« Go back a post || Return to G-A-Y homepage || Haul tail to next post »
04/25/2007
Should 'pro-family' groups be promoting dishonesty?
So a few weeks back, we pointed out how something quite shady seemed to be going on with an American Family Association poll involving "the homosexual agenda" of America's corporations. At the time, it seemed that the anti-gay responses were going up at an exorbitant rate, with the poll results suggesting that over 1500 gay-unfriendly votes had been registered in the span of two minutes. To us, that seemed like a VERY high number of 'mo foes choosing to log on and register their queer antipathetic views! However, despite our suspicions, we moved on from tracking the AFA's perceived shenanigans, as (a) we weren't all that surprised at the findings, and (b) there were far more fish to fry.
Well, yesterday the matter was brought back to light, when a reader pointed out to us that someone in the "Dark christianity" community of Livejournal did a little research into the coding employed by that same AFA poll, and himself became skeptical of what he found. That person (LiveJounal user "eiredrake") noted that he tried to vote in the poll yesterday, but that both before and after his vote, the numbers continued to read:
If a corporation supports the homosexual agenda, you would:
Be more likely to do business with that company. 6,238
Be less likely to do business with that company. 188,722
It would not affect my buying decision. 3,946
Those were the results last night. So what were the results when we tried to vote again this morning? Well...
...they were completely unchanged from the numbers that "eiredrake" had quoted yesterday evening. So again, something shady is clearly going on at the AFA!
The allegation here would seem to be that the AFA is not really registering votes, just manually entering them (sometimes). But no matter what sort of duplicity is TRULY at play, it is obvious that SOMETHING is amiss. It would seem to us that they are simply using this "poll" as a means to collect email addresses, which they will then use to send out their "Action Alerts" (as anytime you vote in an AFA poll, you are unfairly registered as an AFA supporter). That way they can claim to have far more people in their socially conservative corner than they truly do.
Moral. Righteous.
If we have any technical people reading who know about such matters, please leave your ideas about the poll in the comments section. Better yet, if we have any former AFA staffers reading this, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE leave your personal fly-on-the wall experiences with an organization who seems to thrive on shadiness!!
Should corporations be promoting homosexuality? [AFA Poll]
**Also: Queerty did a little something on the poll yesterday.
***UPDATE, 4/26: The AFA has now pulled the poll!
Your thoughts
your link to the AFA "poll" now points to a 404 message. the new page, which is not a poll (because they don't actually offer you a choice any longer) is:
https://secure.afa.net/afa/activism/signpetition.asp?id=1370
Posted by: | Apr 26, 2007 1:44:42 AM
comments powered by Disqus
