Greg Lewis has been studying public opinion on gay rights for about two decades now. And when it comes to attitudes toward same-sex marriage, he's never seen anything like the past few years.
"In 2008, I published an article saying we haven't seen any movement on same sex marriage ever," Lewis, a professor of public management and policy at Georgia State University, admits with a laugh. "But that was using data a few years old. If you look back at the numbers now, you can see that support really began to take off in 2004." He estimates that by the end of 2011, support was at about 46 percent — up from 30 percent in 2004.
