|
Redstate…
The
Marriage Question,
Romney’s Polling, and Bibi’s Red Sharpie
By Erick Erickson
September 28th, 2012
You
know that 50% of
marriages in the United States end in divorce right? Every time gay
marriage
comes up, that data point comes up. Fifty percent of married couples
get
divorced. If heterosexual couples value marriage so little, why should
they
stand in the way of gay couples who really will value it as a civil
right?
You
know that evangelical
Christians in the United States get divorced at the same rate as
everyone else,
right? Every time Christian living comes up for discussion, the media
uses that
data point as a point of derision for those who point to Christian
values.
You
do know that a majority
of Americans favor gay marriage right? Every major media outlet in the
nation
takes it as an article of faith that gay marriage is an opinion held by
a
majority and you are a bigot if you think otherwise.
Did
you know that none of
those data points are true? You’d never know it from the media. In
fact, from
most surveys you’d never know it. Those are the talking points. In
fact, the
rate of divorce in the United States, while still not great, is only
around 30
to 35%. The rate of divorce among “Christian evangelicals” matches the
general
population, but not among practicing evangelicals. It is one thing to
say
someone is an evangelical Christian. It is another to see if they
actually
practice their faith. On gay marriage, it may show up in polling as
having majority
support, but in actual votes it has yet to muster support of a majority
of
voters even in places like California.
But
the media hangs on to
those data points that turn out to be false. They report them as truth
because
the data confirms how the media sees the world, even though it ain’t so.
What
does this have to do
with Mitt Romney?
Go
back to 1996 and look at
the media postmortem of each election thereafter. After each election,
the
media’s criticism of the media is that the media relied too much on
polling to
dictate the coverage of the election...
Read
the rest of the article at Redstate
|
