By KAITLIN BAIN Senior reporter
In 2005, Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. That amendment is still in effect today, while voter opinion is changing and more states nationwide are lifting their bans on same-sex marriage. This amendment was added to the constitution in 2005 with 76 percent of the vote, according to an Associated Press article. This opinion is changing though, according to a poll conducted by Texas Tech in April 2014, with 48 percent of respondents supporting marriage equality and 47 percent opposing it. Mark McKenzie, an associate professor of political science at Tech, said this change of heart comes from a change that is happening nationwide. “Most Americans agree with the court’s trajectory on gay rights and same-sex marriage,” he said. “New voters to the electorate, older voters have died off and the young, both Republicans and Democrats, young people by far and away support gay marriage.”
While Texas has yet to legalize samesex marriage, other states, including Oklahoma, have made the switch. Seth McKee, an assistant professor of political science at Tech, said the south has experienced this lack of movement in several different social issues. “The simple answer is that the South is the most culturally and religiously conservative region of the United States,” he said. “It has been and remains the slowest to move forward with respect to social and values issues and issues regarding equality, like civil rights and gay rights.” Beginning with Massachusetts in 2004, the legalization of same-sex marriage has swept the nation, with 37 states currently allowing same-sex marriage and 13 states with bans through either laws or constitutional amendments, according to ProCon’s website, a nonprofit charity that provides information on controversial issues. Chuck Smith, executive director of Equality Texas and the Equality Texas Foundation, said the lack of progress made by the state over the years comes as a function of which federal district court it is a part of.
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“The ruling that happened that affected Oklahoma was basically at the same level of a judge as what happened in Texas,” he said. “The only difference is that Judge Garcia in San Antonio made his ruling 13 months ago, and the time that Judge Garcia declared Texas’ ban unconstitutional I think maybe at that time we were only 14 or 15 states.” When the ruling was made in Oklahoma, however, the number of states that had legalized same-sex marriage was approaching 30, he said. This number of states and lack of severe consequences when same-sex marriage was legalized in other states was vital to the decision made in Oklahoma, he said. “There was less of a feeling of the need to oppose the stay because we’d seen so many other states go ahead of them without the sky falling and without negative consequences,” Smith said. “I think by the time the Oklahoma judge ruled, it was at a point in time where in some respects they had gotten a green light.”
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