New Jersey Poll Finds Most Support Gay Marriage
“About half of New Jerseyans believe that gay couples should be allowed to marry, according to a new poll. The Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Poll released Wednesday finds that 48 percent of New Jersey residents favor gay marriage, with 43 percent opposed. Fifty percent oppose amending the state Constitution to ban gay marriage. Forty-one percent favor such a ban.” [Newsday]
Hmmm. I don’t know whether this is good news or bad news. After all, California polls on Prop H8 were all over the place. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to get someone’s honest opinion as something so “controversial” as equal rights for all.
So by the “prop 8 property” we can probably expect 51.5% would vote to amend to ban the constitution to ban gay marriage then?
I’m fairly convinced that the Democratic machine-politics of New Jersey will never allow a “Prop 8″ kind of amendment onto the ballot. I don’t even think the NJ state constitution has a mechanism for allowing citizen-introduced amendments (unlike California): any kind of amendment to the NJ constitution needs to go through the state legislature first.
Also, in NJ we already have Civil Unions, which are supposed to confer the same rights as traditional marriage without the name “marriage”. This might have an effect on the way New Jerseyans answered the poll question (“No, I don’t think we should have Gay Marriage because we already gave the gays Civil Union and that’s good enough…”). My fantasy is that this “separate-but-equal” kind of scheme will eventually be deemed constitutionally unacceptable, and all (heterosexual) “marriages” will be converted to Civil Unions for legal/administrative purposes.
Hey, at least for once I’m not ashamed to live in NJ.
Corzine did say he would look into changing the law again after the election, so maybe this will encourage him to actually do it. The courts said that we had to have equal rights, but left it up to the state government as to whether it would be marriage or civil unions, and they chose civil unions. It has been pretty much a disaster, as many times we did not get the rights we were supposed to.
@Alexa: If Corzine gets re-elected, that is. The Republican candidate named Chris Christie (who opposes gay marriage) seems to have strong support now, and is actually ahead of Corzine in certain opinions polls recently.
While I am not from New Jersey, I do know that New Jersey is not one of the primitive states that allow citizen-introduced initiatives. Most are out west.
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/in.....referendum
The whole concept is quite odd to me as the United States is a liberal democracy, which by definition is a democracy where the rights of the minority are constitutionally protected.
@chris – It would be kind of cool and gain you some bragging rights if Jersey (referred to in Connecticut as the armpit of america), the “Garden State” beat NY to the punch. I will admit I am often surprised and delighted at certain areas of Jersey. Although, I still don’t understand why one (if they had the money) would choose to live in one of Jersey’s nicer suburbs in the North as opposed to Westchester or Connecticut.
Jersey might be moving a few notches up in my book soon!! Please join your tri-state cousin Connecticut sooner rather than later, especially considering you have almost 3 times as many people.