70% of Americans in support of same-sex marriage

A new survey indicates there’s been a sea change in public support for samesex marriage.

More than two-thirds of Americans support samesex marriage — recordhigh numbers, according to the 2020 American Values Survey.

In the survey, published this week by the Public Religion Research Institute, a random sample of over 2,500 respondents from every state in the U. S. were asked their opinion on issues including LGBTQ rights, immigration, racial justice and the pandemic.

The survey found about 70% of Americans said they support granting same-sex couples the right to marry — the highest percentage of supporters the survey has recorded. 28% of Americans said they opposed it.

A previous American Values Survey from 2017, the last survey that asked Americans about their same- sex marriage opinions, found that 61% of respondents supported samesex marriage while 30% opposed it.

In all but one of the religious groups polled in the 2020 survey, a majority of members said they supported same-sex marriage. That includes Protestants, Catholics, other Christians and non- Christians of all races. Religiously unaffiliated people showed the highest support for samesex marriage at 90%.

Only white evangelicals didn’t support same- sex marriage by a majority, at 34% in support.

The survey suggests public opinion is changing even among religious conservatives.

Robert Jones, founder and CEO of PRRI and one of its leads on the 2020 American Values Survey, said trends in public opinion around same-sex marriage play out in a series of plateaus and jumps.

Between 2008 and 2010, he said, PRRI sur veys showed that support for same-sex marriage jumped nearly 10 percentage points, from 40% to 48%, among respondents.

Now, support has jumped once more, and among almost every group polled — among men and women, among white, Black and Latino Americans and among almost every religious group except white evangelicals.