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POPSPeople Are More Comfortable With Ignorance "Polls now show that the majority of Americans support openly gay service — a majority did not in 1993 — but there have been no recent broad surveys of the current 1.4 million active-duty service members. A 2008 census by The Military Times of predominantly Republican and largely older subscribers found that 58 percent were opposed to efforts to repeal the policy; in 2006, a poll by Zogby International of 545 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans found that three-quarters were comfortable around gay service members. Mr. Gates, for one, has expressed skepticism about how accurately polls reflect true opinion on the policy. “To get people’s real feelings about it, you have to have almost a one-on-one private conversation,” he told reporters last week. “I think it’s very difficult for people to speak in front of their peers on this issue. The germane question, he said, was, “Can you work with people who are different from you?”