Gallup has a new poll out which shows that support for relations between consenting adults is morally acceptable, the highest number ever recorded in the poll:
Americans’ views toward a number of moral issues have shifted significantly since 2001. Their acceptance of gay and lesbian relations has increased the most, up 19 percentage points in the past 12 years — to a record high of 59% today.
[…]
Americans’ views of the moral acceptability of 10 of the 19 items Gallup asked about have not changed significantly over time, shifting less than five points since they were first measured.
A majority of Americans continue to say seven of the 19 items measured are morally wrong — married men and women having an affair, cloning humans, polygamy, suicide, pornography, sex between teenagers (measured for the first time this year), and cloning animals. Attitudes toward two items — doctor-assisted suicide and abortion — are fairly evenly split, with less than half of Americans seeing each as either morally acceptable or morally unacceptable.
A majority of Americans see all other items included in the list this year as morally acceptable. Birth control tops the list as the most acceptable, seen as such by 91% of Americans, while having an extramarital affair is the least morally acceptable, at 6%.
Those are interesting statistics, as they sort of expose the Religious Right lie that growing acceptance of gays and lesbians are somehow part and parcel of an overall slide into hedonism. What it shows is that Americans increasingly understand what it means to be gay, and generally have a live and let live attitude when it comes to people living their lives as they see fit.
