How Gay Rights Activists Changed The Minds Of Their Opponents

Shankar Vedantam, Parth Shah, Tara Boyle, and Jennifer Schmidt at NPR:

“This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion,” says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. “There’s more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in the past thirty years in the United States than there ever has been in recorded attitudes in the United States on any issue.”

Public opinion rarely shifts on contested issues. Given the long history of discrimination against gays in the United States and abroad, this change has social scientists scratching their chins.

More here.