Poll Finds 55% Would Support Openly Gay Justice
If President Obama were to nominate an openly gay person to the U.S. Supreme Court, a majority of Americans wouldn’t see anything wrong with that.
A poll by Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes found 55 percent of the respondents said they would support an openly gay Supreme Court justice, while 40 percent would oppose the idea.
The poll also found that 50 percent would support an openly gay person as president and 56 percent would support a gay secretary of state.
The Gay Rights blog New York magazine’s Daily Intel noted the findings. Gay Rights quotes Richard Just of National Public Radio, who said the country appears willing to accept Supreme Court nominees from minority groups at a relatively early stage in their integration into American life.
“When Louis Brandeis was nominated to the court in 1916, anti-Semitism was still pervasive,” Just wrote for NPR. “When Thurgood Marshall was nominated in 1967, the country was still in the throes of the civil rights struggle. Yet both men were confirmed.”
