Everyone knows that if you eat after you swim, you’ll cramp-up, that we have only five senses, and that we use only ten percent of our brains. Problem is, none of these things is true.

It’s human nature to believe something that sounds at least half-way credible if it’s repeated often enough. This is as true for matters of public policy as it is for cultural anecdotes and warnings about non-existent dangers.

For example, for many years, Albert Kinsey’s flawed research was cited to proclaim that ten percent of the population was gay or lesbian. We now know this is an over-estimate by a factor of about 300 percent. Gary Gates of UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute, which “specializes in law and public policy related to sexual orientation,” in 2011 published a comprehensive “atlas” of homosexual research in which he says the total “LGBTQ” population of the United States — people who identify as being in one of these categories — is about 3.8 percent. 

The next year, a Gallup poll commissioned by the Williams Institute found even that statistic too high: In a survey of 120,000 adults, “3.4% say ‘yes’ when asked if they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”

Religious liberty and matters of conscience, essential to the very nature of the republic in which we live, also are too frequently presented in a skewed way. In September, the respected Pew Research polling and analysis firm found that 67 percent of Americans believe that “employers who have a religious objection to the use of birth control should be forced to provide it in health insurance plans.” This sounds like an overwhelming percentage until one realizes that this question embodies a false alternative. 

In 2014, the courageous Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, won their Supreme Court case dealing with this issue. However, what was virtually never reported in the mainstream press is that of 20 contraceptive medications and devices on the market, Hobby Lobby covers 16 of them — the only four it does not are those that can have an abortifacient action.

As the Green family noted on their website, “The Greens and their family businesses have no objection to the other 16 FDA-approved contraceptives required by the law that do not interfere with the implantation of a fertilized egg. They provide coverage for such contraceptives under their health care plan.”

Earlier this year, Pew published the results of a survey asking, “Do you believe abortion should be legal or illegal in most cases?” Pew found that 56 percent of their respondents said “yes” to abortion’s legality and 41 percent said no.

The problem is that this survey is so profoundly unsophisticated that it cannot be held as a viable representation of the public mind.

What would the results have been had the following questions been asked:

• Do you believe that an unborn child, developing in the womb, has value independent of her mother?
• Is abortion just about a woman having the right to choose a surgical procedure or does it involve something more serious? If more serious, what it is?
• Do you believe that one million abortion in the U.S. annually is a good number?
• Do you believe an unborn child should be dismembered in her mother’s womb using sharp surgical instruments?
• Are you angrier being asked these questions than you are about the killing of the unborn baby?

When people are presented with unrealistically stark options based, in part, on euphemisms that enable them not to have to think deeply about something morally troubling — such subversive rhetorical manipulations as “a woman’s right to choose” (choose what, by the way?) and “reproductive choice” and “fetus” — they will gravitate toward the thoughtless and convenient answer.

What’s difficult is when that answer is then used to conclude things that just aren’t so. When people are asked about late-term abortions, sex-selection abortions, race-based abortions, and the abortion of unborn children due to disability, they squirm a little more and are forced to deal more probingly with the reality of what occurs on the abortionist’s table.

What Americans truly believe, what they ponder in what President George W. Bush once called “the quiet of the American conscience,” is much harder to get at than the facile questions of even the most sincere polling company.  

Asking questions of friends or survey recipients or anyone else should be tactful, but superficiality does little good. Digging deeper is where one finds the valuable gems of honesty, conviction, and wonder.

Falsehoods, the flotsam of conventional wisdom, and inadequate and thus inaccurate opinion polls need probing, not blithe acceptance. Sort of like the idea that dairy products create phlegm or mucous.  They don’t. 

So, the next time you’re sick, have some ice cream. And maybe ask yourself if anything else you “know,” maybe like what people think about tough issues, is really true.