Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor at The Atlantic,, and where she oversees the Politics Channel and where Andrianna Sullivan holds court. Says Franke-Ruta:
Surveys show a shockingly high fraction think a quarter of the country is gay or lesbian, when the reality is that it’s probably less than 2 percent.
Now, you may well ask why knowing that discrepancy would be of any import. The answer is a simple and direct one:
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.
So, in short, what we’re seeing here is a bandwagon argument, writ larger than life, as they always are… rather like the claim a few years ago of the number of homeless people that were supposedly dying every day. What was it, 24,000? If you’ll recall when we ran the numbers here on this web site, we figured out that if it was in fact 24,000 people dying every day, the problem with cease to exist after a period of less than one year through the stated attrition, alone. Then, as now, the reason for the overemphasis on numbers, false numbers, was obvious. They wanted sway on Society, that far outstripped their actual numbers. So, too, a few other groups, as Franke-Ruta points out:
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.
I am reminded of Mark Twain’s comments, wherein he said that it’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they’ve been fooled.
In any event, as to the overly inflated perceptions of the size of various groupings, I’ve addressed the reasons behind that in the past. Briefly and particularly as regards homosexuals, the problem is of course is one of definitions… the legal definitions vs the Cultural. Consider this; A prohibition on homosexual unions wasn’t written into the constitution back when our nation was founded, because such things were assumed at a cultural level, and therefore never legally defined.
Proof of these assumptions is easy enough to find.
It is interesting for example, that Jefferson, (arguably the biggest social liberal of the lot) thought homosexual acts to be worthy of hanging… (I commend Fawn Brodie’s Jefferson to your reading list) and yet he never indicated anything of the sort in his … our… documents. Clearly, there was some assumptions made on the part of the founders in this area…. cultural assumptions. I have suggested repeatedly that the purpose of government, at least any government that wants to survive for long, in support the culture that gave that life. At the very least it should not run afoul of that culture, lest it become irrelevant to the people it’s supposed to be governing. Yet, while law and government is a more exact science, culture is less so. And so, codification of the culture is problematic at best.
Given this, Jefferson, and the rest of the founders apparently took the attitude that their best tack would be to write laws and a framework that would at least not run afoul of the existing culture, without specifying without attempting to codify the boundaries of that culture.
Leftists, and particularly homosexual leftists, correctly saw the source of the problem not as government but as society. Therefore, they seek to use government to change society. As an example, consider the attempted criminalization of anyone speaking out against homosexual marriages. This is a bedrock change in society that is being attempted by use of the force of government. Certainly, such a movement wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance if the real homosexual population numbers, say 1 or 2%, were commonly understood.
Frankly I’d be interested in being a fly on the wall when Sullivam inevitably lights in on Garance Franke-Ruta. The torrent of illogic from his mouth would be legendary, even within the context of his normal incoherency.
Now, as an aside, ponder this for just a moment; what is it that is driving this argument? Observe, if you will, the picture to the right. At issue here is, as usual, “free stuff”, and who gets it. At least some of this mess was opened up when government started picking winners and losers, and doling out money according to those whims. Once again we see were governmental power, and governmental money and the abuse thereof, distorts the social construct.
Ask yourself; Would this argument and the resulting societal damage, even be occurring absent government largess?
