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NOM Releases Anti-Marriage Poll For Maryland From Mormon Polling Company

02/17/11-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
Could it be that same-sex marriage in Maryland is not well liked and that voters want- nay- demand the right to vote on the rights of others because prejudice is like that and people should have the right to deny others their rights as citizens? Do you trust a research group that, well, no one has really heard of before despite spending some 43 years in the business? Well, that is what is coming out of the National Organization for Marriage right now.

What NOM does not note in their article is that their pollster- Dr. Gary Lawrence- once served as a Bishop in the Mormon Church, is devoutly Mormon, and has his doctorate from Stanford in communications psychology not, well, statistics. Basically, he has a degree in how people respond to the media and to communications. The wording for the questions was fairly simple. He asked:

“As far as you personally are concerned, should marriage be between a man and a woman, or should it also be available to same-sex couples?”

“As you may have heard, some legislators want to legalize same-sex marriage in Maryland and others want to preserve marriage as the union of a man and a woman. As far as you are concerned, is this an issue that should be decided by the state legislature, or is this something that should be decided by the voters?”

What they found was that 54% of Maryland voters believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman as opposed to 37. NOM, which commissioned the poll, also stated that 78% of Maryland voters believe that they should be able to vote on the rights of lesbians and gays.

NOM claimed:

… Another poll conducted in January claimed that Maryland voters favor same-sex marriage by a 51-44 margin, but used the phrase “giving them the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples in areas such as tax exemptions, inheritance and pension coverage.” According to Dr. Gary Lawrence of Lawrence Research, the addition of this pro-legalization argument – couching the legalization of same-sex marriage as only about granting rights and benefits to gay couples – without a counter-balancing statement from the opposing side injects a bias into those results.

One has to wonder what kind of biases were in the methodology of this particular study given the already hostile view of the pollster- a pollster who does not have much of a known track record.

Maryland Poll FINAL – 02.17.11