Gay Marriage

• Agree/Disagree: Same sex marriage should be legal in Texas (August 2022)

  Respondents were asked, "Do you agree or disagree that same sex marriage should be legal in Texas?"

• Beliefs About Discrimination in America Color Views of Supreme Court’s Masterpiece

  June 07, 2018 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

  This week, the Supreme Court released its much anticipated decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Civil Rights Commission, narrowly ruling for the plaintiffs and spurring both sides in the debate over LGBTQ rights to claim larger victories than justified by the decision.  While LGBTQ rights were clearly being tested, beliefs about discrimination in America lurk just below the surface of responses to the decision — and those beliefs vary markedly among partisans.

• UT/Texas Tribune Poll Data on Issues Under Judicial Review This Week

  December 05, 2017 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

  Matters of intense partisan contention at the state and federal level – LGBTQ rights, voting rights, the President’s travel ban, and abortion – are getting attention from the judicial branch this week. Our polling in Texas has yielded a lot of data on the issue at hand that might be useful in thinking about how they made it onto the public agenda in the first place, how specific politics and laws that are now being contested in the courts came to be, and how actions taken by the courts will be interpreted by the broader public here in Texas

   

• Taking Texas to Trial: Public Opinion on Texas' High Profile Cases

  November 06, 2017 | By: Joshua Blank, Jim Henson

   When it comes to legal cases in general, and legal rights in particular, it's important to note that public opinion can often act as a poor guide to a just outcome, and in many cases, may have no relevance on particular legal proceedings. With that caveat aside, public opinion is useful in determining how elected officials, including the Attorney General, might react to court decisions, and further, whether the state chooses to push ahead in the legal process in the face of adverse decisions. 

• Gay Marriage Opinion (October 2014)

  Respondents were asked, "What is your opinion on gay marriage?"

• Gay Marriage Opinion (June 2017)

  Respondents were asked, "What is your opinion on gay marriage?"

• Everywhere you look, Democracy! Texas Data Points from the Week in Politics

  March 02, 2017 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

  The week was barely underway when the new Public Education Chair in the Texas House illustrated just how much style and personality can make the same position feel really different when it comes from a Huberty rather than an Aycock. The House managed to make a fight out of the one issue that there seemed to be universal agreement on in the Legislature, while the Texas Supreme Court decided they want to hear arguments about gay marriage after all.  Meanwhile, in the commanding heights, Governor Abbott was invited by the other two-thirds of the big three to have a fight with one of them, but it was no cigar. Instead, the Governor was plenty happy to take the resolution passed by the Senate joining the call for a Convention of the States, though conservatives are not all of the same mind on whether that’s a good idea or not.  If the governor has to change their mind, maybe he ought to ask the President, who seems to have done a good job of moving Republicans toward a more open-minded position on the President of Russia -- though it turns out Attorney General Sessions may have jumped the gun on that front at least a little.

• Texas Data Points from the Week in Texas Politics - April 22, 2016

  April 22, 2016 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

• The Week's Argy-Bargy: Texas Data Points from the Week in Politics, February 19, 2016

  February 19, 2016 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

  With Donald Trump seemingly headed toward big wins in both the South Carolina and Nevada primaries and Texas’ proportional representation primary less than two weeks away, the magnitude of Ted Cruz’s strength in Texas, and its geographic distribution, loom as major factors on Super Tuesday. Technically, Super Tuesday actually got underway in Texas on Monday, when early voting for the primary election started. Guns were back in the news this week as another private university took advantage of the campus-carry opt-out privilege accorded private institutions even as the University of Texas at Austin begrudgingly announced its policy, which reflected the legislature’s concerted effort to force public universities to allow guns in classrooms. The legislature continued its vision of protecting Constitutional guarantees Wednesday when the Senate State Affairs Committee held a hearing on their interim charge to protect sincerely held religious beliefs from the depredations of government. At several points in that hearing, the testimony flared into the kind of vituperative opposition to gay and lesbian rights that would have pleased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died over the weekend near Marfa. The stakes of choosing Scalia’s successor on the high court couldn’t be higher, including among Republicans whose faith in the court was shaken by the court’s decisions affirming gay marriage and the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act  – decisions from which Justice Scalia dissented with characteristic color.

• Opinion on Gay Marriage (November 2015)

  Respondents were asked, "What is your opinion on gay marriage?"