43% [of respondents] are supporters of the Tea Party movement (3,691 people).
Demographically, 62% are pro-life, 70% support traditional marriage 70% are historical contributors, 45% are male and 71% are 50 years of age or older.
*FULL POLL DATA: http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF10K46.pdf
Talk about your skewed poll. And bear in mind also that comes on the heels of legitimate work which says while most Americans support the repeal of DADT, the tea party doesn't. Of course FRC is going to get the result it wants against the DADT repeal when almost half of those polled are from a group against the repeal in the first place.
And in other news briefs:
Colorado urged not to hire coach over gay views - This is interesting.
ACLU sues Miami Beach on behalf of gay man wrongly arrested by police near Flamingo Park - And I hope that the ACLU wins. The case is ugly.
Panic among Kenya's gays and lesbians after prime minister's threat to have them arrested - Things may be bad for us here in America but it's worse overseas. Please keep these folks in your prayers.
The end of gay men being camp - Not while I'm alive, honey!
The Gay Black Republican Robert Turner takes on DADT . He is currently the President of the DC Chapter of Log Cabin Republicans. He is also the publisher of the online blog DCBigPappa.
ReplyDeletehttp://hiphoprepublican.com/opinion/2010/11/30/robert-turner-i-can-see-dadt-repeal-from-my-front-porch/
http://dcbigpappa.wordpress.com/
It's worth some time to go through and read a bit of the FRC poll. After criticizing the Pentagon study for only getting ~25% response, their own study was less than 1/7 and failed to specify whether each respondent had ever actually even been in the military -- the only qualification was that all either were in the military at some point or had family that had been in the military at some point.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, they did not, as they said publicly, simply ask military members: "Do you think the policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be overturned?"
Rather, they asked: "Do you believe Congress should overturn the current DADT policy which prohibits open homosexual behavior in the military?"
Asking if DADT should be overturned is a relatively straightforward policy question. By asking specifically if Congress should overturn the policy, they are implicitly asking if the respondent agrees that Congress should be setting military recruitment and discipline policy (which is misleading, since DADT is the Congressional mandate of the policy, and repeal by Congress would simply allow control of the policy to return to the hands of the military unless provisions were added to require the military to adopt other particular policies in place of DADT).
Furthermore, the "clarification" at the end of the question -- "...which prohibits open homosexual behavior..." is entirely fallacious. Open sexual behavior -- be it hetero or homo -- is prohibited by the standards of military conduct. DADT prohibits private "homosexual behavior" (since military personnel can be discharged for engaging or attempting to engage in "homosexual acts") and simple honesty (since military personnel can be discharged merely for saying, even outside of work to a civilian, that they are gay); the behaviors conjured up by the fear-mongering of the FRC and its allies are already and will remain prohibited by the UCMJ restrictions which pertain to any and all relationships, be they heterosexual, homosexual, or non-sexual.
But the FRC still argues that their poll -- conducted by targeting particular areas of the country with no attempt to be representative of the armed forces as a whole and with some obvious sample bias (look at the ages...) which asked intentionally leading and fear-mongering questions designed to elicit the most negative possible response -- was "scientific" enough to throw out the results of an extensive, professionally run, fairly representative poll more with more than 10x the number of respondents, all of whose identities were verified to ensure relevance.
It's polls like this -- and pushing the results as "scientific" -- that landed FRC on the SPLC list of hate groups.