My friend Karin Wang, Vice President of the LA-based Asian Pacific American Legal Center, recently reflected on how Asian Americans have become more accepting of same-sex marriage (via APAs for Progress):
For public interest lawyers, the common theme running through what we work on is “how difficult is it to win” – the more difficult the issue, the more likely we are to work on it. One year ago, after Proposition 8 passed, I would have put marriage equality at the top of the list of “really, really hard issues to win.”
But amazingly, the same election results that are still so difficult to accept – because we really should have won – also offer a great lesson of hope and progress.
A few days after the 2008 election, my colleague at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center showed me the exit poll data he had gathered. The Legal Center has polled voters in Southern California for more than 15 years, tracking Asian American voting trends. In 2000, we polled Asian American voters on Proposition 22, the ballot measure that created a statutory ban on marriage equality.
The results were so abysmal – Asian Americans were split roughly 70/30 in favor of Prop 22, significantly worse than the general voters who were split 60/40 – that we never released that data.
Last year, California voters narrowed the gap between those that support and those that oppose marriage equality to 52/48, an impressive shift in eight years. Well, imagine our shock when we looked at our Prop 8 data and saw that Asian Americans voted 54/46 or nearly equal with all other voters – dramatically down from the 70/30 split in 2000. We quickly dug up our “forgotten” data.
For the non-math majors, here’s what happened: Overall, California voters narrowed the gap by 14 points in eight years – but Asian Americans narrowed the gap by 30 points in the same period of time.
It’s hard to pinpoint all of the causes for the dramatic shift – but it’s not a coincidence that during that 2000 to 2008 period, Asian American organizations like API Equality-LA, Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and many others were engaged in a public education campaign to change hearts and minds in our community.
It can take years to bring out positive change. But if we all work together, good things will happen sooner than we think.
– Gautam Dutta
