Did you watch a religious program on television last week?

Are we spending too much money on highways and bridges?

Should a gay man be allowed to teach?

The General Social Survey, a social scientist’s candy land, asks some of these questions and more to 2,000 respondents, and the vast majority of these interviews are done in person.

While any survey sample cannot reproduce a population statistic with 100 percent accuracy, with the GSS sample size and population weights, we can still get a very good representation of the country’s attitudes.

Here are some interesting, preliminary statistics that just how people’s views have changed, or how, not surprisingly, they have remained the same:

Gender Politics

After a presidential election in which Sen. Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic presidential nomination and Sarah Palin was the Republican vice presidential candidate, women should be pretty doing pretty well in the political arena.

It depends. A mere 6 percent of respondents would not vote for a women if she were qualified to run for his or her party’s nomination – the same from 1998.

While this sounds marginal, the percentage of people who believe that men are generally better suited for politics than women has increased by 3 percent since 1998.

So we don’t mind voting for a qualified women candidate, but the chances that we deem a woman “qualified” are decreasing.

Organized Religion

Is religion recession proof? Survey says unlikely.

Only 20 percent of respondents had a “great deal” of trust in organized religion.

This may seem like a positive for organized religion; however, the same percentage of people had a great deal of trust in banks and financial institutions.

In fact, more people had “only some” trust in banks than in organized religion.

To be fair the only societal institution to gain the public’s trust since 2000 was the military.

This recession in faith may have significant impacts on religions that rely on donations for their main operating budgets.

In addition, with religious orders seeing a significant decrease in vocations, parishes and churches already strapped for clergy may not see relief anytime soon.

Freedom of Speech

The survey has routinely asked respondents what type of controversial speakers would they allow in their communities, letting us know just who’s in and who’s not.

This was the first year the survey asked about a “Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred against the U.S.”

The answer was a resounding no; only 43 percent of respondents believed that such a speaker should be allowed to speak.

In fact, the Muslim clergyman received the least amount of people allowing him to speak by almost 20 percent, the next lowest was a racist at 60 percent.

Furthermore, this is the lowest rating about a speaker ever recorded on the survey.

In 1977, only slightly more than half the sample would allow a militarist (someone who believes in abolishing elections and letting the military run the country) to speak in their communities.

Like the militarist in 1977, the low tolerance of anti-American Muslim clergyman must have something to do with a major political and cultural event of the time, Vietnam and 9/11, respectively.

However, when a majority of Americans would violate the freedom of speech of an individual, we know we have a lot of work to do to heal these wounds.

These and other survey questions can be found online. I used the following Web site because I found it to be the most manageable without having to use a heavy-duty stats program: http://sda.berkeley.edu/archive.htm.