Americans' Acceptance of Gay Relationships Crosses 50% Threshold

I think people are becoming more and more disfranchiesed with all the gay bashers getting caught cheating on/beating their spouses, or getting caught leading secret gay lives.

The more culture witnesses the hypocracy of the anti-gay movement, the more they open their eyes to just how normal being gay ultimately is.

sexual orientation and attraction does not define you, your behavior does.

the gay couple who is monagomus, commited, and loving is more valuable than the heterosexual couple that lies, cheats, beats, and degrades itself.

More people are realizing that a relationship is not that there is a penis and a vagina, and they cuntpound... it is that two people commit to each other, regardless of the challanges.

 

Emberstone, your posts are always so..true, and you put so much intelligence into what you say. <3

All I can say is..yay for American changing social beliefs! <3

 

I'd challenge that hypothesis. I'm naturally skeptical but I think the reason is more positive. Rather than people realizing that the anti-gay people are terrible, I'd guess that people are realizing that people that are gay are fine. I'd attribute this to more and more people coming out; Think about it, it's easy for Fundamentalist Christian #56 to say that homosexuality is wrong when she doesn't know anybody who is gay, but when her friend, neighbor or child is gay, it puts it into a different perspective.

 

It makes me wonder if we should put more movies out bout our community our lifes and how "WE"accept others but some refuse to accept us

 

Sorry to be a party pooper, but according to that site, the results are based on telephone interviews made on only 1029 people -which, proportionally speaking, is absolutely nothing compared to the total population of the USA. Mind you, I do think it's possible that American society is getting more tolerant towards homosexuality, but that survey isn't really trustworthy.

 

-_- thanks Mysterons. Good to know we have a pessimist on the site

 

Lol I take no offense in being called a pessimist, though I actually did say I believed American society was becoming more accepting. I was just pointing out that those samples were far too scarce to draw any conclusions. Irrationally taking something as true simply because that's what we want to hear isn't really helpful...

 

Yay! Another 50% to go!

 

I take it you don't really understand anything about polling statistics? 1029 people is a very good sample size.

 

He's right. What do you think is a good sample size? :S

 

^^I'm not sure, 500 thousand [half a million] skattered EVERYWHERE across the country?

 

EC movie anyone?

 

Funny you say so, because I'm actually a sociology student. And yes, I understand enough to know that 1029 of a country with a population over 309,434,000 (I'm taking this figure from wikipedia) is too small a sample size to draw any conclusions. Not to mention that this poll doesn't inform us about where are the samples taken from (I reckon people from certain states are more conservative than others towads LGTB issues) nor does it make any social distinction (which is especially necessary in a country with such a diverse society as the USA). 1029 is probably the number of people that live on a single block in a medium-sized city and therefore trying to make conclusions about the whole country is just a hasty generalization.

 

Well, if you have a very well-distributed representative sample, you need shockingly few people to get reasonable predictions.
Also, it's statistics, which means you can calculate the sampling error. In fact, they attach an entire .pdf at the bottom of that article expanding on the methods used. From which it turns out that, using a 95% confidence interval, they're accurate to within 4% either direction (which is, indeed, a rather big range of 46-54%, but I don't hear anyone complain that it actually could be 54% )

And I'm not trying to draw the argument from authority here, but I'm pretty sure that the people at Gallup and Princeton know how to conduct a proper poll.

Still, even assuming it's only 46%, it's still a trend towards more acceptance over the years. It is probably helped by some states having gay marriage and people discovering the sky hasn't fallen yet. More people are coming out, and it's harder and harder for people to see gays as some faraway threat when some of their childhood friends turn out to be open and happy about liking the same sex.

 

Indeed, the number of samples necessary for a poll is relative, especially in social sciences. I read that .pdf but I found it quite vague since it doesn't explicit the proportional representation of each state in the final figure, which, I insist, is elementary in a country as diverse as the USA. I'm not American so I don't know how this firm usually works, but I do know public opinion researchers tend to make announcements that sell well on newspapers but oftentimes have weak evidence to back them up.

I do think as well that Americans may be getting more accepting towards homosexuality, so it's not like I'm complaining because I want to spread gloom and pessimism all around. All I'm saying is that this poll, as it is presented, is confusing and therefore I'd rather take it with a pinch of salt before going out to celebrate.