Blog: Homosexuals Worried Their Numbers Aren’t Large Enough
Getting “sexual orientation” added to the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) was a top priority of homosexual activists for years. Now they are not pleased with the results of that survey and have said they will challenge them. In fact, according to the Washington Post, they are “distressed over the results of the first large-scale federal survey measuring sexual orientation in the United States.” The NHIS has been around for 57 years and is the government’s premier measure of American’s health statuses and behaviors.
Why are they so distressed? The numbers aren’t what they want them to be! The “conservative” Centers for Disease Control (CDC) administers the survey. Before actually doing the survey they conducted an atypical 100 plus in-depth interviews and three rigorous field tests to come up with questions and interview methodology. This recent survey involved face-to-face interviews and some follow-up phone calls with 33,557 adults between the ages of 18 and 74.
Some homosexual and bisexual activists believe the wrong question was asked and say the questions should have been “asked indirectly and discreetly.” Here’s the question: “Which of the following best represents how you think of yourself?’’ Respondents were given the option, depending on their sex, to respond as gay or lesbian, straight, bisexual, “something else,” or “I don’t know the answer.” Sounds like a straight forward question to me! Is that why the activists don’t like it?
Here are the results that are so “distressing” to the homosexual and bisexual activists: less than 3 percent in the US identifies as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the exact number being 2.3 percent of the adult population — 1.6 percent labeled themselves as gay or lesbian and .7 percent self-identified as bisexual.
As Dr. Michael Brown wrote, ” To be sure, it is wrong to bully or oppress or mistreat anyone based on gender or ethnicity or romantic attractions, so that is not the question. And whether gays are 1 percent of the population or 90 percent, they should not be mistreated.
But you don’t overhaul the legal system to the point of attacking freedoms of speech, conscience, and religion based on the sexual and romantic desires of a tiny percentage of the population, nor do you engage in a massive social experiment, like redefining marriage, because of a statistically tiny group of people.”
We could not agree more!
