Additional polling confirms Latino support for marriage equality

A couple of weeks back I wrote about some eye-popping numbers from a Siena poll and a SurveyUSA poll indicating that Latinos in New York State might be at a tipping point when it came to supporting Governor David Paterson's marriage equality bill.

With the news yesterday that Maine has become the 6th state in the United States to allow same-sex couples to marry and that a marriage equality bill has reached the desk of the Governor of New Hampshire, I thought I'd take a look at some additional polling numbers on Latino support for marriage equality.

On April 30th, Quinnipiac University released results of a national poll conducted between April 21st and 27th in which 2,041 registered voters were interviewed - and the Latino numbers are equally as eye-popping.

When asked "Would you support or oppose a law in your state that would allow same-sex couples to get married?" 52% of Hispanics said that they would support it against 45% who would not.

46%of Hispanics said that they think that "same-sex couples should be allowed legally to marry" compared to 19% who said same-sex couples "should be allowed legally to form civil unions but not marry", with 30% opting for granting same-sex couples "no recognition".

When asked if "same-sex marriage is a threat to traditional marriage between a man and a woman", an amazing 70% of Hispanics disagreed while while 28% agreed.

And when asked the cause of someone being gay on lesbian, 53% of Hispanics said that people were born gay, 29% who said homosexuality was a choice, and 9% said that people "become" gay or lesbian due to they way they were brought up.

The numbers, which mirror the NYS poll by Siena, show that Latinos nationwide support marriage equality at higher rates than whites or African-Americans in the United States, and oppose marriage equality at lower rates than either group.

In the meantime, a poll released this week by the New York Latino Research and Resources Network (NYLARNet) from surveys made late last year (1,232 voting age Latinos from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island were interviewed from Nov. 13th to the 30th), paints a more complicated picture.

For one, the survey didn't distinguish between civil unions or marriage rights for same-sex couples and simply asked participants whether they were "for gay marriage and or civil unions".

The answer was also complicated. 50% of Latinos in New York State said that they were for either but only 37% of Latinos in the other surveyed states responded equally.

Authors acknowledge that views might have changed between November and today although they do not venture to say whether support for marriage equality might have increased or decreased. They also do not try to explain why there is such a discrepancy between support for the recognition of same-sex partnerships in New York by Latinos compared to those of other states surveyed.