Atlantic Monthly
By Garance Franke-Ruta
May 31 2012
The Tyranny of an Extreme Minority
This
nation and our national policies have been led around with a hood over our heads
and a noose around our necks, beaten over the head and shoulders by an extreme radical
ultra minority.
We effectively
now have a homosexual ruling class that consists of 1 ½ percent of the US
population dictating to 98.5 percent of the population as to what is fair and
equitable, how we should speak, how we should act and how we should think, concerning
their vile behavior, speech, manners, and allow them to freely prey upon our
children and young men and women with impunity.
Surveys show a shockingly high fraction think a quarter
of the country is gay or lesbian, when the reality is that the number of Homosexuals and Lesbians
total less than 2 percent (1 ½) of the US population.
One in ten. It's the name of the group that puts on the Reel
Affirmations gay and lesbian film festival in Washington, D.C.,
each year. It's the percent popularized by the Kinsey Report as the size of the
gay male population. And it's among the most common
figures pointed to in popular culture as an estimate of how many people are
gay or lesbian.
But what percentage of the population is actually gay or lesbian? With the
debate over same-sex marriage again an emerging fault line in American
political life, the answer comes as a surprise: A lower number than you might
think -- and a much, much, much lower one than most Americans believe.
In surveys conducted in 2002 and 2011, pollsters at Gallup found that members
of the American public massively overestimated how many people are gay or
lesbian. In 2002, a quarter of those surveyed guessed upwards of a quarter of
Americans were gay or lesbian (or "homosexual," the third option
given). By 2011, that misperception had only grown, with more than a third of
those surveyed now guessing that more than 25 percent of Americans are gay or
lesbian. Women and young adults were most likely to provide high estimates, approximating
that 30 percent of the population is gay. Overall, "U.S. adults, on average, estimate that 25
percent of Americans are gay or lesbian," Gallup found. Only 4 percent of all those
surveyed in 2011 and about 8 percent of those surveyed in 2002 correctly
guessed that fewer than 5 percent of Americans identify as gay or lesbian.
Such a misunderstanding of the basic demographics of sexual behavior and
identity in America
has potentially profound implications for the acceptance of the gay-rights
agenda. On the one hand, people who overestimate the percent of gay Americans
by a factor of 12 seem likely to also wildly overestimate the cultural impact
of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, the extraordinary confusion over the
percentage of gay people may reflect a triumph of the gay and lesbian
movement's decades-long fight against invisibility and the closet.
"My first reaction to that, aside from a little chuckle, is that it's
actually a sign of the success of the movement for LGBT rights," said
Stuart Gaffney, a spokesman for the group Marriage Equality USA.
"We are a small minority, and we will never have full equality without the
support of the majority, and a poll like that suggests the majority is
extremely aware of their gay neighbors, coworkers, and friends."
In recent years, as homosexuality has become less stigmatized, pro-gay
rights groups have come around to acknowledging that a smaller percent of
people identify themselves as gay than some of the early gay rights rhetoric claimed,
based on Alfred Kinsey's 1948 report, "Sexuality in the Human Male."
His survey research on non-random populations in the immediate post-World War
II period concluded
that 10 percent of men "were predominantly homosexual between the ages of
16 and 55" and that 37 percent had had at least one homosexual experience
in their lives, but did not get into questions of identity per se.
Contemporary research in a less homophobic environment has counterintuitively resulted in lower estimates rather than
higher ones. The Williams
Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released
a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7
percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while
another 1.8 percent -- predominantly women -- identify as bisexual. Far from
underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures
included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a
quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey
of women
between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and
2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified
themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.
Higher
numbers can be obtained when asking about lifetime sexual experiences, rather
than identity. The Williams Institute found that, overall, an estimated 8.2
percent of the population had engaged in some form same-sex sexual activity.
Put another way, 4.7 percent of the population had wandered across the line
without coming to think of themselves as either gay or bisexual. Other studies
suggest those individuals are, like the bisexuals, mainly women: The same CDC
study that found only 1 percent of women identify as lesbian, for example,
found that 13 percent of women reported a history of some form of sexual
contact with other women.
"Estimates
of those who report any lifetime same-sex sexual behavior and any same-sex
sexual attraction are substantially higher than estimates of those who identify
as lesbian, gay, or bisexual," the Williams
Institute's Gary J. Gates concluded.
These numbers
are significant because identity -- and not behavior -- is the central
determinant of whether or not someone will seek a same-sex marriage. A straight
woman who makes out a couple of times with a female friend in college is not
going to seek a same-sex marriage, nor is a guy who fooled around once with a
male friend while drunk in high school. Neither individual is demographically
relevant to the question of how often same-sex marriages will occur. And it's
not clear at all what fraction of bisexuals will seek out same-sex marriages.
Overall,
there have been fewer than 75,000 state-sanctioned same-sex marriages in the United States
since they began to be permitted less than a decade ago, according to an
estimate by Marriage Equality USA. Over the eight years since Massachusetts
became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in May 2004, 18,462 same-sex couples married in the Bay State.
Another 18,000 were estimated to have wed in California during
the few months before Proposition 8 passed in 2008, banning future ones; those
marriages remain on the books, as the proposition was not retroactive. It's not
totally clear how many same-sex marriages have taken place in New
York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire,
and the District of Columbia,
the other jurisdictions where it is permitted.
Of course,
gays aren't the only minority population that has an outsized place in the
public imagination. Americans also "vastly overestimate the percentage of
fellow residents who are foreign-born, by more than a factor of two, and the
percentage who are in the country illegally, by a factor of six or seven,"
according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal report
on the social science of estimating minority groups. In 1993, a group of political scientists reported
in Public Opinion Quarterly that "The extent to which minority
populations are perceived as a kind of threat is ... related to perceived
proportions, though the direction of causality cannot be determined."
Correcting the misimpressions about the size of a minority group hasn't been
proved to have much impact on beliefs about them in the short-term,
but that doesn't mean that they might never.
One thing's
for sure: it's hard to imagine the fact that so many think the country is more
than a quarter gay or lesbian has no impact on our public policy.