When bulletins go wild

I recently received a bulletin from my friend Jen, entitled Gay Marriage. The text is below:

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Body: Hello everyone. It will be interesting to see who responds! I told a guy that I could find 300 people who believe in gay marriage before he could find 300 people who do not believe in gay marriage. If you believe in gay marriage, please copy and paste this into a new bulletin.

Add your name and re-post it. If you happen to be the 300th person signing this, please send it back to Andrew Nelson. His email address is: Rnbowzrok4evr@aol.com Thanks!

1)Taylor
[152 names excised in the interest of brevity]
154) Jen -- maybe it's not for me, but I do think everyone should have the option to marry.
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Ok. That's the bulletin. I support same-sex marriage 100%. I find any argument against it to be driven either by faith or homophobia. And neither has a place in the debate. I'll start with why I didn't repost the bulletin, and return to the issue at hand afterwards.
This kind of bulletin (or mass e-mail) always kills me. A cursory statistical analysis should tell you that its outcome is about as accurate as U.S. intelligence prior to the Iraq invasion. Here's a little case study. Let's say that Taylor makes up this little bet with his buddy Andrew. To be statistically conservative, let's then say that Taylor posts the bulletin and that he only has two homosexual buddies, John and Joe who then repost it. The number in front of their names is 2, but there are now 3 people who have signed it.
Next step, Joe sends it on and his gay friends Charlie and Janelle send it on, while John's friends Lance and Tom also send it on. We now have people sending it with the number 3 next to their name, while in reality 7 people have sent it on. This will continue ad nauseum.
A simple excel spreadsheet reveals that the number of respondents will increase exponentially (r² = 1) with the respondent level. At level 8, 255 people have signed the bulletin; at level 9, 511 people have signed it. At the point where it is now (level 154), 2.28x10⁴⁶ people have signed it. When the level actually reaches 300, the number of people will reach 2.04x10⁹⁰). Now, obviously these last two numbers are not feasible, since there are only 1.46x10⁸ people on myspace, and only 6x10⁹ people on this earth. However, at the low levels the analysis is applicable, and shows that way over 300 people have signed this thing, even though we're only halfway there. I understand the psychological benefit that this type of bulletin has for being forwarded on, since it makes the forwarder feel that they are actually helping gain some goal. I just wish we didn't need the incentive to make our feelings and beliefs known.

Back to the issue.
Many people argue against gay marriage from a faith-based point of view. So many problems with this. Number one, your faith-based point of view is very different from my faith-based point of view. And neither of our faith-based points of view should have any bearing on the laws that are passed by our government. Why? Because your argument is a Christian one, and our government is not a Christian government. Notwithstanding the fact that our fearless "leader" apparently gets his marching orders from a higher place (man, God really dropped the ball on that Iraq thing), our country was expressly founded to have a government overseen by justice, not by religion. Somehow, we, the people, became confused over time.
Next we get to the fact that, until the 13th century, even the Christian church did not outlaw gay marriage. I guess that falls in the same category as how that Catholic church no longer allows female priests. Why do men fear so much women and homosexuals?
And then there's homophobia. What the hell are people afraid of? If a gang of no-goodniks comes to your house and calls them out to submit to forcible horseplay, you can always just send out your wife, as detailed in Judges 19:22-30 (as a bonus, you can do what he does and subsequently carve her up and ship her off to your relatives. Good times!).
I've lost my train.