This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This phrase, and the title, mask the fact that in the majority of states same-sex marriage legalization came from court cases, not through legislation or referenda[1].
"America", broadly construed, is quickly changing its mind, too, but this "wave" is more a product of judicial thought than public opinion.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United...
Edited to add: the court cases do not occur until a significant portion of the population believes in an issue enough to be willing to fight for it. Even then, the courts may take a significant amount if time adjusting their legal interpretation.
[0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/28417/most-americans-approve-inte...
My issue is I don't have any data to say whether the judiciary follows closely public opinion, or comes from something else--luck of the draw in who happens to be sitting on the court, for example. (e.g., the change that switched national minimum wage from unconstitutional to A-OK seemed to primarily involved FDR putting friendlier judges on the bench, not an outcry from the public.)
http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx
Note that the first court decision in the US (in Massachussetts) which led to legalized same-sex marriage was in 2003 with marriage becoming legal in 2004 (national public support at about 42%). Note that this was a state court decision, and public support in Massachussetts may have led what it was in national polls. Most of the final (not lower court decisions that were stayed pending appeal to a higher court which issued the final decision) court decisions -- and the acts by state legislatures not mandated by court decisions -- on the issue have happened in the last few years, with national public support at 50% or above.
Legislation is mostly seen as a stepping stone; it's not until it's been tested in court that a law is really valid.
If true, this situation becomes somewhat self-perpetuating
//Not sure what this line of code does, but if you
//delete it, you'll break the whole application
Legislature is the business people. The executive is the developers. The judiciary is the test team. That's how it's designed in the Constitution. The "original intent" of the judiciary was to be the guys waving their hands frantically saying, "Uh, this is a bug," while being completely ignored because there's a ship date to meet.
An interesting contrast might be the UK, which in the space of 10 years moved from a government eventually winning a legislative battle to revise a local government act to remove wording prohibiting "the promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" in 2003, via civil partnerships the following year to full gay marriage in 2013, introduced by a Conservative Prime Minister who had once supported attempts to block the removal of the ban on "promotion of homosexuality". Opinion polls suggested that majority public opinion shifted in a similar direction over that period of time.
I suspect American attitudes towards perceived culture war will be a little more stubborn...
http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-...
This is indeed America changing its mind.
You're right that there is not a direct connection between America's laws and America's minds, but the article was clear in what it was reporting.
It would have been interesting to also include information on public polling of these issues, but this information doesn't exist beyond a few decades ago.
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...
I wish there thy y axis was birth year. That way we can see if older people are actually changing their minds instead of just aging into the next bracket.
However, it ignores some issues that don't fall into such a pattern. For example, the issue of teaching evolution vs. creation in public schools; where teaching about evolution has never been questioned (as far as I know) in some states, while others have had laws on the books, and there is continuing pressure and laws that offer limited "workarounds" of the supreme court decision in order to promote "teaching the controversy", so it's not really a clear cut case of progress.
Another that isn't covered is capital punishment; some states have never had capital punishment, some have repealed it over the years, and the Supreme Court briefly suspended it nationwide but it was reinstated later, and many states still practice it.
Abortion, which is used as an example in this article, faces a similar problems as teaching of evolution. While abortion was allowed nationwide by Roe v. Wade, states are slowly introducing laws that restrict it so heavily that it's not available to a large fraction of people who need it. The turning point nationwide is being slowly turned back by laws that skirt the existing precedent.
It seems like picking these couple of issues, to show how "it may happen again", is a bit disingenuous without also covering major cases in which change hasn't followed this pattern, or has backslid since the original change.
I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I don't think creation teaching and capital punishment started at a low level of support and rapidly ramped up across many states. State-level legislation on creation-teaching is limited to a few conservative areas. Capital punishment has been around forever and support for it has fluctuated with the times.
I agree that abortion doesn't really fit the pattern of the other issues in the article, though. Supreme court approval seems to have come prematurely in that case.
How fast would America change its mind about them?
ADDED: and essentially none of it outside Illinois was forced by the federal courts to date, and that anti-trend looks to continue. Heller and McDonald were nice, but have resulted in very few changes on the ground, nor in the political debate. Although the changes in Illinois are dramatic, extremely so for Chicago and a few of its suburbs, which went from a complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns to shall issue concealed carry (and without automatic prosecution of self-defense cases) in 3 years (!).
As for details, there are currently 7-10 viciously anti-gun states as I count them: unquestioned are California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. Connecticut and Delaware are shall issue concealed carry in practice, but that could change, and Colorado, Connecticut, and Washington state have gotten worse post-Sandy Hook. And of course, the District of Columbia, the subject of Heller, is practicing Massive Resistance, with the Federal court system not really interested in resolution or following the Supremes.
Since then I cannot buy a machine gun manufactured after 1986, nor an imported "assault weapon", nor buy a gun from a dealer without an "instant check", and as fiatmoney mentioned, nationally "assault weapons" have mostly cycled.
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2011/0...
Long story short, acceptance of gun rights has been generally winning over gun control, though the patterns are almost the polar opposite of those reflected in the Bloomberg article.
Edit: It's worth pointing out that, true to form (for America at least), a lot of those states flipped colors as a result of a lawsuit, in which conformant legislation came after the fact.
Edit edit: I don't know how much editorial influence Michael Bloomberg has on Bloomberg News, but as Bloomberg News appears to be anti-gun, and Michael Bloomberg is quite obviously so, might there be a connection?
Beyond that, you're right, federally there's been very little activity, but a lot of the cases are loosely correlated, such that the cases gradually eroded the resistance to gun rights which paved the way towards gun-rights-friendly legislation.
Or, perhaps I'm romanticizing it. While I'm not in cahoots with the NRA, I do follow gun cases fairly closely, and there's been a fairly constant level of activity since 2008.
I honestly cannot recall another municipality that reversed, although I wouldn't be surprised a few others did. Given how few major ones have/had handgun bans, just Chicago, D.C. and NYC (outside of a very few politically connected), and what a big deal it was nationwide when Morton Grove pulled their stunt, I'd be disappointed with my news sources if I'd missed any.
I think it's fair to categorize Morton Grove either way, but perhaps it is errant of me to imply close correlation.
Edit: Actually, I recant. Many cities have overturned legislation as a result of suit, but looking at the context, we aren't talking about cities, we're talking about states.
As to the discussion on how states go from rights-restrictive to rights-permissive, I agree that it has predominately been done legislatively.
Although maybe some other cities in non-preemption states, but the only ones I can remember are Illinois, Nebraska (it came up after the state went shall issue), and Colorado for Denver, but that was carved out by the courts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Colorado#Denver).
This is interesting enough that I checked all the Wikipedia pages after only finding vague "almost all states": Illinois has now preempted most regulations. Massachusetts has "limited preemption", but I remember it to be pretty general. Nebraska is in "most but not all", so I assume the shall issue issues were ironed out, as I vaguely recall. New Jersey is limited (no surprise, it and Massachusetts really would like to outlaw guns altogether and mere ownership is massively restricted), New York of course. Basically Morton Grove's handgun ban lit a fire under state legislatures, most date from the mid-80s.
The above excludes things like some states allowing some cities to outlaw carrying in parks and the like, the usual discharge laws, plus various grandfathered laws, none super-onerous as far as I know aside from registration in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas).
Then again, there's been a whole lot of lawsuits to enforce state preemption; that's not Heller based, but it is of course done in the courts. At least a couple of states have made it particularly expensive for cities to resist, legislatures don't like their authority being questioned....
These laws ostensibly regulate private transfers, but in the fine print are aimed directly at hindering the creation of new gun owners and otherwise trapping us in flypaper, by criminalizing the lending and renting of guns even under supervision. The Washington state officials say they won't enforce that part of the law, but....
Next up are Nevada and Oregon, last time I heard about this.
The chaos agent in me was hoping that 591 would pass alongside 594, to see how the state would have to reconcile directly conflicting bills. Sadly, 591 was massively outspent.
I am hopeful that, eventually, for-cost registration schemes will eventually go the way of the dodo, as I personally equate them to a poll tax, so either the laws will be rescinded on those grounds, or FFL fees will be eliminated, which should ameliorate at least some of the issue.
I'm a long way from Washington. Is the current interpretation of I594 being applied to temporary transfers? I'm in Maryland, and we have a similar transfer limitation, but were at least able to press the AG into issuing a formal opinion on some aspects of the law, though the specifics of it currently elude me.
But of course each state's enforcement will be different, and subject to change. The really nasty states didn't start out enforcing their laws in truly nasty ways until the zeitgeist changed enough and laws aimed for blacks and disfavored immigrants were applied to all but the anointed.
Nothing will happen to the US if it abandons those treaties. It'll be a blip in the news for one day, as a few grumbles are heard. Other than that, what you'll hear is mostly cheering and celebrating.
Other countries will take it as a cue that the global war on drugs the US has been prosecuting is now over, and they will begin legalizing (this is already underway). It's no longer a question of if; at this point nothing will stop the inevitable rolling back of the war on drugs, the momentum is overwhelming.
Specifically, take all US Supreme Court decisions that resulted in the invalidation of state legislature, and track what the trend looked like in terms of historical trends of states that conformed to the decision before the decision was made.
Is anyone aware of any data sources that would have this information in some form? The complexity seems to be that if a law was struck down by a state in 1956, and the Supreme Court made a decision relative to that law in 1960, determining whether the law would have been struck down could be more subtle than a binary yes/no. But even having this data in a basic form, measuring state legislature activity leading up to a relevant federal court decision, could at least give an indication of how long issues take to gain some momentum.
This ignores the other axes; like state judicial decisions being overridden or validated by the federal level, or other variants, but still would be very interesting.
Want to go back and look at something again? You now have to wait for the animation.
This is objectively bad design. I want static PNGs or SVGs, not JavaScript.
Also, that site got in my shitlist for taking control of my keyboard. I prefer to use the arrow keys to scroll one line at a time, and the stupid JavaScript on that site made that impossible.
Actually, I'd be happiest if that entire page was just a single static .svg file.
If you're going to present a graph, the point of that graph is to be understood so it needs to be read easily and promptly.
Animating the graph every time you move up or down the page gets in the way of that analysis. It erases the data you were about to look and forces you to wait needlessly for it to appear again.
Try to look at one graph and quickly go back to a previous one to check it out in comparison or anything. It's absolutely uncomfortable.
For an extreme case, consider some issue where opinions are evenly spread out among all the states, and it very slowly changes, at a rate of, say, 0.5% per year. It would take two centuries to go from all-against to all-for at that rate, yet once you pass 50% you'd expect all the states to switch over more or less simultaneously.
The real world isn't so clean, but the same idea applies. Looking at the data, the recent examples of marijuana and same-sex marriage are changing faster, at more like 1-2%/year, but you can still see that the rate of change in state legalization is way faster than the rate of change of public opinion, as one would generally expect.
A couple of random pages with relevant poll data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Uni...
Note that the "Approve" line doesn't cross the "Disapprove" line until the mid-1980s, long after the USSC had spoken. With same-sex marriage on the other hand, the "Approve"/"Disapprove" cross-over happened a bit over three years ago and the USSC has yet to speak as definitively as it did in Loving v. Virginia.
(One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving. I'm not sure about that.)
Not very convincingly, because it did not hold that States cannot deny equal marriage, which would be the equivalent of the holding in Loving.
The "only" here is pure speculation. The fact is that the US Supreme Court has not issued a Loving like decision on same-sex marriage, and that same-sex marriage remains illegal in many states because of that. Therefore, it does not make sense to treat United States v. Windsor (which struck down Section 3 of DOMA) as an equivalent, in the domain of same-sex marriage, to Loving v. Virginia, in the domain of interracial marriage.
The federal government never did something like DOMA on interracial marriage (there was, relevant to Section 3, no federal policy against recognizing state-sanctioned interracial marriages), so Windsor naturally has no parallel among the interracial marriage cases.
I have a strong suspicion that the results would indicate that America itself doesn't really change its mind all that quickly even after the legal changes take place.
Not quite, but close enough: http://xkcd.com/1431/
Prohibition is one of the examples - the policies aren't at all guaranteed to be good.
It seems that, as a nation, we Americans can no longer settle divisive national (and therefore Federal) issues via the democratic process envisioned by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution: amendment of the Constitution itself. Instead, we leave ultimate decision making power in the hands of the Supreme Court.
Former Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy: rule by judges.
Also according to Fassett, in a February 1953 memo--three months before the Brown ruling--fellow Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson [3] used the term "a ruthless use of judicial power." Although Jackson did not use the term "krytocracy," Fassett commented, "That was sort of Justice Reed's feeling too--his krytocracy thought was the same thing."
I found all of the above in this article [4].
Finally, it is worth noting that, regardless of certain Justices' concerns about the Constitutional limits of judicial authority, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson by a unanimous vote, 9-0.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Forman_Reed
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson
[4] http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/theman/speeches-articles...
Democracy form a certain perspective is built in to us. Or at least people (demo) have in built mechanisms for moving together.