Jan Adamec , a historian and political scientist who specializes in the histories of the USSR, Hungary and Czechoslovakia after 1945, has released his annual findings of Czech opinions on the social acceptability of homosexuality. The Public Opinion Research Centre of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Centrum pro výzkum veřejného mínění, Sociologický ústav AV ČR, CVVM) asked Czech respondents about social acceptance of homosexuality. It conducted a public opinion poll among 1,049 Czechs over 15 on whether gay people should have the right to enter into a registered partnership or marriage or adopt children.
The results are as follows:
Those polled were asked whether a person´s coming out would cause problems in his or her social interaction with the people in the respondent´s town or community.
53% of respondents (answering definitely yes or maybe yes) think that coming out would cause problems. The majority of them are from municipalities with less than 800 inhabitants, older than 60 years, politically left-leaning and particularly supporters of the KSČM.
37% of respondents think the opposite. Many of the respondents in this group have someone of homosexual orientation among their friends or relatives, are young people up to 29 years old, university educated, inhabitants of towns containing 5,000 to 15,000 people, or live in Prague.
Almost three-quarters of the Czech population (73%) agree with the already legally codified right for gay people to enter into a registered partnership. 23% are against this institution.
58% of the respondents agree that gay people should have the right to adopt the child of his or her partner if they are currently living together and are already taking care of the child. 32% are against it.
However, Czechs are torn in their opinion on whether gay men and women should have the right to adopt children from orphanages – 45% agree, 48% disagree.
Gay people got more support in all the questions asked from women rather than from men. The intensity of support for gay rights rises with the level of education and declines with age.
Those who oppose gay rights in all questions rated their standard of living as poor, claimed a political ideology leaning more to the left, and identified themselves more as pensioners and supporters of the Roman Catholic religion.
Those who supported gay rights were more often students and more often had a gay friend or a gay relative.
