(Washington, D.C.) Pushing an anti-gay agenda may be less successful for Republicans than they had imagined. A new poll of white evangelical Christians shows that nearly half of the nation's fundamentalists do not support amending the US Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Despite intense lobbying by political action groups representing evangelicals only 52 percent would support the amendment. It is not that they approve of gay marriage. They do not. But, the poll, taken by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc. for the PBS television show Religion & Ethics News Weekly, and U.S. News & World Report, shows that conservative Christians believe the issue should be handled by the states.
The survey shows that only 48 percent beleive a candidate's support for gay marriage would disqualify him from receiving their votes. It also found that only 36 percent of white evangelicals listed moral values as a top concern.
The poll is considered the most comprehensive look at evangelicals in years and indicates that the movement is not as cut and dried as its own leaders suggest.
"Their concerns are multidimensional," said Anna Greenberg, vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
In addition, even though President Bush has spent considerable time and effort courting evangelicals, as a group they have not been active supporters of the GOP.
After the 2000 race, Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, said 4 million religious conservatives had failed to go to the polls and pledged that the administration would rally them in 2004.
The pollsters said they estimated that 23 percent of U.S. adults - or about 50 million people - are evangelical.
The survey of 1,610 respondents was done between March 16 and April 4. It has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The survey will be highlighted in a four-part series, "America's Evangelicals," whose weekly segments will be broadcast on PBS stations beginning this weekend.
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