Gullixson: How swiftly the tide of public opinion changes

It seems like ancient history now. But it was just 10 years ago that Americans were so opposed to gay marriage that pundits were pointing to ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage - similar to Proposition 8 in California - as keys to the re-election of President George W. Bush.

According to Gallup polls at the time, roughly 55 percent of voters were opposed to same-sex marriage.

But then something shifted. Polls show the point of inflection - the moment when the number of those in support surpassed the number opposed - came in late 2010. That was just after U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage violated the constitutional due process and equal protection rights of same-sex couples. It was a similar decision that was the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on June 26 that has now made gay marriage legal in all 50 states.

Granted, the tide already was turning. In that same year, a number of states, including New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, had legalized same-sex marriage while a number of countries, including Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Portugal and Argentina, were doing the same.

Now, the latest Gallup poll shows same-sex marriage is supported by roughly 60 percent of Americans.

California has recently experienced a similar turnabout that was highlighted last week when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that, beginning on July 1, 2016, requires students attending all public and private schools be immunized. It wasn’t that long ago that the number of unvaccinated children in public school was rising and any suggestion of dropping the exemption for religious or personal beliefs would trigger a torrent of protest calls and letters to the editor.

Just five years ago, one in four U.S. parents still believed that vaccines caused autism - despite the official retraction of a 1998 Lancet study that suggested a possible link.

I encountered this anti-vaccination sentiment in 2009 when I first wrote about the declining percentage of fully immunized students entering kindergarten and the concern this was causing among Sonoma County physicians. In some west county schools, less than half the students are now immunized.

“What I don’t get are the people who claim that the experts and data are not to be trusted about vaccinations but then scoff at those who deny such things as global warming - citing all the expert testimony and data,” I wrote. “Are experts only to be trusted when they validate our beliefs or, in this case, anxieties?”

At the time I was chastised by a number of readers, including a Santa Rosa public school teacher who took great exception to my suggestion that reason favored vaccination.

But since then something shifted.

Two key events triggered this change.

The first was an unnecessary and heavily publicized measles outbreak at Disneyland in December that left 131 people sick and scared the state straight on the hazards of losing the herd immunity to such preventable diseases. The second was that the issue was championed by state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a physician, who had the courage to stand up to anti-vaccination groups in authoring his bill, SB 277 making vaccinations for public school children mandatory.

It’s not clear how much public views have shifted, but clearly the politics have. A Pew Research Center survey this year found that 83 percent of American adults now believe the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) is safe for children. Furthermore a CBS poll from February found the two out of three Americans think parents should be required to vaccinate their children.

Both of these events - gay-marriage and vaccinations - show how the public can be persuaded by a good argument or dissuaded by a poor one. Could the debate about fluoridation, an issue that’s due to come back before the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors later this year, be next? More important, what will it take to shift the politics about our nation’s lax gun controls. Clearly the deaths of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 - and the deaths of 80,000 other Americans by gun violence since then - have not been persuasive enough.