As has been widely reported, the subject of gay marriage has split the Republican Party. Most Republicans support traditional marriage, but many also support gay marriage. What you may be unaware of is that the issue has split the Democratic Party even more.
On Tuesday evening, CNN host Erin Burnett focused an entire segment on the GOP’s division, and brushed over the Democratic split until a guest brought it up.
In the segment (found via the show’s official transcript), Burnett said:
Poll after poll we have seen a stark political divide on this issue. So the latest CNN poll, 70 percent of Democrats support gay marriage and 25 percent of Republicans support it.
And later:
So you could say, look, 25 percent of Republicans support it. It is clear our party is in line. We know what we want and we don't want gay marriage.
But when you look at younger Republicans under 50, almost half, 49 percent support gay marriage and as you go younger that number goes even higher. Younger voters, of course, overwhelmingly voted for President Obama. If you make this a signature issue of the Republican Party, are you going to just become a party that's irrelevant?
Oddly, the CNN poll referenced never looks at young Republicans. It looks at young respondents, but not young Republicans. So Burnett has no citation for her claim that nearly half of young Republicans support homosexual marriages.
More importantly, Burnett claims there is a divide among the GOP. And while her claim about young Republicans may be accurate (again, a viewer doesn’t know where she is getting her numbers from), it ignores how the split among Democrats is almost identical to that of Republicans – an inverse disagreement within each party of only 5 percent, with the Democratic split being greater.
Fortunately, one of Burnett’s guests – Ralph Reed, Chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition – pointed out where one of the big splits in the Democratic Party, ignored by Burnett, lies:
That the Hispanic voters, African-American voters, and Asian-American voters that we have the best chance of winning to our side, are frequent church attendees, conservative socially and culturally, these are the voters who gave George W. Bush 44 percent of the Hispanic vote.
And in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where there were marriage amendments on the ballot, between 10 percent and 20 percent of the American-African vote. Any Republican nominee for president would take that in a New York minute today and George W. Bush did it by being unapologetically pro-marriage.
Again, despite the claim that Democrats have a hold on minority voters, the nearly 30 percent support the party has for traditional marriage is a sign of an equally split Democratic Party as well.
This is not simply an argument of semantics but, in fact, a subliminal media bias exploited to distract the viewer from utilizing their reason and intellect. Furthermore, rather than addressing divisions in both parties, Burnett is cherrypicking in order to provide reasoning to a side she clearly supports.
