WASHINGTON – According to Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll, a higher percentage of Americans than ever before now consider porn to be “morally acceptable.”

Even though 36 percent of respondents said they find it acceptable, porn still ranks well behind medical testing on animals (51 percent), doctor-assisted suicide (57 percent) and abortion (43 percent) in its acceptability. On the plus side, porn comes in higher on the charts than suicide (18 percent) polygamy (17 percent) and cloning humans (14 percent), and well above the lowest-rank behavior addressed in the survey, extramarital affairs (9 percent).

Perhaps more interesting than the results of the poll, however, is a question that springs immediately to mind: What percentage of Americans regularly engage in behavior they claim to consider morally unacceptable?

Depending on which surveys of this sort you choose believe (if any), it appears a vastly greater percentage of Americans watch porn than will say doing so is morally acceptable — or who will say so to a stranger in the context of a survey, at least.

The implication of the disparity is as clear as it is unsurprising: A whole lot of Americans are total hypocrites.

The breadth of our hypocrisy revealed by comparing survey results to actual behavior is underlined in other areas of the Gallup poll, as well. For example, while only 9 percent of the Values and Beliefs poll respondents found extramarital affairs morally acceptable, even the most conservative projections concerning the number of people who have engaged in affairs is around double that number, somewhere between 15 percent and 18 percent. (Some estimates of the same number run much higher, of course.)

As Gallup sees it, these results are part of a broader trend in American attitudes, representing a major shift to the left.

“Americans have adopted more permissive views on matters of morality than they held at the beginning of the 21st century,” states the Gallup article accompanying the survey results. “Much of this change was apparent a few years ago, but opinions continue to shift in a slightly more left-leaning direction. Some of this change reflects increased social tolerance, while some is attributable to generational changes.”

According to Gallup, the trend isn’t likely to swing in pendulum-like fashion, either.

“It would appear that U.S. opinions will continue on this path, as younger, more liberal generations replace older, more conservative ones in the U.S. population,” the article notes.

Interestingly, while Gallup asserts a roughly equal number of its respondents self-identified as “socially liberal” versus “socially conservative,” the percentage of respondents who self-identified as politically liberal has grown at a slower pace — although “that gap is shrinking, as well,” according to the pollsters.

Also of note is a shift in attitudes among older respondents, which Gallup stated have been more dramatic than the changes observed among younger people, although younger people still tend to be more socially liberal than their older counterparts.

“Gallup has previously shown that Americans in all age groups have adopted more liberal views on these issues over time, but the changes have been proportionately greater among older Americans,” the article states. “Older Americans today are more accepting of same-sex relations and sex between unmarried people than older Americans at the turn of the century were. Still, older Americans today are not as likely as younger Americans to hold permissive views on these issues.”

The Gallup Values and Beliefs poll is based on telephone interviews conducted in early May, with a random sample of 1,011 adults over the age of 18, distributed across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.