In Canada, gay marriage has been legal across the entire country since 2005, making Canada the fourth country in the world to make it legal. In the States (and most other countries), the battle for gay marriage rights is still being waged. Historically, the public in the US has been strongly opposed to gay marriage, but that has slowly been changing. The latest polls show that for the first time, more people support gay marriage than oppose it. From The New York Times:
A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.
This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. That represents quite a lot of progress for supporters of same-sex marriage. Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority.
As we noted last August, support for gay marriage seems to have been increasing at an accelerated pace over the past couple of years. Below is an update to the graph from last year’s article, which charts the trend from all available public polls on same-sex marriage going back to 1988.
Read the rest of the article here.
On a related note, Prose Before Hos has put together "a handy graph [i.e., pie chart] for the confused," outlining the potential effects of legalizing gay marriage.
