76 Percent of Tennessee are BIGOTS

This is very bad news! We expect the TN anti-gay marriage amendment to pass in November but was hoping we can limit it’s support. I want to leave TN, the South.. Hell this country! (Another State court, Washington, has also struck down gay marriage rights!) We’re loosing in the courts now, and the homophobic people of this country don’t think we should have the same civil rights they have... (support is growing, among young people, but it will take a couple of decades for the old bigots to all die off and leave us alone..)

-----
Poll Shows Support for Marriage Amendment -- A Mason-Dixon poll conducted for the Chattanooga Times Free Press shows strong support in Tennessee for the so-called 'gay marriage' amendment to the state constitution - that effectively bans gay marriage by constitutionally defining marriage as between a man and woman. 76% of respondents said they would vote for the proposed amendment, while only 15% of respondents said they would vote against it and 9 percent were undecided.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

State voters embrace ban on gay marriages
By Ashley Rowland Staff Writer

Complete poll details are at tfponline. com

More than three-fourths of Tennesseans support an amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, according to a poll of registered likely voters taken earlier this month.

Seventy-six percent of respondents said they would vote for the proposed amendment, which will be on the ballot this fall. If approved, the amendment effectively would ban gay marriage.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they would vote against the amendment, and 9 percent were undecided.

"Every place that this has gone on a statewide ballot, it has passed overwhelmingly," said Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. of Washington, D.C., which conducted the survey for the Times Free Press. "I don’t see any reason why it won’t pass overwhelmingly in Tennessee, and these numbers seem to back that up."

A total of 625 Tennessee voters were interviewed by telephone July 17-19 for the poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Support for the amendment was strongest among men and residents of East Tennessee, where 81 percent of respondents said they would vote for it. Seventy-two percent of residents in Middle Tennessee and 74 percent in West Tennessee said they would vote for the amendment. One of the amendment’s backers said he isn’t taking those numbers for granted.

"I still don’t think the issue is on the radar screen for most people," said state Sen. David Fowler, a Republican from Signal Mountain and president of the Family Action Council, which supports the amendment. "When asked about it, there are more people that support it than don’t, but I would say the vast majority aren’t aware that the issue will be on the ballot yet."

The head of a state gay rights group questioned the results of the Mason-Dixon poll. Chris Sanders, head of the Tennessee Equality Project, said Tennesseans don’t support a ban on gay marriage as strongly as residents of other Southern states.

"I think Tennessee still has momentum toward supporting marriage equality in Tennessee," he said.