Pam Spaulding notes how the Faith and Freedom network in Washington state is trying to bully the state's Supreme Court into not overturning the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, a ruling which is expected sometime during the legislative session ending in March.
Faith and Freedom commissioned, wrote and paid for the poll of 405 registered voters by Elway Research. Heavily loaded questions were asked about 'gay marriage' vs. 'a union of one man and one woman,' and whether or not courts or the legislature should decide on the matter. Faith and Freedom then used the poll results to insinuate that Supreme Court justices who interpret the law to find the DOMA unconstitutional would suffer 'political consequences' at the next election:
"I think a person who is thinking about it would realize there is a political consequence to it," said Joseph B. Fuiten, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Network, which paid The Elway Poll to conduct the survey in late December. The group was "just making the observation," Fuiten said, when asked if the network was warning justices and Democrats to oppose gay marriage.
In publishing his analysis of the poll, Fuiten took some liberties with the results that Elway Research may not necessarily support. In particular, he characterized the questions as an 'Elway Poll', even though Elway clearly states in the survey report that 'the findings are not those of “The Elway Poll” but are results of questions that were written and paid for by the sponsor and inserted as a proprietary question in "The Elway Poll"'. He also failed to clearly state the size and compostion of the sample and margin of error, as required by Elway.
Fuiten also compared the results of the Elway poll to two previous polls on gay marriage — claiming that they show dramatically declining support among voters — without providing any information concerning the prior poll data. Thus readers are left unable to determine for themselves whether Fuiten's conclusions about public opinion trends are in fact supported by the data.
This is just another example of extreme religious groups using whatever tactics come to hand to attempt to impose their agenda on the public. Although conservatives have railed for years against so-called 'judicial activism', they seem to have no qualms about engaging in a little judicial activism of their own — by urging judges to follow public opinion rather than the law when making rulings!
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