<p>Public opinion on same-sex marriage has shifted so far, so fast that I’m not sure 2008 election results have much relevance anymore. Among other things, there’s an entire cohort of 18-to-22 year olds who weren’t eligible to vote in the 2008 election, but now are, and public opinion surveys show that group overwhelmingly favoring same-sex marriage. And the attitudes of many middle-aged people have swung as well. Older people, not so much.</p>
<p>That said, I’m not surprised that anti-LGBT sentiment would be strongest in California’s interior, in places like Merced and Riverside Counties. Interior California is more like the rest of the interior West, and very different from the coast. In southern California, I would expect much of the support for Prop. 8 came from Latinos at the urging of the Catholic Church. The Church hasn’t changed its position, but many individual Catholics have. At least that was our experience here in Minnesota, where the Catholic Church largely bankrolled a 2012 proposed constitutional amendment to put a permanent ban on same-sex marriage into the state constitution. They really shot themselves in the foot; by putting that issue on the agenda, it forced people to think about it, and upon reflection most Minnesotans, including a majority of Catholics, said the constitutional amendment wasn’t a good idea, and voted it down by a decisive margin—first time ever such an amendment had been defeated at the ballot box. And in the process, public opinion shifted so strongly in favor of marriage equality that the state legislature was able enact a full marriage equality bill this spring, which public opinion surveys say has been embraced by a majority of Minnesotans.</p>
<p>In any event, I’d expect every UC campus to be LGBT-friendly. The only question is attitudes in the surrounding communities, which should be fine in most coastal cities, less so in the interior.</p>