Witherspoon Institute: Same sex marriage not as popular as some polls suggest (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Recent polls suggesting a shift in American attitudes toward same sex "marriage" do not reflect the true sentiments of the majority of the population, according to Matthew J. Franck of the Witherspoon Institute and Gwen Brown of Radford University. The skew in polling data can be attributed, the authors say, to a phenomenon known as the "spiral of silence," or what could become popularly known as "the Seinfeld effect."

In the 1993 Seinfeld episode “The Outing,” a female reporter mistakes Jerry Seinfeld and his friend George Costanza for homosexual partners. When her misunderstanding dawns on them, they vehemently deny that they are gay, yet constantly punctuate their denials with the rote expression “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” As heterosexual men, Jerry and George are both keen to be taken for what they are, but there’s more to it than that: they can’t entirely inhibit revulsion at the idea that others think they are homosexual, and perhaps revulsion at the very idea of being homosexual.

Their repeated exclamation “not that there’s anything wrong with that!”—invariably uttered with far less passion than their denials—is a socially conditioned response. Somewhere they have learned that it is unacceptable to cast aspersions on homosexuality, and that the politically correct response is to say (as Jerry does at one point, albeit rather too excitedly), “People’s personal sexual preferences are nobody’s business but their own!” Jerry and George struggle to suppress what they really think with what they have been taught to think is “enlightened opinion.” Call it the Seinfeld Effect.

Seventeen years later, the advocates of same-sex marriage are making “people’s personal sexual preferences” everybody’s business, and are counting on the Seinfeld Effect to suppress what most Americans really think about same-sex marriage. They are waging their struggle, after all, not just in courts of law but also in the court of public opinion, and the advocates’ success with certain judges will not be secure unless most Americans are with them. So how are they doing?

A CNN/Gallup poll released on August 11 found that 52% of respondents supported and only 46% opposed same-sex marriage—a result widely trumpeted as the first time a majority expressed this view. But in an important finding, a North Carolina firm called Public Policy Polling discovered that its method of automated polling or “robo-calls,” in which respondents interact on their phone with a computer-controlled interview system rather than a human interviewer, yields significantly higher numbers of Americans who oppose same-sex marriage.

The robo-call technique has been pioneered by pollster Scott Rasmussen, who has racked up an impressive record of accuracy in the highly competitive business of predicting election outcomes. Using this same system, Public Policy Polling—whose head actually favors gay marriage—found in a poll released on August 13 that a mere 33% of respondents favored same-sex marriage, while a full 57% opposed it. (This is a result the firm’s head deplored, but defended as accurate nonetheless.)

What’s going on here? If we take both polls as accurate, each in its own way, then we can say that one-tenth (or more) of Americans oppose same-sex marriage but are extremely hesitant to say so to another person, even a stranger conducting a telephone survey. Yet they will express their disapproval in the complete anonymity of a “robo-call” survey—or, from what we have seen so far, the voting booth.

This finding shows that while support for conjugal marriage is widespread, it is also fragile and falling victim to a phenomenon known among public opinion researchers as the “spiral of silence.” The late German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined this phrase, and used it as the title of a book 30 years ago. W. Phillips Davison summarized her theory as follows:

Most people are able to estimate (although not always correctly) what majority opinion is on most issues, or whether a particular opinion on an issue is gaining or losing ground. Those who see their own views as becoming more widely accepted tend to voice these views in public, and with increasing confidence. Those whose opinions seem to be losing ground are reluctant to speak out. The silence of the “losers,” in turn, increases the confidence of the other side. Finally, only a hard core is willing to defend the minority opinion in public.

One need not believe in what Noelle-Neumann called a “quasi-statistical” sixth sense to see her point. The conformity of crowd behavior has been observed almost as long as there have been crowds, and, for most people, the smaller and weaker one feels one’s own position to be, the harder it is to maintain it.

The reality is, and probably always will be, that the majority of the American population opposes same sex "marriage." Not that there's anything wrong with that!