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

Abbott, M.C. (2015, September 7). Catholic bishop troubled by gay marriage survey results; Priests (and pope?) support Kim Davis. renewamerica. Retrieved on September 10, 2015 from: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/150907

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/\

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 26^th 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 5^th 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