Salt * Wet * Fish

Recently the Straits Times came up a poll regarding acceptance of Homosexuality:

http://www.straitstimes.com/Take%2BOur%2BPoll/Take%2BOur%2BPoll.html

The polls asks the following question

MM Lee Kuan Yew recently said that ‘homosexuals are mostly born that way’. The Government has in effect adopted a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. With Singapore becoming more cosmopolitan, should society also be more open towards homosexuality?

The final results is…

Singapore should be:
More accepting (54%)
Less accepting (44%)
Maintain current level of acceptance (0%)

Total Votes 136949

Er… 136,949 people voted? When did Singaporeans become so caring about such polls?

It seems like when this poll was discovered by the “conservative” (AKA anti-gay) Christians, there was a mass email to get people to vote “NO”. There starts the race between “YES” and “NO” to gain grounds over 1 week. The flaw about the poll is that you can vote more than once… hence you could write a script to click “YES” or “NO” to affect the results of the poll and this is exactly what probably happened in BOTH camps, yes, both. The final number is a bit telling of the use of bots, isn’t it?

In all honesty, I don’t really care too much about this poll nor its results, because it means nothing and its a very bad poll in the first place. What do you mean by more accepting or less accepting? What is the current level of acceptance?

Also we know from other surveys that a lot of such opinions can be correlated to religious believes and whether a person knows another gay person or not, among others. It is almost a non-argueable fact that most of those against would come from the Abrahamic religions. We also know that those who have closed gay friends or relatives or siblings then to be more positive about gay people, whereas those who never knew gay people would based their decisions on their stereotypical perception.

So, the 2nd correlation tells us that society’s acceptance is no static but dynamic based on interaction with gay people on a personal level. The more people interact with gay people, the more likely they will have a positive experience about gay people in society, obviously there will be some minorities who don’t have a good experience.

Such results can be very telling to decision-makers or even gay people because it tells them that the “negative” attitude towards gay people is just a matter of lack of education and interaction with gay people, amongst others. Of course, when religion is added to this, we may find that not matter what happens, some people will always come up against gay people because of their belief. If that is a minority, then it tells us that close association with gay people can change a person’s negative view to a positive one, even if their religious belief tells them otherwise.

Of course what am I saying is based on my own view of the results such polls would probably reveal. Thus it brings me back to the point that this is not something one can simply deduce from a meaningless and flawed poll that only allows to you choose between “more accepting”, “less accepting” and “keep it current”.