Most LGBT Friendly UC?

bclintonk
Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:58:08 +0000

Sam Lee:

If many of the ones “among those whose education level is high school or less” are actually high school students, then that 46% may be significantly inflated.



Well, that’s a fair point. I didn’t do the survey, so I don’t know, but typically when pollsters do surveys on these kinds of public policy questions, they’ll only poll people of voting age, which excludes most HS students. I think that’s probably the case here because they broke the age demographics down into just 3 groups, 18-34, 35-49, and 50+. Of course, some HS students are 18, a few even 19, but California has such a large population of post-HS age people with a HS education or less that the 18- and 19-year-old high schoolers would be a pretty small fraction of the sample.



I honestly don’t know what “mainline Protestants” mean exactly. I highly doubt religion plays much role in their view.



Again, it’s not my survey and not my term, but “mainline Protestants” is a widely used term in religious circles, used mainly by Protestant churches that want to distinguish themselves from the more politically and socially conservative “evangelical” Protestants. So it’s people like the UCC (Congregationalists), Unitarians, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, ELCA Lutherans (descended from the establishment Lutheran churches in Germany and the Nordic countries, but not Missouri Synod or Wisconsin Synod Lutherans who consider themselves evangelicals), United Methodists, American Baptists (descended from the anti-slavery Northern Baptists of the Civil War era, but not the Southern Baptists who consider themselves evangelicals), and Disciples of Christ, among others. Many (all?) of these denominations work together through ecumenical organizations like the National Council of Churches (which the more conservative evangelical denominations abhor), and they have a common history of working in various ways on social justice and social reform issues, which they derive directly from their theology. That theology differs from denomination to denomination, but shares a common thread of “the social gospel.” Some trace their social activism to the abolitionist movement, others (like the United Methodists) to temperance movements which really saw themselves first and foremost as a movement to better the lives of the urban poor and working class; others to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Most were pretty strongly anti-war in the Vietnam era, and have remained so since. All have struggled internally with the ordination of women (now broadly accepted), and more recently with the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy (increasingly accepted), and even more recently, whether to give church recognition to same-sex unions, whether marriages or civil unions or simple church-recognized commitment ceremonies without any formal legal sanction, which many of these denominations now embrace, and others are still struggling with I think it’s just a mistake to suggest the views of members of these denominations on same-sex marriage have nothing to do with their religion. Quite the contrary; issues like ordination of gay and lesbian clergy and religious recognition of same-sex unions are compelling theological issues that these churches have been struggling with, and sometimes hotly and angrily debating, but their positions are evolving quite rapidly toward full acceptance of equality on the basis of gender orientation. And those theological debates are also contributing to an evolution in the views of millions of people who strongly identify with one of these denominations, just as the rapidly evolving views of individual congregants are influencing the churches themselves.

No doubt it’s true that many people only loosely identify with one of these churches, just as millions of lapsed Catholics would still self-identify as Catholic even if they no longer attend Mass. But I wouldn’t underestimate the role these churches play in the lives of millions of others, and the degree to which their moral teaching still has resonance for many, shall we say, infrequent attenders.

Here in Minnesota during recent battles over same sex marriage, the voices of leaders of mainstream Protestant denominations in favor of marriage equality were a very important counterweight to the voices of the Catholic bishops and conservative evangelical ministers. Religion played a huge role, on both sides.