In the days following President Obama’s announcement that he supports marriage among same sex couples, there has been many articles published on the subject. Conservatives have argued that such a stance is against traditional American values; liberals have argued that the views of the American public are simply changing. A recent article CNN.com by contributor, and Democratic strategist, Maria Cardona pushes the idea that key groups are more friendly to the idea than many conservatives would like to believe; she specifically reports that the religious Latino vote is pro-gay rights and is unlikely to help the conservative in the upcoming presidential election.
Although Cardona is clearly biased in her article, her use of polling statistics makes a strong case that the gay marriage issue is not going to affect the democrats negatively, at least not within Latino community. Many proponents of gay marriage have made such a claim, but her specific use of statistics and percentages makes her argument more persuasive and compelling. She sites polls that show 80% of Latino voters believe that gays and lesbians are discriminated against, as well as 73% that gays should be able to serve in the military openly. She finds that 68% of Latino Catholics believe being gay is morally acceptable, with 79% of those same Catholics believing that gay people can still be “good Catholics.” Similar use of polling percentages can be found in an NPR interview of Nate Silver of the New York Times; Silver cites that 45% of voters are against gay marriage and nearly 70%, or 2/3, of voters under the age of 30 support it.
Whether or not these polls are truly representative of the mindset on gay marriage by Latinos and young voters, Cardona’s and Silver’s use of hard numbers and mathematical data that proves their points make these reports more effective and less generalized that many similar kinds of arguments made by both sides of the issue who do not rely on this kind of statistical data.