Trends in Public Opinion on Seven Major Social Issues

Audacious Epigone ^

[nodont]

Those who reflexively defend traditional morality are, in the face of change, by definition going to be the ones yelling "stop" most of the time. As Michael Blowhard explains (albeit in a discussion of architecture), that is probably the preferred default position:

Tradition: Practices based in experience that almost always succeed.

Deviation should only arise when the evidence is unequivocally compelling.

Are progressive causes overcoming the moribund opposition of social conservatives in the US?

The GSS allows for positions on five major social issues--abortion, capital punishment, drug legalization, wealth redistribution, and school prayer--to be tracked from the seventies to the present. Affirmative action is first asked about in 1994. The following graph shows the percentage of those who either "agree" or "strongly agree" that homosexuals should have the right to marry one another.

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Support for abortion rights is flat and may have topped out despite longstanding legal sanction. A recent Gallup poll showed for the first time since the polling organization began tracking the question in 1995 that a majority of Americans self-describe as "pro-life".

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Opposition to the death penalty hit a nadir during the crack epidemic of the mid-eighties to early-nineties and has since returned to the level it hovered around during the seventies, but it is a minority view and will probably suffer again if the pattern of lessening violent crime reverses sometime in the future.

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Affirmative action, when described as giving special preference to minorities at the expense of whites, has never been popular and this shows no signs of changing in the near future (although the long-term demographic transition the US is currently experiencing could effect it down the road, as NAMs are far more supportive of it than whites are).

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Rest of article contains lots of good statistics and graphs.