In a new post over at the National Review, NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher offers her take on the recent Pew poll that found a 5-point dip in public support for gay marriage (49%).
Writes Gallagher:
It may well be an outlier, but here is why I suspect not:
White Evangelical support for gay marriage dropped 4 percentage points, from 22 percent to 18 percent; Catholic support dropped 9 percentage points, from 61 percent to 52 percent. (White mainline Protestant opinion was virtually unchanged, rising from 56 percent support to 57 percent support.) Unaffiliated support for gay marriage continued its rise — from 71 percent to 76 percent in just one year.
But something happened over the last year to give traditional Christians second thoughts about what gay marriage would mean. What could that be?
The most likely candidate is A&E's decision to suspend Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, after he expressed, rather colorfully, rather standard orthodox Christian views on gay sex.
The Duck Dynasty incident was not, of course, alone. In the spring of 2014, 65,000 people signed their names to a petition stating that Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich must either recant his opposition to gay marriage or be fired. The firestorm caused him to step down. The Eich case is salient for gay-marriage opponents because he had done nothing to deserve a public tarring and feathering except contribute once to the Prop 8 campaign in California.
Gallagher goes on to point out that a similar drop in support occured back in 2009 in response to the backlash against Miss California Carrie Prejean after she stated her opposition to marriage equality.
