Right on, SCOTUS.
That’s the message to the nation’s highest court from a majority of Americans, who in a new Washington Post/ABC News poll issued their own rulings on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 cases one week after the Supreme Court did.
The poll found that 56% approve of the DOMA ruling “providing legally married same-sex couples with the same federal benefits given to other married couples,” while 41% disapprove. On Prop 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, 51% of respondents said they supported SCOTUS’ decision (or lack of decision) to let the lower court’s ruling stand.
The Supreme Court made history last week when the justices ruled 5-4 to strike down DOMA, a 1996 law defining marriage as a union between one man and one women for federal purposes. By the same 5-4 margin, the justices also decided that the proponents of Prop 8 lacked standing to defend it, and deferred to the trial court’s ruling that the voter referendum, as it applied to California, was unconstitutional.
Same-sex marriage returned to the Golden State last week. Since then, scores of gay couples, including both pairs of Prop 8 plaintiffs, have tied the knot.
The telephone poll was conducted June 26 through June 30 among a random national sample of 1,005 adults. It has a plus or minus 3.5% margin of sampling error.