Don’t mess with the Internet
So the American Family Association put up a web poll yesterday on
whether people support gay marriage or not (you can find the poll here).
Purportedly, the results will be given to Congress to show that
Americans don’t support gay marriage and thus we need to “defend”
marriage from the ravaging homosexuals who will destroy it. The
poll was designed in such as way as to guarantee the “results” that it
will purportedly demonstrate.
First problem: any Internet poll is an inherently biased sample, as
those who answer the questions are not representative of the population
that one is trying to gain information upon. Perhaps these are
people who just like to answer questions, or are particularly motivated
on this issue. And it only includes those people who have
computer access. In this case, it initially only included those
people who received the poll announcement from the “American Family
Association” (whose efforts have probably ended up estranging more
families from their gay children [since its sole advocacy issue right
now seems to be about gay stuff] than saving other families).
That group (who subscribes to AFA announcements) is pretty pre-disposed
to deny gays their civil rights.
Second: if it exists on the Internet, it WILL get to the wider public
eventually, and although the measuring instrument will still bear much
bias, the originator will not longer have the element of control that
they would have had with a mail poll of their members. Not to
sound too Tom Friedman here, but the Internet roars along on its own
logic, and it’s uncontrollable in its eventual effects, at least in
this regard.
But thanks be to God, for the poll has gotten out into the wider
Internet. Now the pro-gay marriage and civil union categories are
eight points ahead of the anti-marriage category. (You can find the most current results here.) AFA will
probably pull the poll later today (as the American Anglican Council
did at one point in a poll over the Gene Robinson consecration that wasn’t going the “right”way [pun intended]), saying
that the wrong people had gotten to it and messed up the integrity of
the results. But such a statement belies itself — if the “wrong
people” get to a poll that’s supposed to be reflective of some larger
group, then the poll was badly designed and presupposed its own
results. But they won’t tell you that they designed the “poll” in
exactly that way so as to cook it to get the results they wanted —
they’ll just claim that someone else spoiled the party.
But if you try to cook things in your direction in such an obvious way,
you can’t cry “unfair” when the Internet foils your stupidly laid plans.
Ecto blogging software
20 December 2003 at 12:14 pm.
Update on the poll. The pro-gay side is about 20 percent above the anti-gay side, at this point. Whoo-hoo!
20 December 2003 at 2:19 pm.
The perverts as always are out in force. There’s a reason blogdex has this story at number 2 right now. My answer is so What? Homosexual marriage is a loser from the get-go. Not unlike the homo activists themselves. Ho Ho!
21 December 2003 at 9:28 am.
The above is barely coherent, as you may have realized by reading it. If intelligence like this is who the AFA et al. have on their side, then people who agree with me have nothing to worry about.
I used rationality and argument, NC3 used namecalling and incoherence. No wonder the body politic is in trouble if this is what passes for “discussion.”
21 December 2003 at 8:58 pm.
I try and keep it simple for those of you who’ve been educated into imbecility. I guess I used too many two syllable words. Here, let’s try it again sport…
Homo marriage.
Fish.
Barrel.
Bang.
27 December 2003 at 3:20 pm.
Again, NC doesn’t offer *argument* just polemic. He thinks the reasoning is self-evident, but it’s not. But he still doesn’t seem able to explain it.
If I may be so bold, in 50 years (or less), there’ll be gay marriage, and people will wonder what all the hoopla was about, just as we do today regarding interracial marriage.