Ripples from a Spinning Poll

Without much comment, Andrew Sullivan notes that evangelicals are questioning the accuracy of that PBS poll that found only moderate enthusiasm for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as man-woman. From the American Family Association:

The poll was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in recent weeks for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and U.S. News & World Report. The results of the poll, which were widely publicized, indicated that by a margin of 52 to 41 percent, Evangelicals prefer to leave the issue of same-sex marriage up to the states rather than amend the U.S. Constitution.

The fact that a New York Times poll in March said 59 percent of the general population supports a Federal Marriage Amendment caused many to question the polling group's definition of "Evangelical."

Russell Moore, a senior officials at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says the survey is off target because the authors assumed self-professing Evangelicals are true Evangelicals. He tells Baptist Press that incredibly, 45 percent of those so-called Evangelicals in the survey disagreed with the statement that "only born-again Christians go to heaven."

More than any question of who does or does not have a right to the moniker "Evangelical," this disparity was caused by differences in the actual questions. Once again, here is the question that garnered the controversial response rate (I even took the time to let Acrobat kick in to double-check the PDF):

Should the U.S. Constitution be amended to ban gay marriage, or is it enough to prohibit gay marriage by law without changing the Constitution?

I see nothing about "leaving it up to the states." I don't even see any ambiguity about the preferred outcome. So, unless I'm missing some bit of information, here, the person who wrote the poll summary (see page 17 of this PDF) erroneously introduced the concept of state law, and everybody else has spun a prudential assessment about legal methods into a lack of support for an amendment.

Ever feel like the only person who can see (or will admit) that a coworker's project is fatally flawed?