Are most homosexuals 'indifferent' to gay marriage?

With the Home Office's 'Equal Civil Marriage' consultation set to close next week, two newspapers today reported on the latest opinion poll to probe the views of the public:

Daily Mail: "Most homosexuals indifferent to David Cameron's drive for gay marriage: Only a quarter would wed if law changes"

Daily Telegraph: "Gay marriage: poll suggests doubts in gay community"

As the headlines would suggest, this is not an ordinary poll. The polling organisation ComRes conducted an online poll on behalf of Catholic Voices in which they sampled 541 respondents who defined themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or 'other'. This was filtered down from over 10,000 initial respondents.

For this reason, it isn't strictly correct for either paper to reference gays or homosexuals alone. In fact 40 per cent of the 541 sample identified as 'bisexual'.

Catholic Voices are transparent about the methodology and point out that the sample size means the 'margin of error' for this sample is 4.21 percentage points - in other words we can be reasonably confident that the conclusions of the poll accurately reflect the population (estimated at around 700,000 LGBT people) within this margin.

But does the poll show indifference in the LGBT community?

The Daily Mail provides as evidence for their headline the poll's finding that "fewer than four in ten [believe] it is a priority for their community". Hence, everyone else should be considered 'indifferent'.

Indeed, 39 per cent of respondents agreed that 'redefining' marriage was a priority:

However another question in the poll, which the Mail does not mention in its piece, asked respondents whether extending marriage to same-sex couples was important to them. Here, just over half of the respondents said this view held true for them:

So the people sampled appear to hold different views of how important they feel the extension of marriage is and how they see others like them viewing the same issue. 

However it should be pointed out that there are problems with comparing these questions to one another. For instance, the first uses the term "redefining" as a descriptor of the policy change, whereas the second uses "extended" in the same way. Both could be considered loaded terms that could swing opinion in either direction.

So the Mail's headline represents, at best, a selective interpretation of the ComRes poll.

This is not to say however that there are no 'doubts' in the LGBT community exposed by the poll, as the Telegraph suggests in its report. It points out that a quarter of respondents felt there was 'no need' to redefine marriage due to Civil Partnerships offering the same rights.

While nearly half disagreed with this statement, the Telegraph's 'doubts' are a valid interpretation of the findings. The assumption behind this is that we would expect a greater proportion of those responding to disagree outright with the statement.

However, ask the same group of people whether they feel marriage should only be between a man and a woman and stronger support for same-sex marriage emerges than implied by the previous question:

So the 'doubts' referred to by the Telegraph as far as the 'no need' question is concerned seem much smaller when a different question is used as evidence.

The claim that most homosexuals are indifferent to gay marriage is arguable since there are other questions from the same poll used by the Mail which appear to contradict the point. While it is true that a minority see it as a 'priority' in their community, half do feel it is important for them.

Meanwhile, the claim from the Telegraph that there are 'doubts' in the LGBT community is more plausible. However, even these doubts can be diluted with a careful choice of questioning.

Full Fact found last week that the wording of a polling question affects conclusions of how strong public support for the monarchy is. It would seem that the case is no different for the LGBT community's views on same-sex marriage.