Half of all Americans believe that gay men and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which a large majority also said businesses should not be able to deny serving gays for religious reasons.
Fifty percent say the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection gives gays the right to marry, while 41 percent say it does not.
Beyond the constitutional questions, a record-high 59 percent say they support same-sex marriage, while 34 percent are opposed, the widest margin tracked in Post-ABC polling.
This includes 53% support in the 33 states that don't currently allow same-sex marriage. This debate should be effectively over (and in some ways it is). And yet, as Greg Sargent points out, the GOP will remain firmly against same-sex equality.
Republicans are alone here: They oppose legal gay marriage by 54-40; and they don’t believe the “equal protection” clause guarantees the legal right to marry by 54-38. Majorities of independents and moderates are in the Yes camp on both.
Note the religious breakdown: White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage, by 66-28. By contrast, white non-evangelical Protestants support it by 62-27, and white Catholics support it by 70-26.
When your base is made up of "God hates gays" bigots who justify their stupidity via religion, you become the party of fanatics. My advice is to evolve or perish, but of course they don't believe in evolution, either.
Republicans are even more out of touch on the subject of increasing the minimum wage.
Even groups that are not congenial to the idea have been unable to find opposition. Reason, the self-styled magazine of “free minds and free markets,” which espouses libertarian views, conducted a poll in December that found 72 percent favoring a minimum wage increase, with just 26 percent opposed. In that survey, 88 percent of Democrats joined 70 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans in supporting a higher minimum wage.
The Republican argument against raising the minimum wage is that it's immoral because it destroys jobs. If that were true, Washington State, which has the highest state minimum wage at $9.32 an hour, would have a terrible job creation record as thousands of jobs were destroyed, yes?
Only, surprise...the opposite happened.
In the 15 years that followed, the state’s minimum wage climbed to $9.32 -- the highest in the country. Meanwhile job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington’s restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years.
It's like Republicans are basically wrong about everything or something like that.
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