fun with numbers...

An article in the Washington Post that I read over lunch (and I won't comment on the article itself, since I'm sure you can guess my reaction if you've read some of my other posts on the subject) ends with this:

A Feb. 5-8 poll by the National Annenberg Election Survey asked: "Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution saying that no state can allow two men to marry each other or two women to marry each other?" Of the 814 adults surveyed, 49 percent opposed an amendment, while 42 percent favored it.

That was a reversal of an Annenberg poll a few days earlier that asked, "Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow marriage only between a man and a woman?" With that wording, 59 percent were in favor and 33 percent were opposed.

Which says to me, that along with the 10% of the population that is supposedly gay (and I won't provide a link to a source for that number since everything I could find on the subject seems to be biased to one side or another) and the four-out-of-five dentists surveyed that prefer sugarless gum for their patients that chew gum, it would appear that 16-17% of Americans (that's about one in six) couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag. They may mean well perhaps, but some of those higher order processing skills seem to have gone missing. But hey, at least they're trying to be good. More or less. (well, maybe more less than more, if you follow me.) Anyway, that leaves us with a nice round 42% of the population being bigots. I suppose I'm actually being a bit optimistic (the numbers are something of a swag) since the pro-amendment folks (see, I'm not even lowering myself to calling them the anti-freedom-back-to-the-dark-ages supporters) probably didn't have to think too hard to figure out what their opinion was.