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Gallup just released the results of its annual poll surveying Americans’ moral views on a number of hot topics, from adultery to polygamy to birth control. In general, respondents seem to have grown more progressive. According to Gallup, 59% of Americans believe gay and lesbian relationships are “morally acceptable,” up from 40% in 2001, when the annual questionnaire was first administered. Sixty-three percent of 2013 respondents are alright with teens having sex, compared to 32% 12 years ago. While only 45% of those polled in ’01 “personally believe[d] that in general it is morally acceptable” to have a baby out of marriage, now 60% do. Birth control got the “meh, ok” from 91%.

This is good news. In a country where kids are literally bullied to death for their sexualities, where a gay man was shot down last weekend in New York, where even those who survive often face inexcusable discrimination, the fact that an additional fifth of the country now think the queers shouldn’t all burn in hell is a big deal. A growing acceptance of teen sexuality, I hope, will allow for substantive, positive sex education. Unmarried mothers are unsupported by their government and, too often, their neighbors, so increased tolerance has real, positive effects on real women’s lives.

With that being said, I don’t like the question.

Obviously, if the choices are Americans finding queer relationships “morally acceptable” or “morally wrong”–as Gallup poses the options–I’d rather the former. But the poll’s frame is conservative and stigmatizing, regardless of the outcome. In choosing the categories and asking respondents to deliver ethical verdicts, Gallup reinforces the dangerous power dynamics of the tolerant and the tolerated, the normal and the deviant. Gallup’s choice to ask whether same-sex relationships, but not opposite-sex relationships, are morally acceptable may be explained as a reflection of current debate and law–hetero couples allowed to marry each in every state–but the question still reinforces the division between the default sexuality we will never doubt and the mutant forms whose moral acceptability must be determined.

Besides, I don’t think moral acceptability should be our goal. Let’s aim instead for celebration. This isn’t me griping that we haven’t progressed as far as I’d like because the standard Gallup tested and celebration are fundamentally different forms of engagement. Acceptance admits X behavior or identity isn’t bad. Celebration declares that it’s good. The tolerant are fine that there are gays in the neighborhood, while the celebratory are glad the world is queer. We find positive value where Gallup probes acceptability. We don’t think liberation is found in assimilation.

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