The Family Research Council tried to make hay with our Legislative Priorities Survey, which showed (among other things) that over 80% of our readers and newsletter subscribers consider equal rights "somewhat" or "extremely" important. The FRC headline? "Homosexual Agenda is Low Priority—Even for Democrats." Huh?

They got there, of course, by conveniently forgetting about the 33% in the “somewhat” category. By that standard, this Pew Poll showing that only 48% of Republicans strongly oppose same-sex marriage “proves” that opposing equal rights is low priority for Republicans. (To be clear, the Pew survey was a scientifically constructed poll - ours was a non-scientific, self-selecting survey.)

Now, as anyone involved in politics will tell you, 80% of respondents calling an issue important is pretty close to monolithic. Not quite as monolithic or as intense as our education supporters (who are staring down the barrel at billions in school cuts and hundreds of thousands of laid-off teachers) or our job promotion supporters (because of the recession), but overall support for equal rights was in the same ballpark.

So the FRC's glee was more than a bit puzzling. But it did remind us of a Boston Globe article last week about a university experiment exploring what happens when political ideologues are presented with verifiable evidence that something they believe is false:

The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

"Backfiring" would certainly explain the Family Research Council. They saw a document showing equal rights to be wildly popular among the progressive base, and they thought it proved the opposite. What's more, the FRC is based in Washington, D.C., which approved civil marriage equality last year. Yet faced with such compelling, empirical evidence in his own backyard that equal rights shouldn’t be a big deal, the author of the FRC’s blog post continues to suggest that homosexuality should be considered a mental illness and that gays are “ten times more likely to molest children” than straight people. Both claims have been thoroughly discredited and represent bigotry, plain and simple.

Sorry, but when the DLCC wants scientific commentary, we’ll find someone whose boss didn’t give $82,500 to David Duke or give speeches before racist hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Should no one meeting those strict standards be available, we'll settle for someone with a strong enough grasp of basic arithmetic that they can add two percentages together.