by Stephen Peters •
WASHINGTON – Today, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization, released new polling ahead of an expected ruling in the Supreme Court’s case, Obergefell v Hodges, a case that could lead to nationwide marriage equality. The national survey, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for the Human Rights Campaign, shows that candidates who continue to oppose marriage equality face the risk of backlash.
Read the memo here. From the memo: “A 55 percent majority of voters are less likely to support a candidate for president who opposes allowing same-sex couples to marry, including 40 percent who strongly oppose. This majority includes Independents, married women and white millennials. All of these groups voted Republican in the last congressional election.”
“It’s clear that those candidates who continue to oppose marriage equality are going to have an increasingly difficult case when nearly half the country knows an LGBT couple who has gotten married or are in a committed relationship,” said JoDee Winterhof, HRC Vice President of Policy and Political Affairs. “When it comes to marriage equality, we’ve reached a turning point, and those candidates who want to defy the court of public opinion are putting themselves in real peril.”
The Human Rights Campaign has released detailed background documents highlighting the anti-LGBT records of current and potential 2016 candidates. More on their records, including their positions on marriage equality, can be found at http://www.hrc.org/
On April 28, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Obergefell v Hodges, a case originating in Ohio. In January, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Obergefell along with three other cases from Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The arguments were consolidated under the name Obergefell, and the questions posed by the court dealt with the constitutionality of marriage bans more broadly.
Marriage equality has to date come to 37 states as well as the District of Columbia—representing more than 70 percent of the U.S. population.
The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. HRC envisions a world where LGBT people are embraced as full members of society at home, at work and in every community.
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