Response - Heat Map in Google Docs

 After seeing the tutorial by Gang on creating a heat map in google docs, I decided to see if I could use this to make a visual tool for the percentage of all households that are of same-sex in the U.S.  Using the heat map gadget makes it easy to see the intensities of each state.  The generated heat maps can be seen below:


 2000:
 


2010:

 From these maps it is easy to see that the western and northeastern parts of the United States have darker shaded areas correlating with higher percentages of the population containing same-sex households.  Doing some research into these regions, you will find more states consistently liberal with policies advocating same-sex couples. It is also apparent that some of the darker states seem to bleed over to nearby states showing that they potentially influence states around them.

The data can be found at the following: http://www.census.gov/hhes/samesex/