freedom map of the US?

future gay marriage map
Originally uploaded by coltmaverick.

The picture-maker says (edited a bit, as indicated):

The United States seems inexorably headed towards marriage rights for [same-sex] -- but how long will it take to get there across the board? Nate Silver has an answer. Based entirely on his hard work at fivethirtyeight.com, here is the future of [same-sex] marriage in the US:

The years indicated are those by which a [same-sex] marriage ban would be defeated by voters in a given state, according to a regression model designed by Silver....

How did Silver come up with these results? Here's the explanation:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

Click through for more details.

Needless to say, I'd like to see this map go black as fast as it can go. I think any consenting adult should be able to marry any other consenting adult.