Conservatives & Pornography

I am not a Conservative, Christian, or even very right wing, but in my quest for critical thinking and fairness, I felt the need to write about this article.

ABC News recently published a story that pointed out that states that are typically politically Conservative have the highest consumption of pornography.

The article can be read in its entirety here:

"Porn In The USA: Conservatives Are Biggest Consumers"

"Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage."

If you know even a little about statistics, taking a survey, or doing research, you will hopefully see the flaw here.  We can't know that the same people voting red and going to church are the same people downloading porn.  We know nothing about the individuals other than the state where they live or the apparent zip codes where they come from.  This is a pretty broad assumption considering we don't know the sex (although I have a guess), age, political affiliation other than what is implied, religious background, occupation, or anything else about the individuals subscribing to the porn.  I'm sure that not EVERYONE in these states is religious and/or Conservative, and making large jumps in logic and science is not only dishonest, but it is also prejudice.

* * * *

I was able to fish up this study and have a chance to skim it (here).  The results were analyzed by zip code, but when it mentioned politics, it only referred to the state level.  There were other correlations in this study as well.  For example, zip codes with young people and wealthy people were more likely to subscribe to a pornographic web sites.  

"...adult escort sites are more popular in 'blue' states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the “red” states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism."

The purpose of this study was to establish correlations about adult entertainment to assist in constructing federal laws concerning usage of internet pornography.  Many different types of correlations were found, but the ABC article focused on trashing the Conservatives.  There were plenty of other correlations they could have picked.  Furthermore, the authors of the original study try to tie political affiliation to their statistics arbitrarily.

Why use the votes from the 2004 presidential election?  Why not actually talk to the people or poll them anonymously? 

Age was also mentioned as a factor, but how can you properly asses age based on zip code?  For a few areas, such as college neighborhoods, you can make an educated guess.

It drives me nuts when politically motivated cornballs try to spin these types of stories and data, just to paint the other party as hypocrites.  The baseline for this whole article assumes that just because you've voted right-wing that you love guns and Jesus and completely hate gays.  That is a cartoon character only held by a certain percentage of the population that attended The Blue Collar Comedy Tour.  This type of a stereotype ignores Libertarian, Constitution Party, or even swing voters.  Hell!  These people may not have even voted at all!

The world is not black and white and people should stop filling in the blanks once a label has been given to them.  Liberals are not always PC Socialists, most Christians oppose the "God Hates Fags" protesters, Republicans are not always dumb rednecks, and most atheists are not closed-minded.

My knowledge of statistical analysis is probably flawed, but this just seemed like an attempt to correlate internet usage with political affiliation and didn't do a very thorough job.

Now it's your turn to tell me why you think I'm an idiot.

Discuss.