According to Tom Jensen, director of the North-Carolina based Public Policy Polling (PPP), polls finding that a majority of Americans support homosexual “marriage” cannot be trusted because Americans are sometimes hesitant to state their position before a live interviewer who may judge them to be intolerant.
Earlier this month a CNN poll found that 52% of Americans thought that homosexuals should have the constitutional right to marry; 46% said the Constitution should not give that right.
Public Policy Polling’s latest survey however, found that 57% of Americans think that same-sex “marriage” should be illegal, while only 33% think it should be legal and 11% have no opinion.
The difference between the two polls, according to Jensen, springs from the fact that CNN and other major polling organizations use live interviewers, while Public Policy Polling uses an automated system.
He said that people are “more likely to tell their true feelings on an automated poll, where there’s no social anxiety concern, than to a live interviewer who they may be worried about the reaction of.”
“It is frankly impossible,” he continued, “based on the results of gay marriage referendums over the last decade, to believe that a majority of Americans support its legalization.”
Gay marriage has been rejected by all the 31 U.S. states where it was put to a vote. Public Policy Polling was the only polling company that correctly predicted that Maine citizens would overturn a “gay marriage” law last year.
“Dark blue states like California and Maine voted against it just in the last two years,” pointed out Jensen. “Obama states like Wisconsin and Virginia rejected it by 14 and 18 points margins in 2006 and red states like South Carolina and Tennessee did so by 56 and 62 point margins.”
Jensen nevertheless said that the “the numbers are moving in the right direction for gay marriage proponents, if slowly.”
Voters under 30 opposed homosexual “marriage” 52% to 44%, according to the poll.
Over half of Americans thought that it would be legal 20 years from now, however. Proponents of gay “marriage” were very optimistic – 96% of them thought that it would be legal by 2030, while only 1% thought it would not be.