Tuesday, December 1, 2015

People’s Perception about Gay Marriage & Related Issues


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, September 15). Post ABC poll: Most say Kim Davis should issue marriage licenses to gay couples. The Washington Post. Retrieved 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, cites ‘God’s Authority’. Right Wing Watch. Retrieved on September 1, 2015 from http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/kentucky-clerk-denies-marriage-licenses-gay-couple-5th-time-cies-gods-authority
Texas Tech University Institutional Research, 2012. Retrieved on September 22, 2015 from http://www.irim.ttu.edu/NEWFACTBOOK/Faculty/2012/F12RANK.php


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.
                                                    
                                                   
 

Figure 9- People’s opinion about stability of gay couples in comparison to heterosexual couples
                                                   



Figure 10- People’s opinion about who has the right to refuse to serve gay couples
                          


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