Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Quinnipiac University pollsters are being called out on the publication of erroneous poll data that supposedly show Catholics as “leading American voters toward support of same-sex marriage.”
According to Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, the assessment by Quinnipiac analyst Peter Brown that Catholics are leading the way toward endorsement of homosexual marriage is a “wild misrepresentation of the group’s own data.”
Quinnipiac released the poll on March 8 claiming that polling data from a small sample of American Catholics found that 54 percent support same sex marriage and only 38 percent oppose it. These “findings” were trumpeted widely by the mainstream media where apparently no one bothered to check the data.
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League did just that and found that even though Quinnipiac segregated the data based on church attendance for every other question in the poll, it deliberately lumped together responses from practicing and non-practicing Catholics on the question of same-sex marriage to make it look like Catholics were largely in favor of the unions.
However, when separating responses from practicing and non-practicing Catholics, it turns out that 55 percent of practicing Catholics are opposed to same-sex marriage with only 38 percent saying they favor it.
Perkins claims that when confronted about this, “Peter Brown, whose selective reporting helped mislead the public, claimed that Quinnipiac ‘only [has] so much space, and can only do so many things up front.’ (Accuracy, apparently, being one of those things it cannot do ‘up front.’)”
Adding insult to injury, even after being caught in the distortion, Quinnipiac still hasn’t scrubbed this erroneous assertion from its website.
“To them, it’s an inconvenient truth that the church is still fiercely opposed to redefining marriage,” Perkins writes. “Unlike some people, whose principles sway to and fro with the politically correct winds, our convictions are fixed. As Christians, we stand for what’s right–even if it means standing alone. And right now, we’re far from alone!”
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