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The most impossible poll

Pollsters should just give up asking about gay marriage for the next few years. Enough already.

Yes, we know in 2004 that a majority of Americans opposes it, a sizable minority supports it, a sizable minority STRONGLY opposes it, but beyond that the intensity of feeling is difficult to measure.

The answers you get on this subject vary widely by wording. This is usually difficult to prove across polls, which is why we are fortunate that a recent poll asked the same exact question with two different phrasings.

These gems come from the CBS/NYT poll conducted late last week.

In response to,
"Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow marriage ONLY between a man and a woman?"

59% of respondents said "favor," 35% said "oppose", and the balance didn't know.

This seems like unusually bad news. Most polls show America evenly divided on the constitutional amendment. But fear not, because our pollsters asked the SAME people this question:

"Do you think defining marriage as a union only between a man and a woman is an important enough issue to be worth changing the Constitution for, or isn't it that kind of issue?"

38% thought it was worth changing the Constitution, while 56% said that this issue really does not belong there.

If I were a conservative and wanted to spin these results, the best I could come up with would be that 1 in 5 Americans opposes gay marriage enough to support an amendment, but they don't want to actually think about what that means.

Personally, I don't find it hard to come up with factors that can shave points off of the ideal anti-marriage question in big chunks to get us down from 59% to 38%. I would even grant that 38% understates support for the amendment. There may be some people who want gay marriage to go away but think homosexuality is so revolting that any reference would be the equivalent of a ketchup stain on our sacred documents. We can all find words and phrases in the first question that could sway people toward a conclusion they might not otherwise have reached.

But at this point, who cares? The Mom index is more entertaining.