It ain't what you don't know that hurts you...

[avram]

OK, here’s something to be annoyed about. (We could all use more of that, right?) Thanks to kathrynt, I looked up this MSNBC story about a recent poll on American attitudes towards gays and the freedom to marry, and then looked up the poll report itself. (This is always a good idea, if you can manage it. Newspapers often leave out important details; television always does.) On page two I found the following information:

Why are people homosexual?	1985	2003
Something born with	20%	30%
Way people are brought up	22%	14%
Way some prefer to live	42%	42%
Don’t know	16%	14%

Only 14% knew the right answer, and that’s down from 16% in 1985!

Comments

Nitpick

[redbird]

A minimum of 28 percent know the right answer, actually, assuming that one of the choices given is valid: the 14 percent who said they don't know, plus the ones who chose whichever of the other answers proves to be correct. (I suppose it's possible that the cause is a postnatal viral infection, but this seems rather unlikely, and most other answers would resolve to either "born that way" or aspects of nurture.)

Or, of course, sexual orientation could be multiply determined: a combination of pre- and post-natal events, for example, or different causes in different people.

The real question is "Why are they taking this poll?" Why do people think it matters: religion isn't inborn, but most of us agree that people shouldn't be discriminated against for their religious beliefs.

Hmm. I wonder what results you'd get if you took that same poll but replaced "homosexual" with "Christian"--without changing the available answers.

Re: Nitpick

[avram]

Nah, even if one of those first three is correct (which, as you point it, might not be the case; I lean towards the idea of multiple determination myself), they don’t know, they’re only guessing. The real thing that poll question shows is that in the past eighteen years, two percent of us have become more ready to act as if they know the answer to a question that they actually have no idea about.

I wonder what would happen if you swapped in the word “heterosexual”.