Public opinion is a weird thing. On some topics, it’s incredibly stable over time. That was the case for abortion for decades.
I remember leading a discussion about that in graduate school when I was a teaching assistant. If you traced long term survey trends about the topic, the public’s views in the early 2000s didn’t differ that much from answers to those same questions 30 years earlier.
But there are other issues where viewpoints shifted incredibly rapidly. Support for same-sex marriage is clearly one of those topics.
The General Social Survey asked about this for the first time in 1988. The share of the sample agreeing that gay couples should have the right to marry was 11.7%. Then, they stopped asking the question for a long time. Then, they added it back to the core of the survey in 2004. I am guessing this was because the topic was center stage in the election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Thirteen states had a constitutional amendment on the ballot to codify marriage being between one man and one woman. It passed in all 13.
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