Everybody’s talking about the American Family Association’s Gay Marriage poll, and how they had planned to present the results to the American Congress. As Lesley at Plum Crazy wisely points out, this is hardly a scientific survey–it’s a freakin’ Web poll. You’d have to be a fool to lend it any credence.
Regardless, they undoubtedly hoped to get their site visitors–presumably conservative, anti-gay marriage types–to visit the poll, vote accordingly and then have a tasty stat-filled sound byte for a future press release. A good, but overly transparent tactic. As you can see, the current results are no doubt a closer reflection of America’s views than they had hoped for. Another fine example of a company screwing themselves by underestimating the power of Internet-based communication.
By the way, while looking at the AFA’s site, I noticed their front page banner. Does that pink text look a little Rainbow Nation to anybody else? I couldn’t resist a little Photoshopping to make it a bit more gay-porn-sitish:
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Actually, there is a movement afoot to subvert the poll. A gay friend of mine contacted me begging to vote as a Californian to skew the results more in favour of gay marriage. Apparently it was working – when I looked the vote was at about 75% against, but earlier it was significantly higher.
Case in point why web-based polls have absolutely no credibility.
I happened to see that site just before I came here for a catch-up. What do you call that – a link coincidence? A parallel linking experience? Anyway when I checked a few minutes ago the pro-legalization side was winning by about 20 points. It seems the gays got game when it comes to getting the message out. And why not? We love to gossip 😉
If I’m not mistaken, the results are no longer visible, probably because the results were getting skewed?
They’ve moved the results to the bottom of the survey page (http://www.afa.net/petitions/marriagepoll.asp)–probably to save on bandwidth. Homosexual marriage is ahead by 23 points. DB.
I love this. I saw this when it was really low before word got out. What are you going to expect. It is kinda like having a poll about banning guns on the NRA website. Also a fun thing to do there is use their petitions to maniputlate what they want you to say to a Representative.