Gallup Poll Analysis

Hey everyone! I've been seeing these surveys for a while now, and they relate to my post a couple of days ago about sexual orientation. It seems that whether the forum is a magazine, website, survey database, or a curious individual, people are just dying to know where The Big Bad Gay is in America.

I just saw an FB post on my wall from Crew Magazine that says "A Gallup poll recently determined that 3.5% of people in the United States are LGBT." Crew conducted their own poll shortly after a discussion on it asking Facebookers whether they thought the results were understated, about accurate, or overstated. I'm sure they posed the question in seriousness, but I just about busted a gut from laughing when I saw those three possible responses! The magazine happens to be a huge supporter of the LGBT community, so the reason I laugh is that Gallup's results are simply not feasible, and I found Crew's possible responses a humorous commentary.

More to the point, I really don't believe the US is in a place to be conducting such a survey and expecting accurate results. Even if individual answers remained anonymous, there are too many people who are afraid of society's reactions to the LGBTPQ community to answer honestly, so anyone who's in the closet will either not answer or claim they're straight to save face. Anyone's who's bi- or gay-curious will mark straight either out of fear or because they're not actually sure they're anything other than straight. On top of that, you would have to assume that everyone in America actually knows their orientation, so you're gonna tell me that pollers walk around asking 4 year olds who'd they rather sleep with? Please.

Furthermore, where the hell did this poll take place? Literally, I'm cracking up right now. 3.5%??? Clearly everyone in America wasn't polled, or I would know; I mean, they didn't ask me to respond lol. Second of all, just how large IS the LGBTPQ movement in America, or even how large all of the Gay Pride Parades are every year in multiple cities? Right off the bat, just knowing those things makes the poll ridiculous. Given that, they obviously polled only a cross section of America, and the resulting tiny percentage of non-heterosexuality would lead me to believe the poll was conducted somewhere in Michigan (Grand Ledge High School perhaps? The Boy Scouts maybe?).

In all seriousness, the poll was not conducted correctly in many ways, so I really don't know why they even bothered publishing something so ridiculously unfounded. The poll revealed who, in this cross section, would answer anything other than straight, and not necessarily who is actually LGBTPQ (insert big fat implication here). The poll assumed way too much for the topic it wanted to analyze statistically, and America would have to be a fantastical utopia to conduct such a poll. 

What do you think about this poll? I actually had a thought about how similar an orientation poll is to an ethnicity poll, so do you have any thoughts on that? Thanks for reading! :)