Agenda Pushers : Re-Evaluating the Measurement of Attitudes Towards Lesbians and Gays
Fears of group power, often anchored in conspiratorial thinking, form a common theme in public discussion of minority groups. This paper explores the role that fears of gay group power play in forming attitudes and policy preferences towards gay men and lesbians. The paper explores this topic three ways: by scaling items related to gay group power with items about gl people as individuals, by using the resulting scale to model policy preferences for same-sex marriage, and by using the scale to model support for the 2010 Arizona immigration and national Health Care Reform laws. The resulting anti-gay scale reveals that a belief in gay political power not only strengthens the alpha score of the scale but also anchors it. Models predict support for same-sex marriage preferences but not for other laws. The result is a theoretically grounded account of attitudes towards lesbian and gay people in the US