The dangers of polling soldiers about how they feel about openly gay comrades

The Pentagon has made a big deal out of how it wants to survey service members on how they would feel about serving alongside openly gay comrades. Fine, but keep this in mind, from Rick Atkinson’s revelatory The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944:

Another War Department decree of 1940 asserted that segregation "has proven satisfactory over a long period of years." A survey of white enlisted men in 1942 revealed "a strong prejudice against sharing recreation, theater, or post exchange facilities with Negroes"; of southern soldiers polled, only 4 percent favored equal PX privileges for their black comrades."