The Family Research Council is once again responding to polls showing widespread support for gay rights by making up their own anti-gay fuzzy math.
In his daily email update on Friday, FRC President Tony Perkins wrote that the Republican House leaders who oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act are “more in line with the majority of Americans” than is President Obama, who supports the act.
Perkins cited a Huffington Post poll, which he says found that “only 50% of Americans support an ENDA-type” law, which he claims “gives preference to homosexuals and transgenders in the workplace.”
No wonder the President had to resort to an executive order on special treatment for homosexuals. Turns out, the American people aren’t nearly supportive of his agenda as the media led us to believe. In a Huffington Post poll, only 50% of Americans support an ENDA-type (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) law, which gives preference to homosexuals and transgenders in the workplace. Congress had been reluctant to act on ENDA, and now we see that leaders are more in line with the majority of Americans than the President, which jumped ahead of the legislative branch to impose those rules on federal contractors. So much for the groundswell of support for measures that crush the constitutional freedoms of both employers and employees. Most people apparently think the current anti-discrimination statutes are strong enough.
Perkins conveniently leaves out the fact that the Huffington Post poll found that only 38 percent of respondents opposed ENDA, as opposed to 50 percent who supported it. The poll also found that that a vast majority of Americans support the principle of the the law and think that such protections are already in place:
In the new survey, 50 percent of Americans favored and 38 percent opposed legislation banning job discrimination against gays and lesbians. The poll found political division on the issue: 63 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of independents favored that kind of legislation, but only 34 percent of Republicans did.
But on at least one major protection the legislation would provide, all three groups were united. Seventy-six percent of Americans, including 88 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents and 68 percent of Republicans, said that it should be illegal to fire someone for being gay or lesbian. Only 12 percent of Americans said it should be legal.
The fact that far more Americans agree with the principle than with the legislation may be attributable to a common misconception: Sixty-two percent of Americans think it’s already illegal to fire someone for being gay, while only 14 percent of poll respondents said that it’s legal. In fact, it is still legal in 29 states to fire someone for being gay.
Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents all think it’s already illegal to fire someone for their sexual orientation.
Perkins and Gary Bauer recently claimed that a poll showing opposition to marriage equality among Republicans in fact showed that “most Americans” opposed marriage equality. Perkins made a similar claim about a poll that only surveyed voters in a handful of battleground states and districts.
