Poll: 50% (Or 72%) of America Wants To Be Kept Safe By Openly Gay Troops
A full 50 percent of Americans support the right of gay and lesbian troops to serve openly, a new NBC-WSJ poll finds. (That’s a 10-point jump from 2000.) Some 38 percent of those polled said they support keeping Don’t Ask Don’t Tell alive, and 10 percent say they don’t want any gays serving at all, but curiously all those respondents were named John McCain. But! A CNN poll (PDF) says support stands at 72 percent. It’s all in how you ask, perhaps.
You have to watch these polls. When they ask questions that include phrases like “serve openly”, it’s a little ambiguous. “Serve openly” has different meanings to different people.
What they should be asking is whether gays should serve without having to keep their homosexual orientation a secret from others. That’s basically what DADT mandates – ie that you keep it a secret.
DADT is all about a secrecy clause that is applied to those of a homosexual orientation only, and not to those of a heterosexual orientation. It’s a discriminatory secrecy clause.
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CNN just came out with a poll saying 72% of those polled support allowing gay and lesbian service members to serve openly.