May 2015 | Lester Feder

The results of a BuzzFeed News/Ipsos poll are in, including a snapshot of the world’s views on marriage equality. Among the findings: a surge of support for marriage equality in the Pope’s home country.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on May 28, 2015, at 10:01 p.m. ET

Support for legal rights for same-sex couples tops 70% in some countries where lawmakers are attempting to jump-start attempts to establish marriage equality in the wake of Ireland’s historic vote last week.

This is among the findings of a new BuzzFeed News/Ipsos poll of 23 nations which was conducted online over a two-week period beginning about a month before Irish voters voted for marriage equality by a 24-point margin.

We have the clearest picture of attitudes in the 16 of the countries we surveyed where the internet is widely accessible because it was possible to get a sample in our online survey that is representative of the country as a whole. These are concentrated heavily in Europe and North America.

But data collected from the seven additional countries in our survey — Mexico, Brazil, China, South Africa, India, Turkey, and Russia — also suggests there may be surprisingly broad support for partnership protections in many corners of the globe. (We included these countries in our analysis only where our findings appear to reflect broader public opinion based on other surveys despite our limited sample. But they’re marked with an asterisk as a reminder that these figures may not be truly representative.)

This is what we found.

1. This is how many people support same-sex marriage or partnership rights in 23 countries around the world.

Not surprisingly, support for marriage equality tends to be strongest in Western Europe, the region that saw its first marriage equality law passed in the Netherlands in 2000. Our three Latin American countries — Brazil* and Argentina, which have marriage equality, and Mexico,* where it is on the verge on becoming a nationwide reality through the courts — also show majority support for at least civil unions. But our data also hints that majorities support at least civil unions in Japan, South Korea, and possibly China.*

2. The last two Western European countries without marriage equality appear ready for it.

The BuzzFeed News/Ipsos survey found clear support for marriage equality in the only two Western European countries without marriage equality: Germany, which has civil unions but not marriage, and Italy, which has no protections for same-sex couples at all despite multiple court rulings ordering parliament to enact them.

We found that 68% of Germans favor marriage equality even though the ruling party of Chancellor Angela Merkel has reiterated its opposition to marriage equality in the wake of the Irish vote. Though only 48% of Italians support marriage equality, a total of 75% favor some kind of legal recognition for same-sex partnerships, something Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has been unsuccessfully trying to enact since taking office in early 2014.

3. There is still no clear majority for marriage equality in the United States.

We found that just under 50% of people in the United States support marriage equality, which is a lower figure than a recent Gallup poll that found a record 60% support it. One likely reason: An additional 20% of respondents in our survey said “same-sex couples should be allowed to obtain some kind of legal recognition, but not to marry.” Respondents in the Gallup poll only had the choice of saying they supported marriage rights for same-sex couples or not.

4. This is how support for marriage equality has changed from 2013 to 2015.

The 2015 survey used the same question as a 2013 survey of most of these countries — also conducted by Ipsos — which allowed us to be able to compare results between the two.

5. There has been a surge for marriage equality in the home country of Pope Francis, Argentina.

Argentina, which became the first country in Latin America to allow same-sex couples to wed with a law passed in 2010, had one of the largest increases in support for marriage equality in the last two years, 11 points.

6. Marriage equality doesn’t get more popular everywhere it passes.

That often is the case, but not always. The different experience of Great Britain (not the United Kingdom, since its marriage equality law doesn’t affect Northern Ireland) and France is especially interesting, because both enacted marriage equality laws in 2013 but have seen very different trajectories in public attitudes. In Great Britain, the roughly 12-point increase in support for same-sex marriage appears mostly to have been people who said they only supported civil unions in 2013 moving into the marriage equality column. But in France, support for marriage equality remained basically unchanged at just over 50%.

That may just be a reflection of the continuing deep unpopularity of the president who pushed through the marriage equality law, François Hollande. But it could also be the result of a continuing vocal opposition to the law. France saw mass demonstrations against the law when it was being debated, and the organization born of that opposition — called La Manif Pour Tous — has transformed itself into a permanent organization and has become an engine for opposing marriage equality throughout Europe with links to campaigns in Eastern Europe and Ireland.

Don’t make too much out of the apparent drop in support for marriage equality in Sweden, where same-sex marriage has been allowed since 2009. “This shift is within the range of error we’d expect based on the smaller sample size for the Swedish data,” said Ipsos researcher Nicolas Boyon, “so this data point is unlikely to be an indicator of change in public opinion in Sweden.”

7. Young people appear to be embracing marriage equality around the world.

Young people were more likely to support marriage equality than their elders in virtually every country we surveyed — in some places almost three times as fast.

8. Attitudes toward abortion and marriage equality don’t always go hand in hand.

To get a sense of how attitudes on marriage equality and abortion rights correspond, we lined up the percentages of people who said they supported full marriage rights for same-sex couples and people who said they believed abortion should be legal “whenever a woman decides she wants one.”

Generally, the countries that are supportive of marriage equality tend to be the most supportive of abortion rights and vice versa (the top right and bottom left quadrants of this chart), but there are plenty of interesting exceptions.

Hungary is an especially interesting outlier. After being one of the leaders in Eastern Europe in creating civil unions with a 2009 court ruling, it then led a regional shift to the right, becoming the first of four Eastern European countries to enact new barriers to marriage equality since 2012. In our survey, just 31% of Hungarians said they supported marriage equality, but Hungarians are among the most permissive in the world when it comes to abortion, with 64.6% believing it should be available without restriction.

9. Opposition to abortion appears strong in Latin America despite growing support for marriage equality.

There’s an interesting cluster of Latin American countries at the other end of the spectrum — Argentina, Brazil,* and Mexico* — suggesting that the marriage equality revolution that has swept the region over the past five years will not be followed by a wave of liberalizing abortion laws.

Since Argentina passed the region’s first marriage equality law in 2010, full marriage equality has become the reality in Brazil and Uruguay, while court rulings in Mexico and Colombia mean they could soon follow their lead. But abortion remains heavily restricted or entirely illegal throughout Latin America except in Cuba, Uruguay, and Mexico City.

All three of the Latin American countries in our survey have strong majorities in favor of some kind of partnership rights, and both Argentina and Mexico* have a majority supporting full marriage equality. Argentina has the strongest support for unrestricted abortion, but even there that is less than 25%, while in Mexico and Brazil it is just around 15%.

We’ll have a closer look at global abortion attitudes in a follow-up post on the BuzzFeed News/Ipsos Global Survey.

*The seven countries asterisked throughout this post have too many people without internet access for us to be sure that our online survey was truly representative of the country as a whole. We only included ones where we believe our findings appear likely to still reflect broader public opinion based on data from other sources, but we can’t be 100% sure that the data for these countries are truly representative.

But there are fears of a disappointment, just as with California’s Proposition 8 in 2008. Lester Feder reports from Dublin on the coming referendum and the ties between Ireland’s campaign and those who fought in the U.S.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on May 12, 2015, at 9:00 a.m. ET

DUBLIN — In less than two weeks, the Republic of Ireland could become the first country in the world to allow same-sex couples to marry thanks to a popular vote, boosting the marriage-equality movement, which has swept across western Europe.

The latest poll shows 78% of voters in favor of passing the amendment on May 22. That is a staggering number, considering that Irish voters only approved divorce in 1995, and with a margin of less than 1%. It also reflects how diminished the power of the Catholic Church has become over the past 20 years, thanks in large part to devastating sexual abuse scandals that have undermined its moral authority. Catholic bishops have come under fire from some conservative laypeople for not doing enough to stop the referendum, while a few priests have even come out in support of it.

After 20 years of fights in the U.S. and around the world, this is the first time LGBT rights activists have locked horns with conservatives in a battle for the direct support of an entire nation. Several eastern European countries have held referendums to bar same-sex couples from marrying, but Ireland is the first country to ask its electorate to vote on whether to establish marriage equality. A win would counter the criticism from conservatives that marriage equality has been imposed by elites over the will of the people. But a defeat could embolden a growing movement in eastern Europe that wants to enact constitutional bans against marriage rights for same-sex couples.

Paradoxically, the high poll numbers are making Yes campaigners even more nervous. Irish voters have a history of abandoning proposed constitutional changes in the final days of the campaign. And the shadow of California’s Proposition 8 — when voters rejected marriage equality in the state in 2008 after a win seemed likely — looms large.

“Look at how Prop 8 happened — Prop 8 was a slam dunk [for LGBT rights supporters] until the result came in and it turned out it wasn’t,” said Brian Sheehan, co-director of Yes Equality, the campaign group created to get out the Yes vote. The fact that pollsters comprehensively failed to predict the outcome of last week’s general election in the United Kingdom hasn’t boosted their confidence either.

Lampposts across Ireland are plastered with posters representing both sides. The No side says it’s printed around 10,000 posters in pink and blue with pictures of babies alongside slogans like “children deserve a mother and father.” Brightly colored signs from the Yes campaign urge people to vote Yes for “a more equal Ireland” and “because marriage matters.” The version in Gaelic translates to “lend me your hand,” a phrase that can both mean asking for help and someone’s hand in marriage.

The Yes campaign has had the upper hand in the debate for months. Backed by every one of Ireland’s political parties, it has been running a bus tour to generate support for the referendum that was recently joined by Ireland’s head of government, Taoiseach Enda Kenny. The Yes campaign has also racked up an impressive list of endorsements from celebrities and athletes, including actors Colin Farrell and Chris O’Dowd, the musician Hozier, and the former captain of the country’s rugby team Brian O’Driscoll. Yes Equality is also running a canvassing operation that hopes to knock on all 1.8 million doors in Ireland.

Until recently, the leaders of Ireland’s Catholic Church had done little more than pass a formal declaration in December opposing the referendum. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, took a more forceful tone early last week, which he said was in response to criticism from the conservative Catholic press that he “had ‘confused’ the press” with his “attitude to the referendum and had given constant solace to the Yes campaign.” This was followed by a round of statements condemning the referendum from Ireland’s top bishop, Archbishop of Armagh Eamon Martin, and several other senior bishops in their dioceses over the weekend.

This is quite a reversal for an institution that long dominated family policy. Condoms were not widely available without a prescription in Ireland until 1985, so it was common for women to travel across the border to Northern Ireland — part of the U.K. — to purchase contraception. Sodomy wasn’t decriminalized until 1993, 26 years after it was legalized in England. Voters rejected a referendum to allow divorce in 1986, and it took almost another 10 years before it was finally approved by the narrowest of margins.

The No campaign has mostly been led by a small Catholic think tank, the Iona Institute, and an ad hoc group of conservative newspaper columnists and individuals with little political experience who’ve come together under the name Mothers and Fathers Matter. In addition to organizing the poster campaign, Mothers and Fathers Matter is a clearing house for spokespeople against the referendum for the debates that broadcasters are organizing almost daily.

The tactics of the No campaign — which is built around the argument that children will be harmed if same-sex couples are allowed to wed — look disturbingly familiar for American LGBT rights advocates, who are watching the Irish vote carefully. This is exactly the kind of messaging that ate away at support for marriage equality in the Proposition 8 campaign, and they believe it has the fingerprints of the conservative group that pulled off that upset victory, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM).

“When the other side filed [to name their group] as Mothers and Fathers Matter, that was an instant signal to me that their messaging is 100% from the playbook of NOM and the U.S.,” said Thalia Zepatos, director of research and messaging for Freedom to Marry, an organization established in 2003 to counter the wave of ballot measures in U.S. states to ban marriage equality. Like NOM, she said, Mothers and Fathers Matter was using a “drumbeat of fear-based messaging [about children by the No campaign that] brings the numbers lower and lower and lower.”

The Irish campaign “reminds me more of Prop 8 than any other campaign I’ve seen since then,” said Zepatos.

The No side denies that it is borrowing tactics from California, saying it’s learned more from campaigns in eastern European countries like Slovenia in 2012 or Croatia in 2013, where referendums were passed curtailing partnership rights for same-sex couples.

“We wouldn’t be taking too many more lessons from Prop 8 than from elsewhere,” said David Quinn, head of the Iona Institute and adviser to Mothers and Fathers Matter. Quinn, who also writes a regular column in the Irish Independent newspaper, is widely regarded as the savviest campaigner on the No side.

“Obviously the only way two men or two women can found a family is by violating a child’s right to have a mother and a father.”

But the No camp has gotten some input from veterans of the California campaign and other marriage fights abroad. Frank Schubert, the conservative political consultant credited with the Proposition 8 victory, told BuzzFeed News before an NOM rally in Washington earlier this month that he has sent private polling, focus-group work, and other messaging guidance to activists on the No side. NOM President Brian Brown also said he had “talked a lot” to Quinn periodically over the past few years, though they hadn’t communicated in over a year.

They’ve also sought advice from opponents of same-sex marriage in the U.K., Keith Mills, a spokesperson for Mothers and Fathers Matter, told BuzzFeed News last Tuesday. The next day, he said, the group was due to meet with a representative from La Manif Pour Tous, an organization formed in opposition to France’s 2013 marriage equality law that has established itself as an engine for movements opposed to marriage equality across Europe.

“We would take most succor from what happened in Slovenia,” Quinn said, referring to the 2012 referendum that reversed a law passed by parliament extending legal protections to same-sex couples. Opponents have also consulted the leaders of the 2013 campaign that blocked marriage equality in Croatia.

They hear the same advice from campaigners in every country, Quinn said. “The message that comes back all the time, loud and clear … [is] keep talking about the children.” Marriage is inherently bound up with the right to found a family, Quinn argued: “Obviously the only way two men or two women can found a family is by violating a child’s right to have a mother and a father.”

Yes campaigners call this argument a “red herring.” The Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. passed a law last month to expand adoption rights to same-sex couples; a Yes vote in this referendum would do nothing to change that, and they say it would leave existing law on surrogacy unchanged. The country’s major children’s charities have also endorsed a Yes vote.

Mills and Quinn both said the No campaign had not received any funding from international donors, however. Quinn said the Iona Institute’s only substantial international funding has been €24,000 over the past few years from an Italian foundation headed by a former member of the European Parliament, Luca Volonté, who sits on the board of the conservative online campaign platform CitizenGo along with NOM’s Brian Brown. But none of that money has gone to the referendum campaign, Quinn said.

By contrast, the No campaign has been making an issue out of the millions of dollars that have been given to Ireland’s leading LGBT rights organization by the New York-based Atlantic Philanthropies. Atlantic was created by Irish-American billionaire Chuck Feeney in 1982 and has contributed to a range of sectors in Ireland and to LGBT rights causes around the globe. Though Yes Equality says all its funding has been raised from Irish citizens, the No side has been arguing that the vote will be a test of whether “American money [can] buy an Irish referendum.”

Marriage equality campaigners did consult the U.S.’s Freedom to Marry as they were thinking about formulating their campaign, however. Noel Whelan, strategic adviser to Yes Equality, said American advice was especially helpful in learning how to engage people outside the gay and lesbian community about the importance of marriage to same-sex couples.

That hasn’t “directly translated” into an Irish context, Sheehan said, in part because Ireland “never had a culture war” about LGBT rights the way the U.S. did. Most advances for LGBT rights — from decriminalizing sodomy in 1993 to establishing civil partnerships in 2010 — were made in single votes in Dublin and not in a series of state-by-state battles or judicial wins. And this unfolded as economic change transformed Ireland from a society dominated by the church to one that shifted more toward Europe and the U.S. during an economic revolution in the late 1990s.

“Ireland has been on such an extraordinary journey,” Sheehan said. “We want this campaign to be different than any other campaign.”

“I think this is a campaign that we can win, but this is a campaign that we can lose.”

Last week, Ireland’s first openly gay elected official, Sen. David Norris, appeared on one of the constant stream of broadcast debates, which are the primary battleground during Irish campaigns since direct advertising is banned. Norris, a well-known politician who ran for president in 2011, was a leader of the push to decriminalize sodomy in the 1980s.

“This is all about equality — equality and nothing else,” he began, recounting how voting to approve marriage equality would finish the work begun by repealing the sodomy law.

“We cannot win this on our own,” he said. “We are relying on the goodwill, the decency, and the sense of compassion from our heterosexual friends, families, and neighbors … I want my participation in the Irish family to be recognized once and for all in the constitution.”

Tom Finnegan, an anti-abortion activist representing Mothers and Fathers Matter, countered that existing civil partnerships guaranteed equal rights to same-sex couples. “If we pass this referendum, it will be constitutionally impossible for any Oireachtas ever again to give preference in law for [a child to have] a mother and a father.”

Spokespeople for the Yes campaign spent a great deal of time rebutting these points in the first major round of debates held last week. From their point of view, every second they spend addressing these questions could potentially cost them votes. They believe the No campaign has an easier job than they do — voters don’t have to be against same-sex marriage to vote No; all they need to do is feel unsure to choose to stick with the status quo.

“All [the No campaigners] have to do is confuse,” Tiernan Brady, policy director for the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, told BuzzFeed News at the Yes Equality headquarters last week. The consensus in the Yes campaign office was that their side had been drawn into a shouting match with their opponents in an important television debate the night before.