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Q. What single thing is inevitable about young people?
A. They grow up.
In his blog Gays defend Marriage writer David Benkof has a post entitled: Younger voters favor gay marriage. So?
In survey after survey, younger voters tend to favor gay marriage at higher rates than older voters. After a survey last May which showed such a trend, Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said the results displayed a “generational replacement,” with older voters being replaced by younger voters who supported same-sex marriage.
But what if this isn’t a generational issue, but rather an age issue? Young voters tend not to be married, a fact that could be significant in terms of attitudes toward this issue. As today’s young voters get older and marry and have children, could they come to appreciate that mothers and fathers make different kinds of contributions to the raising of a child? It certainly is possible.
If that hunch is correct, then young voters’ support for same-sex marriage is related to their age, not their generation. A similar result is found among women - unmarried women are more likely to vote Democrat, whereas married women are more likely to vote Republican. Yet these are the same women! They’re just at different stages of their lives, and have different attitudes.
I’m not asserting that the younger-voters statistic is age-oriented rather than generational; I’m just raising the possibility that it might be.
In no other area of political life do such “macro –trends” get as regularly trumpeted as inevitable realities. Polls increasingly show more and more young people being against abortion for instance…yet, you never hear the media trumpet that Roe’s demise is “inevitable”.
New America Media, with support from several foundations as well as the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), commissioned Bendixen & Associates (B&A) of Coral Gables, Florida to conduct a survey of young people in California. They found that of all social problems…the one that most young people ranked as the most important was “Family Breakdown” (by 24%).This is important and encouraging. The generation that has grown up in the wake of the sexual revolution knows the pain associated with its wanton values. All pro-marriage forces need do is convince them that same-sex “marriage” locks in and reinforces the trends that lead to further family breakdown and make it more difficult to rebuild our broken family structure.
The IMAPP institute has done some parsing of the various polls on this subject. The paper entitled Same-Sex Marriage: What Does The Next Generation Think? Has some interesting eternals. One particularly encouraging one demonstrates that adult and social leadership (surprise) affects the views of young people. That is: If young people see important adults in their lives being vigorously and intelligently against neutering marriage, they are more likely to stand up against it themselves.
What does the next generation think about same-sex marriage? Depending on how the question is asked, a majority of young adults either oppose or support samesex marriage. In recent polls by reputable polling companies, the proportion of young adults (ages 18-29) who favor gay marriage ranges from 40% to 63%. Conversely, the proportion of young adults opposed to gay marriage ranges from 36% to 54%. In our judgment, the most neutrally worded polls find a majority of young adults currently oppose same-sex marriage, even as a majority of college students now favor it.
So rather than a fait Accompli – What we have is a momentary and malleable single answer on a easily manipulated poll question toward an easily manipulated population of young people. So…Keep fighting Opiner’s….The youth are the future and they are ours to win!!!!
Comment excerpts:
Pearl -
“What has me concerned is the media bias feeding these young adults destructive opinions; morally desensitizing them. It is a difficult task we have to speak louder and be more influential than television and movies, news stations and radio outlets.”
The Playful Walrus -
“I have had people angrily tell me that fathers are not important - after all their father was a jerk and they were better off when their mother got rid of him. They tell me this completely unaware that the state of their lives and their anger make it abundantly clear that having a good father married to their mother would have made a HUGE difference in their lives.”
Chairm -
“SSMers want things both ways. They complain that the judiciary must impose against the "mob majority" and yet they also make the prediction that their side will triumph with the majority coming in the next generation.
so the majority is de facto a tyrannical mob when it opposes the SSM-merger, but it something else when a majority appears to favor the merger.”
