Bible belt states lead the US in gay pornography searches between 2004 and 2011

The states of the Bible belt, America's conservative corridor, lead the country in searching Google for homosexual online media content between 2004 and 2011. I applied Google Insights for Search to the term gay porn and filtered the results to the "Online Media" category. The specific link to the search I performed can be located through this link. The results are normalized by Google such that the scaled numbers can be compared with each other. The top 10 states that lead the United States searching for gay porn are Mississippi, Florida, West Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and New York. The results also include a map showing the relative scaling for search volume across the US.

Search volume index for gay pornography searches

Since a few of the states in the top 10 are Bible belt states, I wanted to graph the search volume index of gay porn as a function of religiosity for people from those states. I included data from a recent Gallup Poll that surveyed Americans about how important religion was to their lives. I plotted the results of this poll as a function of the number of searches for the word 'Bible' in each of the 51 states, just to confirm the that Google searches do indeed reflect the opinions and interests of the people within their states.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are the most Googled "Four Horsemen of Atheism"

The "Four Horsemen of atheism" is term coined by Richard Dawkin's website in reference to a debate on atheism feathing Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. I was curious to see which one of these guys is the more Googled atheist in the World. Google Trends shows that Dawkins was the actually the most searched atheist for a while, but Hitchens is pretty much neck and neck with him now. Well, besides being slightly interesting, this isn't the most useful knowledge in the world.

UPDATE Dec 16th 2011: Rest in peace Christopher Hitchens.

Muslims should boycott Lowe's but also address legitimate concerns

Lowe's is the latest corporation to pull out as a sponsor of TLC's "All American Muslim". I find this move to be bigoted and despicable and I will subsequently stop shopping at Lowe's.

The show they were sponsoring isn't my favorite television show but it is a show that needs to be aired. The goal of the show is to depict the lives of normal, boring American Muslims. What is wrong with that? Everyone on earth knows how the fringe extremist Muslims think. This was a much needed show.

Lowe's claims that they are removing their ads because they didn't want to 'alienate anyone'.

What the ...?

They just alienated an entire community by pulling their sponsorship.

On a second and more important note, I believe Muslims across America need to come together and address the root cause of this sponsorship suspension. The initial opposition from the Florida Family Association that forced Lowe's hand may be racism or bigoted or extreme.

Predominantly Muslim countries among global leaders in searching for homosexual pornographic content

The Islamic view on homosexuality is well known. Not only is it forbidden in the religion, but it is also a punishable offense in certain Muslim countries. A recent Gallup poll below highlights the negative attitude of Muslims in Western countries towards homosexuality. 

This trends gains strength in Muslim majority countries. A Pew Global Attitudes Survey indicates that besides Western Europe and the Americas, the majority of polled citizen from Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East believe that homosexuality should be rejected. Included in these regions are obviously the countries whose populace is mostly Muslim.

None of these surveys are surprising.