gay marriage which helped us understand people’s perception
with wide and clearer understanding.
References
Beitsch, R. (2015, August
19). Despite same-sex marriage ruling, gay adoption rights uncertain in some states.
USA Today. Retrieved on September 1, 2015
from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/19/despite-same-sex-marriage-ruling-gay-adoption-rights-uncertain-some-states/31992309/
Bittenbender, S. (2015, September 9). Defiant
Kentucky clerk’s backers: fire aides over gay marriage licenses. Reuters. Retrieved on September 10, 2015
from http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/09/us-usa-gaymarriage-kentucky-idUSKCN0R91RC20150909
Cook. C. (2014, September 23). Texas Tech
enrolment figures shatter previous numbers. Texas
Tech University. Retrieved on September 22, 2015 from http://today.ttu.edu/posts/2014/09/texas-tech-enrollment-figures-shatter-previous-numbers
Hanna, J., Payne, E. Ed. & Stoichet,
C. E. (2015, September 8). Kim Davis released, but judge bars her from
withholding marriage licenses. CNN
Politics. Retrieved on September 8, 2015 from http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/08/politics/kim-davis-same-sex-marriage-kentucky/
Liptak, A. (2015, June 26). Supreme Court
ruling makes same-sex marriage a right nationwide. The New York Times. Retrieved on September 22, 2015 from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html
O’ Neill, E. (2012, February 20). Steve
Sweeney claims two-thirds of marriages end in divorce. PolitiFact. Retrieved on October 1, 2015 from http://www.politifact.com/new-jersey/statements/2012/feb/20/stephen-sweeney/steve-sweeney-claims-more-two-thirds-marriages-end/
Pettus, E.W. (2015, August 28). Judge
is asked to block ban on adoption by gay couples. Daily Journal. Retrieved on September 9, 2015 from http://djournal.com/news/judge-asked-block-ban-adoption-gay-couples/
Schulzke, E. (2015, June 30). Behind the
rapid shifts in public opinion on same-sex marriage. National Direct News. Retrieved on September 10, 2015 from http://national.desertnews.com/article/5013/behind-the-rapid-shift-in-public-opinion-on-same-sex-marriage.html
Somashekhar, S. & Craighill, M. P. (2015,
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on September 17, 2015 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/poll-most-say-kim-davis-should-issue-marriage-licenses-to-gay-couples/2015/09/14/684e6d62-5b0a-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html
Swift, A. (2014, May 30). Most
Americans say same-sex couples entitled to adopt. Gallup.com. Retrieved on September 11, 2015 from http://www.gallup.com/poll/170801/americans-say-sex-couples-entitled-adopt.aspx
Tashman, B. (2015, September 1).
Kentucky Clerk denies marriage licenses to gay couple for 5th time,
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Appendix B
Charts & Graphs
Figure 1-
Graph showing where the people were from.
|
Figure 2- Political views of the people surveyed
|
Figure 3-
Political support for gay marriage
|
Figure 4- Different age groups of the people surveyed
|
Figure 5-
People’s opinion about Kim Davis’s refusal to issue marriage licenses to
gay couples
|
Figure 6- Support
of men and women towards legalizing gay marriage.
|
Figure 7-
People’s opinion about whether gay couples should be able to adopt children
or not
|
Figure 8-
People’s opinion about whether children would be happy living with gay
parents.
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Figure 9-
People’s opinion about stability of gay couples in comparison to
heterosexual couples
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Figure 10- People’s opinion about who has the right to
refuse to serve gay couples
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