Have you ever been asked to answer a poll that didn't seem very... objective? Sometimes polls seem oriented to push a certain viewpoint or agenda on the person being polled, rather than truly test public opinion. Our pollster friends call that a "push poll."

The other day, we encountered a "push poll" of epic proportions, courtesy of Family Research Council.

The poll, masquerading as an innocuous "membership poll on health care" came in the August 4 action alert and included this seemingly tame headline: Tell Us Where You Stand on the Major Issues in Health Care. The poll starts off with this:

Throughout the recent Presidential election campaign, President Obama said: "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." That campaign promise was clarified recently when President Obama said he supports a government "option" to keep the private insurers "honest." One study by a leading health care actuary and benefit firm found that 119 million Americans could be moved by their employer to the government health care plan.

We'll need to start out with a fact-check, provided by Media Matters: that 119 million number comes from a misrepresentation of a study paid for by the insurance industry. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, by contrast, put the estimate at 10-11 million, which would inconveniently undermine FRC's core argument that health care reform is a "government takeover."

Now, onto the "poll..." Every single question in this poll has a clear, anti-reform slant, which syncs up with FRC (and other Religious Right group's) desire to kill health reform.

Here's a sampling:

Democrats twice voted as a bloc to allow care to be rationed. Republicans voted as a bloc twice to prohibit care from being rationed. Should the U.S. government ration health care?

Now, I'm not sure when Democrats voted as a bloc to 'ration' health care, but even more that that, I really don't understand the connection between the first two sentences and the third. It seems like FRC is more intent on attacking Democratic Members of Congress than actually understanding their membership's opinions on health care.

Or how about this one:

Should doctors and nurses and other health care providers be allowed to refuse to perform, participate in, refer for, or otherwise facilitate abortions?

It sure would be nice if they'd acknowledge that we have robust conscience protections in place so that health care providers are not forced to participate in abortion services, something we've blogged about quite a few times. And it's a rather peculiar question, since healthcare reform would not repeal longstanding conscience protections.

In another question, FRC asks, "Should Congress expand the current $1.84 trillion annual deficit to provide every American with health care coverage?"

Tellingly, the final question -- "What is your number one concern about the major health care reform now under discussion?" - has the following answer options:

Denial of care/delay of treatment/rationing
Taxpayer-funded abortions
The cost
That your health care plan will be changed without your consent
That the government will be in charge of your health care

Nothing about the millions of uninsured families (something you'd think the "Family" Research Council would care about), nothing about insurance companies (whose unsavory, profit-driven practices often harm families), nothing about pre-existing conditions (or the fact that couples starting a family have a hard time finding an insurer when pregnancy is often considered a pre-exisiting condition) or rising premiums (which are sending thousands of American families into spiraling debt each day) . In addition to closing with a question appealing to fear, the only answers available happen to be the fears health care reform opponents are stoking the hardest.

The list goes on and on...

As Jim Wallis nicely pointed out today, truth-telling is a moral principle that many on the Religious Right are leaving by the wayside in the health-care debate. It's doing a disservice to us all.