07-10-06 Council Meeting Minutes

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REGULAR MEETING JULY, 10, 2006 7/10/06 To the Members of the South Bend Common Council President Timothy Rouse wrote an editorial that appeared in the South Bend Tribune on July 9, 2006. In that editorial, he questioned the validity of recent survey findings showing that 79% of Hoosiers agree that lesbians and gay men “deserve the same civil rights protections as everyone else.” I’m sorry I can’t be there in person to respond to Mr. Rouse’s concerns, but I am currently in Baltimore at a professional conference. I’d like to assure the members of the Common Council that the data from the 2005 Indiana Poll are trustworthy and reliable. I have two main points to make. The first point I want to make concerns the fairness of the questions. Mr. Rouse infers that because I study the gay rights movement, the survey questions I designed might be biased or at least might be perceived to be biased. Survey researchers like me worry about biased questions all the time. Because bad questions give us useless answers. That’s why we test questions ahead of time to make sure they are fair, and we use questions for earlier surveys so we can compare results. The 2005 Indiana Poll used questions that had been field tested in a variety of other surveys, making only minor changes, such as using the word “Hoosiers” instead of the work “Americans.” It’s not surprising, then, that the results of the 2005 Indiana Poll look very similar to findings from other surveys. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that lesbians and gay men should be included in civil rights laws. For example, the 2004 National Election Study found that 80% of Americans favored laws to protect lesbians and gay men against job discrimination. The National Election Study is one of the most respected and long-running surveys of American opinion in the nation; it is the standard against which other public opinion surveys are measured. The second point I want to make concerns the number of people that were surveyed. Mr. Rouse infers that because we surveyed “only” 504 adult Hoosiers, our findings do not offer a true picture of actual public opinion. This is a common misperception. The 2005 Indian Poll surveyed a random subset of Hoosiers men and women, old and young, black and white, Republican and Democrat who look like the rest of the state. This technique allows researchers to gauge overall public opinion very accurately, even when only a relatively small number of people are interviewed. In fact, the National Election Study can measure the attitudes of over 200 million people by interviewing only 2,000 people. In sum, the findings of this recent survey are real and they are credible. Four out of five Hoosiers believe that lesbians and gay men deserve the same civil rights protections as everybody else. Yours truly, Ellen Ann Andersen Associate Professor of Political Science Catherine Pittman, 2628 Summit Ridge, South Bend, Indiana, passed out two handouts, 1. South Bend Equality – Petitions; 2. No Special Rights.net, petition. She stated that the Human Rights Commission has indeed made a statement that they recognize that discrimination is occurring against GLBT individuals and that they have asked the South Bend Common Council to find a remedy to this.They wanted it to be investigated and find a remedy to be found. It has been over a year ago, that they made that request and it is in writing. Also, because only two cases have been reported of GLBT discrimination, GLBT individuals no that there is no recourse for them when they go the Human Rights Commission, so it underestimates the number of people who would come if they new that there was recourse, that someone would be able to listen to them. She talked about some of the petitions that the Council may have seen circulating around. Mr. Mangan’s group has done a good job of trying to confuse this issue. There have been presentations on all kinds of irrelevant issues in this Council Room. In a similar manner, the petition that his group has circulated raises all kinds of irrelevant issues.The petition mentions same sex 13