Blessing these unions.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Gay marriage gains support - Brief article

IN AUGUST CNN announced the first poll results indicating that most Americans support gay marriage, with 52 percent of respondents agreeing that "gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married and have their marriage recognized by law as valid" Combining that result with data from other surveys, poll analyst Nate Silver argued on his blog FiveThirtyEight that "it has become increasingly unclear whether opposition to gay marriage still outweighs support for it."

While the margin of error in the CNN poll (4.5 percentage points) left open the possibility that gay marriage supporters do not constitute a majority yet, Silver noted that their numbers have been rising more or less steadily since 1988, with the trend accelerating in the last year or two. Furthermore...