Good news in the numbers

It’s not often that several of my blog posts are tied together by a single news story, but this is such a time. A new poll by CBS News found a massive majority of Americans who know someone who’s gay and it also found increasing acceptance of gay relationships.

On Monday, I obliquely referred to a recent Gallup poll when I wrote, “Recently, the US passed, somewhat late in the game, the point at which half the people surveyed thought gay relationships were morally acceptable.” The CBS poll found a decrease in the percentage of respondents who didn’t find gay relationships “objectionable”: In January 2009, 56% didn’t “object” to such relationships, but in the latest poll that dropped to 48%. CBS offers no reasons for the change, but does note that in 1978, only 23% didn’t “approve”, so support is still more than twice what it was then.

The poll found, as the chart above shows, that 77% of Americans says they know someone who’s gay or lesbian, up from only 42% in 1992. Even the latest percentage is probably too low: Many people do, in fact, know someone who’s gay or lesbian, but they may not know that for a variety of reasons.

But this poll found, as so many before it have, that:

“Those who know someone who is gay or lesbian are less likely to disapprove of homosexual relations than those who do not. More than half of those who know someone who is homosexual do not see homosexual relations between consenting adults as wrong. On the flip side, more than half of those who don't know anyone who is homosexual say such relations are wrong.”

The poll found other unsurprising things: Those over 65 are least likely to “approve” of gay relationships; that age group makes up the biggest part of the anti-gay Republican Party, too. Naturally, people under 30 and Democrats generally don’t “disapprove”.

It also wasn’t unsurprising that language mattered: Respondents asked about “homosexual” relationships were somewhat more likely to disapprove than those asked about “same-sex” relationships. Oddly, though, respondents were slightly more likely to say that people are born “homosexual” than “gay or lesbian”.

And this is where my recent previous two posts on hate groups comes into the picture: What all anti-gay hate groups have in common is that they always use the word homosexual and write “gay”, in quotation marks, to be dismissive. They know that to many people, the only syllable they hear is the third—homoSEXual, reinforcing images of gay people as sick, perverted sexual predators. It also sounds clinical, like a disorder. I believe that both aspects account for the differing responses to the word “homosexual” in questions: Applied to relationships, “gay and lesbian” sounds less overtly sexual, while in the question of whether people are born gay, “homosexual” sounds like a medical condition, while “gay and lesbian” sounds like a choice. These ideas—pathology and choice—are exactly what the rightwing has been trying to foster.

However, here’s what’s important: The percentages of people who realise that they know a gay or lesbian person is reaching ever more massive majorities. Such people are far more likely to support GLBT people’s rights and to realise that we’re born, not made. That, in turn, means that inevitably we will prevail and the anti-gay hate groups will fail.

Progress is slow—far too slow for a civilised society, but it’s clear and unstoppable. The right wing knows that, which is what’s behind their increasing—and increasingly obvious—desperation. The day is rapidly approaching in which the vast majority of Americans will know the truth and the battles will end.

So, polls like this aren’t merely interesting numbers—they’re a glimpse of a better a future. They also show that the future will arrive much sooner if every gay and lesbian person comes out.