Support for Trump skyrocketed among religious people post-Orlando

The graph is taken from Reuters Polling. It shows trends among religious people (i.e., those who attend church nearly every week, every week, or more than once a week).

You can see the support for Trump (red line) has bounced around since the beginning of April, but it hasn't been impressive since you would expect religious people to support the Republican nominee. As I wrote before, highly religious people are not enthusiastic about Trump, and I suspect it's because they want their candidate to be straightlaced. (You don't have to be religious to not like Trump -- just stuffy and upright -- atheist George Will doesn't like him either.)

But notice the 13 point jump in support since Orlando. That's a big, fast increase. My guess is that moments like Orlando force religious people to face the fact that there are only two choices: either the next Prez will be Trump or Hillary. And who wants Hillary when ISIS wants to kill you? Trump support among the religious has fallen the last couple days (not shown) so it might take several clarifying moments to get these righteous folks to pull the level for the Donald.

Gay men, but not lesbians, are more likely to favor gun control

With the Orlando shooting, I wondered about gun attitudes among gay people. The General Social Survey asked people if they favored a law requiring people to get a police permit before buying a gun. Here are the percentages in favor:

Men
Gay  82.9
Bisexual  64.3
Straight  65.6

Women
Gay  66.7
Bisexual 60.0
Straight 77.6

Among men, gays are more likely to favor a gun permit law. In fact, the vast of majority of them want it. In contrast, bisexual men are like straight men.

The pattern is different for lesbians: their numbers are similar to those of straight men. Bisexual women shows the LEAST support for gun permits of any group.

The overall pattern is consistent with the view that gay men tend to be psychologically like women, while lesbians are like men. Some of this could be due to the level of exposure to prenatal testosterone. Bisexuals in some ways seem hyper-masculine; turned on by anything that moves.