The same CBS/New York Times poll that shows Mitt Romney opening up a very slight lead on the president also contains a possible clue to solving the mystery I mentioned last week: The gap between public support for gay marriage in opinion polling and the actual support the cause tends to get at the ballot box. Unlike many of the recent surveys (Gallup, Pew, etc.) showing majority or near-majority support for same-sex marriage, the Times/CBS poll didn’t just ask respondents a yes/no question, but raised the possibility of civil unions as well:

The poll asked respondents a three-part question: whether same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry, or if they should be allowed to form civil unions but not marry, or if there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship. Nearly 4 in 10, 38 percent, said they should be allowed to marry, similar to recent surveys, but up significantly from just 2 in 10 who said so in 2004.

Another 24 percent said same-sex couples should be allowed to form civil unions.

But 1 in 3 said there should be no legal recognition at all of the relationships. In November 2004, 44 percent said same-sex relationships should not be legally recognized.

So a quarter of Americans would like to see some legal recognition for gay relationships, but would also prefer — again, if given the option — that such recognition not be described as a marriage. Judging by the data in other surveys, when you narrow the choice to a yes/no for same-sex marriage, a significant segment of that in-between group may end up saying yes. But one can safely assume that it’s at least a somewhat reluctant yes, given that the people offering it would prefer another option. And this would seem to be exactly the population that might say one thing to a pollster and end up voting another way in a referendum later on.

Not that this wouldn’t necessarily be quite the same thing as so-called “social desirability bias,” in which voters feel overt social pressure to answer one way to a pollster but then behave differently in the privacy of the voting booth. (The 2010 paper that shows the consistent gap between polling on gay marriage and referendum results also argues that there’s no correlation between this gap and, say, the size of the state’s gay population or other factors that would raise the social costs of being opposed to gay marriage.) Rather, it might just represent a kind of basic unsettledness to public opinion on the question, and a dissatisfaction with a binary choice, that might make polling the issue unusually difficult.

Queries such as the one Douthat raises invokes the “inevitability” canard wrought by same-sex marriage proponents. While social commentators are quick to cite polls, they are less likely to discuss the discrepancies in polls versus outcomes. What is known as the Bradley Effect, historical trends indicate that what one says they’re likely to do in a voting booth, does not square with what they actually do in the voting booth.

For further discussion, see the “Seinfeld Effect.”

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LEXINGTON, KY—”It’s a funny thing about politicians whose views ‘evolve’ on controversial issues,” said Martin Cothran, in response to the announcement today by President Barack Obama that he approves of same-sex marriage. “They always seem to evolve as the political winds and financial gusts are blowing.”

Obama’s remarks come the same day that most Americans found out that North Carolina citizens voted in favor of the traditional view of marriage. “Although it’s becoming increasingly common for politicians to kowtow to liberal special interest groups, when this issue is put before people, they still vote to keep the traditional definition of marriage,” said Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation.

“There are people whose moral convictions shift with the polls and there are people whose moral convictions are tied to something more permanent. The President has made it clear today which camp he’s in.”

From Ryan Anderson at National Review:

Today’s vote in North Carolina is not about banning anything. Nothing will be made illegal as a result. In all fifty states across the nation two people of the same sex can live together, have their religious community bless their union, and have their workplace offer them various joint benefits — if the religious communities and workplaces in question so desire. Many liberal houses of worship and progressive businesses have voluntarily decided to do so. There’s nothing illegal about this. There’s no ban on it.

What’s at issue is whether the government will recognize such unions as marriages — and then force every citizen and business to do so as well. This isn’t the legalization of something, this is the coercion and compulsion of others to recognize and affirm same-sex unions as marriages.

[...]

But this isn’t really about civil rights or civil liberties. No one is suggesting the state deny people who self-identify as gay or lesbian their rights to free speech, religious liberty, free association, or any other traditional civil liberty. The question is whether a new “civil right” — the right to have the government and private citizens recognize your same-sex sexual partnership as a marriage — ought to be created, redefining marriage in the process.

[...]

Voters in North Carolina today are not voting to ban anything. They are voting to define what marriage is. They are voting to protect the union of a man and woman as something unique and irreplaceably important.

May 8, 2012

Contact: Andrew Walker

502-509-5743

Lexington, KY—A conservative family group applauded the passage of North Carolina’s Marriage Protection Amendment and expressed hope that groups opposed to the amendment would refrain from what it called “hateful rhetoric.” Titled “Amendment One,” the amendment defined marriage as being between one man and one woman, resisting recent attempts to re-define marriage. North Carolina becomes the thirty-second state to establish similar constitutional marriage protections.

“When people are afforded the privacy to vote their convictions without fear of intimidation by overzealous gay rights activists, over and over we see traditional marriage winning by substantial margins,” said Andrew Walker, an analyst with The Family Foundation.

“We hope the opponents of this bill can refrain from the kind of name-calling they have engaged in on previous such occasions. Calling people ‘bigots’ just because you disagree with them is its own kind of hate speech.”

Walker pointed out the significance of North Carolina being a moderate state. ”The passage of an amendment by such a wide margin in a state like this is a repudiation of the idea that same-sex marriage is an inevitability.”

According to Walker, Kentucky’s amendment regarding marriage, which passed in 2004 and was approved by 75 percent of voters, was a major historical moment. “What most Kentuckians do not recognize is that more people voted ‘Yes’ on the Kentucky Marriage Protection Amendment than had ever voted both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’combined on any other constitutional amendment in Kentucky history.”

Walker maintained that marriage is worth protecting:  “Where marriage and the family goes, so goes the nation.”

Herald-Leader columnist Tom Eblen cheered on the witch hunt over a Christian businessman’s refusal to print T-shirts with a message that contradicts his religious views.

The man is being hauled before the Lexington Human Rights commission, which is being called upon to throw him into the political water to see if he floats.

Taking up his torch, Eblen added his voice to those of the Gay and Lesbian Services Organization and Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, who are chanting the political equivalent of “Burn him!”

The University of Kentucky, too, has added its increasingly anti-religious voice to the din. This is the same university that refused to hire a science professor on the grounds that he was an evangelical, resulting in a complaint to the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, which was completely ignored.

Eblen and the rest of the mob are arguing that the business, Hands on Originals, has violated the Lexington Fairness Ordinance, an ordinance which added coverage for sexual orientation to that for race, religion, gender and national origin in anti-discrimination laws governing housing, employment and public accommodations.

The ordinance prohibits a business from refusing to serve a person on the basis of his sexual orientation.

In a famous scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a woman is accused of being a witch. The reason? “She looks like one.” To Eblen and the rest of the witch hunters, Hands On Originals looks like it’s discriminating, even though it’s not.

What Eblen and the mob haven’t noticed in the midst of their frenzied denunciations is that Hands On Originals did not discriminate against any customer on the basis of sexual orientation. In fact, the business has an expressed policy against it. What it did do was refuse to print a T-shirt with a message that went against its religious convictions.

It didn’t refuse to print the T-shirts because of who was asking it to print them; it refused to print them because of what the T-shirts said. This is not prohibited by the ordinance.

Had the group come to Hands On to print a shirt that said “I love the Wildcats,” there would have been no problem.

Ironically, the people really discriminating are UK and any other organization that pulls its business from the T-shirt company, since they are doing so on the basis of the owner’s religious beliefs. If they were providing the service rather than receiving it, they would be the ones violating anti-discrimination laws.

It used to be witches who were supposed to contort themselves into strange positions, but now gay activist groups, marching under the banner of tolerance, are twisting themselves into the tolerance police, intent, not on preventing discrimination against individuals, but on using the power of government to force others to agree with them.

But in their increasingly intolerant crusade, they have apparently failed to take note of the consequences.

Imagine that you ran a T-shirt business and a white supremacist group came to you to print T-shirts that said, “Down with N—–s!” According to the reasoning of Eblen and the mob, anti-discrimination laws would require you to print them. Not to do so would be to discriminate against a racial group, in this case, Aryans.

Here’s where the gay rights activists and liberal journalists meet the Aryan Nation.

Eblen’s bizarre reasoning doesn’t end there. He ventures into the issue of what Christianity actually says about homosexuality, saying that, the way he reads it, the Gospels aren’t against it. Notice the subtle avoidance of the rest of the New Testament, in which Paul leaves little doubt about the issue. Or the Old Testament, which doesn’t exactly read like a gay rights tract.

Then, as if to amuse those of his readers who have actually read the thing, he charges those who disagree with him with selectively reading the Bible.

Might as well burn the Bible along with the witch.

I have a new slogan for a T-shirt: “Down with the Tolerance Police!” I’ll take it to a gay-owned T-shirt company and point out that, according to the groups who say they represent them, they have no choice but to print it.

The current scandal is the use of pain killers on race day. Since the horse feels no pain the tendency is to respond and run hard and fast.  When the horse exceeds the ability of the body to bear the load, the horse breaks down, resulting in injury, often career ending, and even death. The additional tragedy is that the horse that breaks down often takes other horses down resulting in additional injuries and death.

Why is this suddenly a problem? The explanation is that tracks with purses inflated by casino money are running claiming races with purses well above the value of the horses. When this happens (which is many times a day nationwide) owners have great incentives to juice the horse, and hope he or she wins in one day more than the sale value or the claiming value. As a result, many more horses are breaking down. Such is the corrupting influence of casinos on horse racing.

The fans who watch a horse die often do not return to the track.

The Kentucky Racing Commission, the tracks and the Department of Revenue had asked for a judgment from the Franklin Circuit Court as to the legality of the games that the Racing Commission had approved.  The Family Foundation asked to join the suit in opposition.  The Franklin Circuit Court approved the games, and The Family Foundation appealed the decision.

Stan Cave, lawyer for The Family Foundation. cited a number of issues with the decision.  The first judgment was inappropriate in that there was no opposition until after the fact.  Once allowed the opposition was not allowed access to documents or discovery.  A third issue was that while simulcasting is viewing a live horse race, the viewing of historical races is not live.  The fourth issue raised was the nature of the pool.  While hostile questioning by Judge Combs deflected Cave into a fruitless discussion of a pool of one, the nature of the pool came up later in the presentations by the defense.  Numerous questions by the judges prevented Cave from bringing up the issue of the non-horse related games, since he was allotted only 20 minutes.

Peter Ervin, representing the Racing Commission, after the usual propaganda about the tracks needing help, racing as the signature industry and breeding as one of Kentucky’s largest agricultural industries, claimed the allowing of instant racing is within its jurisdiction.  He claimed that the betting was on legitimate races, and that there was no Constitutional or or statutory requirement that the race be live. This is a key issue that the court must decide.  Erwin indicated that the bets were pari-mutuel because the bets were pooled over time and over different races to create the pari-mutuel pool.  The bets were not against the house which takes roughly 8% of the bets.  He asserted several times that historical racing is just another exotic bet.

Bill Lear, on behalf of the eight race tracks, argued that since the bets are not against the house, the nature of the pool does not matter.  He introduced a number of extraneous matters, deflecting attention away from the key issues.

Another lawyer representing the Revenue Cabinet argued that racing tax structures should apply because betting on historical races is no different from watching a tape-delayed basketball game.  He was apparently answering complaints about the low tax rates on what are apparently slot machines.

The unanswered question, which was not discussed, is whether the other five games that are not related to horse racing are allowable..  Are they pooled bets?  If not, they are not under the jurisdiction of the Racing Commission, and should be removed.  Another unaddressed issue is that the bettor is not required to watch the last few seconds of the race.  Is this betting on a horse race or simply a gambling device.  In four to six weeks we will have an answer, just not necessarily the right one for the people of Kentucky.

Phone: (859) 329-1919

LEXINGTON, KY— “The Family Foundation today called last week’s decision by the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE) to allow another 6 percent increase in college and university tuitions “an educational scandal.” It also called on State Auditor Adam Edelen to audit the CPE.

“The CPE has become a rubber stamp for tuition increases by our colleges and universities,” said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst for the group. “And every time the CPE shirks its responsibility to keep college affordable, which is basically every year, it places more students in a position where they either can’t afford a college education or they have to go into further debt. This is unfair to the families of this state and detracts from the economic competitiveness of this state.”

The CPE has called its recent decision to allow UK and U of L to increase tuitions 6 percent for the second year in a row one of placing “caps” on the rise in tuitions. “To allow a tuition increase that is over twice the rate of inflation is not a ‘cap’,” said Cothran. ”It’s a license to steal.”

Cothran said his group had called on former State Auditor Crit Luallen to audit the CPE. He said her office said they would consider it, but never took any action. “There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm among our state’s public officials for regulating for-profit colleges. We would like to see an equal level of enthusiasm for regulating the ones that taxpayers pay for.”

Cothran said the CPE should not be allowed to abandon its stated goal of keeping higher education affordable.

In the case of the recent fight over the transportation budget in Frankfort, David Williams and the Senate Republicans have balked at Gov. Steve Beshear’s attempt to pass the budget, which provides $4.5 billion in money for roads in the state, without passing the Road Plan, which contains the directions for what the governor is to do with the money.

Without the Road Plan, the governor has a blank check on what he can do with the money.

And because Williams wouldn’t consent to something no one is really able to defend, Beshear called the Legislature back into session the very next week so that he could have his transportation money.

So now people are up in arms about the fact that we are paying something over $60,000 per day to call legislators back to Frankfort because they couldn’t agree during the regular session.

And who gets the blame? Why even ask? David Williams.

I can understand why liberals would want to blame David Williams for everything bad that happens, including legislation they don’t like, inclement weather, and large scale natural disasters. What I can’t understand is why conservatives would want to join in.

Instead of standing up and cheering for elected officials who will put their foot down when the governor or the Democratic House want to do things that they shoudn’ta oughta do, we criticize them for doing it.

David Williams and the Republicans are now taking fire from some conservatives themselves for trying to hold the governor responsible for how money spent, and being criticized for obstructionism and intransigence. Instead of talking about what a great job our guys are doing and how we should elect them to do it again, we talk instead about how we need to throw all the bums out and impose term limits.

Whereas founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson had an enthusiasm for checks and balances, modern conservatives, despite portraying ourselves as Jeffersonians in many ways, have a singular impatience for them. Some of us seem surprised that the legislative tools you have to use to obstruct bad policy are all obstructionist tools. But if bad policy should be obstructed, and you do what needs to be done to obstruct it, you shouldn’t have to face charges from your own supporters that you are being an obstructionist.

Folks, this is the way it’s supposed to work.

It’s like having your army invade the enemy only to have the folks back home criticize you for having to actually use weapons.

The liberals don’t do this to themselves. When Democrats kill things they don’t like, their liberal friends in the media slap them on the back and call it a job well done. They stand together. They know who they think the good guys and the bad guys are, and they identify them and level blame on the bad guys. They target their fire.

But when conservative legislators do the right thing, they’re never sure whether they’re going to have the support of their own people. When we see things happening that we don’t like in Frankfort, we fire into the crowd, hitting both our enemies and our friends.

When liberals succeed in stopping something by bringing everything to a halt, they throw a party. When conservatives do it, they all put themselves into therapy.

The last argument conservatives should ever make is that elected lawmakers are “not getting anything done.” Why would conservatives ever buy in to the liberal idea that the more legislation we have, the better? In every other case, conservatives want government to do less. So when it comes to legislation, why would any conservative want them to do more? The vast majority of legislation is bad. Most bills in legislatures expand government or do other things that conservatives generally oppose.

That’s why conservatives shouldn’t lament gridlock, they should celebrate it.

The only legitimate criticism is that, since we now have yearly, rather than bi-annual sessions of the Kentucky General Assembly, we are paying more money to have legislators in Frankfort and that they still aren’t getting things done.

Well, some of us conservatives opposed going to annual sessions for just this reason: it would either make government more efficient or it would only allow government greater opportunity to aggrandize itself. So what are conservatives now to do? Help increase the scope and power of government?

That’s essentially what some conservatives are saying. They should think about it a little more.

FRANKFORT, KY— “No, I am not talking about National Basketball Championships for the University of Kentucky,” said Kent Ostrander, executive director of The Family Foundation in the Rotunda of the State Capitol today. “I’m talking about eight Sessions – eight years – without a pro-life bill being brought to the floor of the House of Representatives.”

Rep. Bob Damron’s House Bill 274, which deals which patient health records, has had the Face-To-Face Consultation legislation amended to it in the Senate and now all it needs to become law is a vote of concurrence by the full House. It passed the full House on Feb. 10 by a vote of 94-0, creating an interesting dynamic in the House given the pro-life amendment.

“The last pro-life bill to come to the House Floor was Rep. Bob Damron’s HB 108 Fetal Homicide Bill in 2004,” said Ostrander. “It passed with an overwhelming vote of 88 to 5 and Kentucky is even more pro-life now than it was eight years ago. It is time – it’s past time – to secure this legislation.”

Ostrander when on to say if HB274 is given the opportunity to be voted upon today, it will pass by a similar margin as the 2004 Fetal Homicide bill and true legislative representation will have been achieved.

With the 2012 General Assembly ending with today’s House and Senate sessions, The Family Foundation joined other sanctity of life organizations to elevate the reality that politics is being used to thwart the will of the people. Some of the other groups involved include the Kentucky Right to Life Association, the Catholic Conference, the Kentucky Memorial for the Unborn and the American Family Association of Kentucky.